# data[].attributes.headline
28 Ways to Learn About Disability Culture

# data[].attributes.subject
28 Ways to Learn About Disability Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New York Times staff members put their heads together with disability advocates to recommend movies, books, TV shows, dance and art that capture disability experiences.

[Image description: One man laughs and carries another man while a third man looks on. Behind them, people sit in wheelchairs in a grassy area.] A scene from the Netflix documentary "Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution." Credit... Steve Honigsbaum/Netflix

Image

Xian Horn, a disability advocate and selection committee member for ReelAbilities, a film festival showcasing people with disabilities, recommends these films with the idea in mind that film "can be a mirror in documenting every area of advocacy."
Zak, a boy with Down syndrome who has no family and lives in a senior facility escapes to pursue his dream of becoming a wrestler. This movie has star power in the likes of Dakota Johnson, Bruce Dern, John Hawkes, Shia LaBeouf and Thomas Haden Church. But it really is about the debut of Zack Gottsagen, "a disarming performer who creates a sweet and funny character" as Zak, Glenn Kenny wrote in his review in The New York Times.

Youth from an upstate New York summer camp called Camp Jened go on to lead the historic 504 Sit-in demonstration as adults. "No matter how fondly you recall your time at sleepaway camp," Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review in The Times, "chances are your experiences weren't as formative as the ones recounted in ' Crip Camp.'"

Darius McCollum's love of mass transit has made him the subject of newspaper headlines for the many joy rides he has taken on New York City buses and subway trains. But the subtext of this documentary, Neil Genzlinger wrote inThe Times, is "a criminal justice system that has no way to deal with an offender like Mr. McCollum, who has Asperger's syndrome, other than to keep throwing him in prison."

A remarkably nuanced 3-D view of JJ DiMeo (Micah Fowler), a sarcastic and at times mischievous teenager with cerebral palsy. "That he's a flawed kid with a flawed family in a reasonably funny sitcom is what makes 'Speechless' good, rather than simply worthy," James Poniewozik wrote in his 2016 review in The Times.

Ryan O'Connell plays Ryan Hayes, who is gay and has cerebral palsy and is navigating his first internship as well as a budding sex life.

Sammi Haney, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, plays the best friend to Dion, a boy who at one point uses his superpowers to lift her from her motorized wheelchair.

A folk artist and disability rights advocate, Lea was the winner of NPR Music's 2016 Tiny Desk Contest for her original song "Someday We'll Linger in the Sun." She told NPR that it is about "how love might be a struggle now, but that it's worth hanging on."

The persona of Erik Paluszak, who says his "genre is in a constant state of flux" but can best be described as psychedelic alt rock.

A dance pop recording artist and performer with a visual impairment whose songs focus on empowerment. "People tend to forget or not notice my disability, which is good because I'm not looking for pity parties," she told Flame magazine last year.

A singer-songwriter with muscular dystrophy, Tabi blends R&B, pop, rock, folk, jazz, blues, country and dance. She said on her website that she started singing for fun as a way to exercise her lungs and diaphragm, but her love of music became a career.

A Deaf hip-hop, rap, rock and alternative songwriter and entertainer, Forbes is known for his distinctive music videos. "When I was 5 years old, my parents got me a drum set for Christmas and in many ways it was their way of saying, 'You can do anything,'" he told the website HearingLikeMe.com.

A graphic novel by Marieke Nijkamp and Manuel Preitano reimagines the origin story of DC Comic's Barbara "Oracle" Gordon as a paraplegic young hacker reluctantly drawn into solving a mystery at her rehab facility.

A nonfiction anthology of essays edited by the disability activist Alice Wong "gives a glimpse into the rich complexity of the disabled experience," the publisher, Penguin Random House, said on its website.

In a memoir slated to be published in September, Erin Clarkdescribes her journey from growing up a young, disabled girl in Northern Ontario to becoming an artist, writer and paraglider living in Spain.

In a memoir to be published this fall, Riva Lehrer explores growing up with spina bifida in the 1960s and '70s with well-meaning parents whose attempts to "fix" her backfired until she found her own sense of empowerment.

Written and edited by disabled people for disabled people, the magazine says on its website that it looks to "increase representation of sick and disabled people in publishing and the arts, and to challenge the harmful stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding disability."

The account bills itself as a space for disabled and chronically ill artists, and its website provides features each month on different artists.

A pottery and clothing designer whose work, according to her website, examines "physical bodily pain, the cost of being disabled in our society, and the associated emotional impact from both."

Blue puts his self-deprecating wit on display in shows like " Sticky Change" on Amazon Prime Video, and on tour. His confrontational stance with his cerebral palsy reflects a sentiment common among many disabled people: that they should not be defined by disability.

Anner, who has cerebral palsy - "the sexiest of palsies" - muses on life on his YouTube channel. Anner gained fame when he won the reality competition "Your OWN Show: Oprah's Search for the Next TV Star," and became the host of the travel show "Rollin' With Zach."

Perez, who describes herself on her website as "the woman in a wheelchair, with no feet, who won a treadmill on 'The Price Is Right,'" jokes about race, dating and life as an amputee.

Using virtual reality and video game-related work, Lee recreates life with complex regional pain syndrome, a pain-related chronic illness, in a way others might experience it. She says that persistent pain "can have a devastating effect on both the lives of people living with it and those around them."

Gupta is a multisensory textile artist whose work "everyone can access through the engagement of all their senses," including touch, smell, sound and sight.

Kim, who is Deaf, is a sound artist whose work was in the Whitney Biennial last year. She performed in American Sign Language at the Super Bowl - and then wrote about the frustration of having the cameras shift away from her. "Why have a sign language performance that is not accessible to anyone who would like to see it?"

For his digital album " Unseen Reheard," Slater, who is blind, was inspired by "an obscure weird science theory" that assumes that blind people can hear "transdimensionally" by being in tune with the subharmonics of the universe.

This dance collaborative "creates and performs at the nexus of access, technology, disability, dance, and race." It was founded in 2016 under the direction and artistic leadership of Alice Sheppard, and is a project-based ensemble of four disabled artists: Sheppard, Jerron Herman, Laurel Lawson and Michael Maag.

This company "disrupts space, dismantles normal, and redefines beauty and virtuosity through innovative performance and discourse," according to its mission statement.

Sarah Bahr and Katherine McMahan contributed research.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
28 Ways to Learn About Disability Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
New York Times staff members put their heads together with disability advocates to recommend movies, books, TV shows, dance and art that capture disability experiences. Xian Horn , a disability advocate and selection committee member for ReelAbilities, a film festival showcasing people with disabilities, recommends these films with the idea in mind that film "can be a mirror in documenting every area of advocacy."

# data[].attributes.headline
NY Times Article on Invisible Disabilities

# data[].attributes.subject
NY Times Article on Invisible Disabilities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Happens When You’re Disabled but Nobody Can Tell (Published 2020)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The author and clinical psychologist Andrew Solomon examines the disabilities that ramps and designated parking spots don’t address.

# data[].attributes.headline
Disability Justice Race and Education Special Issue

# data[].attributes.subject
Disability Justice Race and Education Special Issue

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vol 6 No 1 (2020): Special Issue: Disability Justice, Race and Education | JCSCORE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vol 6 No 1 (2020): Special Issue: Disability Justice, Race and Education

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Center Disability in the Tech Response to COVID-19

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Center Disability in the Tech Response to COVID-19

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Across the United States, COVID-19 has had unequal impact on different communities. As numerous studies have shown, Black people, immigrants, and low-income people are more likely to contract the disease and more likely to suffer hospitalization and death when they do. Such disparate impacts also extend to the disabled community, which has similarly experienced far higher rates of hospitalization and mortality.

Advocates for social justice and civil rights have repeatedly called for the policy and technology sectors to effectively address COVID-19's unequal impact on marginalized communities. Yet those advocates, as well as policymakers and technologists themselves, first need to understand the specific concerns that disabled people have. As a disabled person who is also queer, trans, and East Asian, I would argue that centering disability justice as a framework is necessary for achieving racial, gender, and economic justice, especially in light of COVID-19.

Nowhere is that framework more necessary than the technology industry. On the one hand, technology holds enormous promise for helping disabled people to cope with, and perhaps even thrive amid the pandemic, such as by enabling consistent access to meaningful social interaction. On the other, however, technology threatens to exacerbate long-standing structural problems, such as widespread medical discrimination resulting in denial of care. For disabled people, the stakes have never been higher, and this requires the tech policy community to make careful, well-designed proposals in collaboration with the most impacted communities.

Social justice and civil rights movements will remain incomplete and insufficient as long as they perpetuate ableist practices and ideas and are inaccessible to disabled people. Unfortunately, tech policy often fails to acknowledge, understand, or respond to issues impacting disabled people across different disability experiences, even though disabled people comprise one of the most at-risk groups.

Those with the highest chances of severe symptoms if they contract COVID-19 are people with chronic lung conditions and people with suppressed or compromised immune systems-by definition, disabled people. The people at greatest risk of post-recovery complications after surviving COVID-19 are likewise disabled people. Otherwise non-disabled people who are reporting significantly decreased lung capacity after surviving COVID-19 are now joining the disabled population. We also represent the vast majority of the population living in the congregate settings with the highest rates of transmission. That includes disability-specific locations like group h omes, psychiatric hospitals, and nursing homes; and institutions where disabled people are extremely disproportionately overrepresented, like jails and prisons.

Tech policy proposals that do not center disabled people ultimately become dangerous for our continued health, safety, and freedom.

Disabled advocates and community members are deeply concerned about a slew of COVID-19 policies, but among the most dangerous are practices relating to care rationing. Public health experts have cautioned us all to do our part in flattening the curve to decrease the strain on the medical system, but even with these efforts, failing health-care systems are having to ration health care, which is dangerous for disabled people. Unthinking technological approaches toward rationing may make this problem worse.

In the event of a shortage of equipment or personnel, many state and hospital policies often deprioritize people with certain disabilities to receive life-saving treatment. Unfortunately, these policies are not hypothetical; they have devastating real-world consequences, like a hospital's choice to withhold COVID-19 treatment from Michael Hickson, a Black man with quadriplegia, because of a doctor's belief that he had a low quality of life. Hickson died last month. These decisions on rationing care reveal what many disabled people already know from personal experience: Medical ableism is deadly and pervasive.

To predict the likelihood that patients will recover from COVID-19, some hospitals have adopted algorithmic modeling. For disabled people, this may accelerate practices that cut us off from care or decrease the likelihood that we will be seen as patients worth saving. Algorithmic modeling could be helpful by providing doctors and nurses with information to better serve and treat their patients, but adoption of algorithmic assessments to predict the speed of decline for patients with COVID-19 could also threaten the lives of disabled people already at risk of denial of care. Available tools may not make accurate or reliable predictions, but even if they do, researchers have already documented that doctors are more likely to make riskier decisions about patients with disabilities.

For disabled people who are also queer, trans, or people of color, the deployment of algorithmic modeling increases the risk of compounded medical discrimination. All marginalized communities have long histories and ongoing legacies of surviving involuntary medical experimentation, coercive treatment, invasive and irreversible procedures, and lower quality of care-often justified by harmful beliefs about the ability to feel pain and quality of life. These health care disparities are exacerbated for people who experience multiple forms of marginalization.

Development of contact-tracing apps and apps to surveil students or employees' physical proximity to each other threaten disabled people by increasing surveillance of an already hyper-surveilled and criminalized community. These kinds of apps lack the utility necessary for them to be an effective tool in responding to the pandemic, given the actual likelihood of transmission in different interpersonal interactions. As Ashkan Soltani, Ryan Calo, and Carl Bergstrom explained, such apps will lead to both over-identification (flagging too many false positives and creating the likelihood that people will ignore notifications) and under-identification (failing to adequately account for possible transmissions and exposures, even for people who are definitely infected). They introduce highly intrusive and easily abused monitoring and surveillance to create false reassurance that they would actually slow the spread.

In a pandemic, this devaluation of disabled people's lives has catastrophic consequences. When public health and elected officials say that "only" elderly and immunocompromised people are at serious risk, they're saying that people with aging-related disabilities or disabilities that affect immune or respiratory systems are expendable. While everyone is at risk of privacy violations in ill-fated attempts to combat COVID-19, disabled people are afraid of how COVID-19 data could be weaponized to further deny or deprive us of care.

For disabled people, the pandemic has created opportunities and challenges as schools, universities, and employers have instituted widespread remote working and learning. Schools and workplaces have denied disabled people's accommodation requests for telework and remote learning for years. It only took a pandemic for them to realize they could have let us do so all along. Now that millions more people are working and studying virtually every day, more disabled people can participate in previously impossible education and work opportunities. Employers and schools are discovering nifty accessibility features, like captioning, and exploring both synchronous and asynchronous meeting and learning options.

But this increased reliance on technological stopgaps to aid physical distancing also hurts many disabled people in two important ways.

First, as of 2020, a whopping 98 percent of all web content fails to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which is the international standard for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. That could mean that content is inaccessible to screen readers, refreshable Braillers, eye tracking, or other adapted technologies. It could also mean that content is inaccessible to people who rely on captioning, need to resize images and text, or have cognitive and language-based disabilities. This means that even basic public health information and news updates in the pandemic are inaccessible to large numbers of disabled people-let alone classes, work, unemployment assistance, social media, or games.

Now more than ever, we need policymakers to understand that meaningful access and participation of disabled people is not optional. Information about programs designed to provide relief from the devastating economic impacts of COVID-19 must be accessible to disabled users. The design of these programs must take into account the social, environmental, and political factors that have put disabled people, especially multiply marginalized disabled people, in economically precarious positions for decades. Apps designed to track and slow the spread of COVID-19 should be developed and implemented carefully, and local governments should be cautious about deciding to implement new apps for any official purposes.

Disabled people, particularly disabled people of color and disabled queer and trans people, have survived medical experimentation, eugenics-based policies, and the combined effects of economic exploitation and deprivation. Understanding this context will help policymakers devise policies that are actually responsive to both the needs of the moment and the contemporary legacies of historical injustices.
Lydia X.Z. Brown is policy counsel for the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. They focus on disability and algorithmic justice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to center disability in the tech response to COVID-19

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Across the United States, COVID-19 has had unequal impact on different communities. As numerous studies have shown, Black people, immigrants, and low-income people are more likely to contract the disease and more likely to suffer hospitalization and death when they do.

# data[].attributes.headline
Call for Chapters Disability Hierarchies and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.subject
Call for Chapters Disability Hierarchies and Human Rights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The disability movement began with the imperative that persons with disabilities must come together and fight for the rights of all disabled persons equally. Persons with disabilities, however, are rarely equally represented in movements nor equally protected under the law. Peipzna-Smarasinha (2019) argues that hierarchies in the disability rights movement made it necessary for "disabled people of color, queer and trans disabled folks of color, and everyone who is marginalized in mainstream disability organizing" to come together and form the alternative Disability Justice movement (p. 22) in order to ensure their voices were heard. Similarly, others have argued that the needs and interests of men with disabilities have consistently been prioritized over the needs and interests of women with disabilities in mainstream disability rights organizations (Banks & Mona, 2007; Sands, 2005).

Hierarchies have long been a mainstay of disability movements around the world, where often times both law and culture rank persons with disabilities according to the specific type or circumstance of their impairment (see, for example: Deal, 2003; crippledscholar, 2015). Legal regimes often differentiate persons with disabilities according to various hierarchies that imply that disabled ex-combatants or workers deserve greater protections and benefits than persons who have been disabled all of their lives (See for example: , or that the rights and freedoms of persons with physical or sensory disabilities deserve greater protection than those of persons with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities (See for example: Szmukler et al., 2014). Mirroring this inequality in implementation of rights, persons with intellectual disabilities or autistic people are often included in tokenistic ways in disability rights organizations and advocacy (Petri et al., 2017) as are disabled women and people of color. Hierarchies can also cut across age, with the interests of youth and adolescents with disabilities or older persons ignored by disability rights organizations that prioritize the rights of young children and disabled adults but ignore the needs of adolescents and senior citizens with disabilities (Meyers, Karr & Pineda, 2014; McCloskey and Meyers, 2018; Meyers, 2020).

Please submit a short abstract or explanation of your intended contribution (250-500 word as a .doc or .docx file) to by August 31, 2020. Please put "Hierarchies Abstract" in the email subject line. Abstracts and explanations will subsequently be reviewed and contributors will be notified by December 15 and contributors will have until March 15, 2021 to submit their full draft.

Civilizing Disability Society: The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Socializing Grassroots Disabled Persons' Organizations in Nicaragua, traces the ways in which the UN Convention has transformed grassroots disability associations on the ground in Nicaragua, oftentimes in ways that clash with Nicaraguan civic culture and ignore the expressed needs of local disabled persons in lieu of international priorities.

Young Persons with Disabilities: Global Study on Ending Gender-based Violence and Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

Young Persons with Disabilities: Global Study on Ending Gender-based Violence and Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Call for Abstracts: Hierarchies of Disability Human Rights, new edited volume

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The disability movement began with the imperative that persons with disabilities must come together and fight for the rights of all disabled persons equally. Persons with disabilities, however, are rarely equally represented in movements nor equally protected under the law.

# data[].attributes.body
Donations welcome

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Check out Disability Justice Culture Club by Dancers' Group!

# data[].attributes.headline
Help Multiracial DV Survivor Get Permanent Housing

# data[].attributes.subject
Help Multiracial DV Survivor Get Permanent Housing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Content Note: Domestic Violence Several years ago, my close friend Coale survived a domestic violence homicide attempt by her then partner. Since this experience, I have watched this dear person struggle to find stability because of the aftereffects of this trauma. Particularly, she has had to move from place to place, which has interrupted her healing process and made it difficult just to survive. Please support this lovely community worker, therapist, and healer in her journey to acquire stable housing.
- Rebel Sidney Black, founder of Portland Disability Justice Collective
Coale/Karah is a mixed race Nez Perce/white/white-passing queer disabled femme. She needs help to establish stable housing after having moved ~13 times and now facing moving again at the end of August 2020. She remains fairly physically weak due to physical disabilities. Her mental state/disabilities, though clear, makes it very difficult to live with others, needing alone time and little to no interaction in person. It has become painfully apparent that living with others is not an option and that she needs a forever home to heal and be safe after many years of trauma. She can only manage to work part-time as a social worker and therapist for the foreseeable future and has student debt that is prohibitive to seeking a loan.

Coale is unable to afford Portland's rising rental rates, even in shared housing, and has found herself in many unsafe situations while trying to survive. She needs a permanent home where she can ground, settle in, and begin to heal after experiencing severe domestic violence including strangulation, waterboarding, torture, and attempted murder.

She is humbly requesting help from the community to stabilize, acknowledging that many of us need help. Her goal is to, for example, buy a very small home such as a manufactured home, a boat, RV, or trailer that she can own and live in long term. We are setting the goal at $30,000 because of the cost of manufactured homes in this area. The money is needed as soon as possible because Coale will be houseless again in August.

She is very grateful for any help you can provide. Even just $20 will make a big difference in Coale's ability to survive long-term. She greatly appreciates your generosity.

Please share her story with others in your social networks to help her get the support she needs. Housing survivors IS transformative justice!
#SupportSurvivors #SurvivorCenteredHealing #HousingIsTransformativeJustice

Read more

#1 fundraising platform

People have raised more money on GoFundMe than anywhere else. Learn more

GoFundMe Guarantee

In the rare case that something isn't right, we will refund your donation. Learn more

Expert advice, 24/7

Contact us with your questions and we'll answer, day or night. Learn more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Help Multiracial DV Survivor Get Permanent Housing organized by Rebel Black

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Content Note: Domestic Violence Several years ago, my close friend Coale survived a domestic violence homicide attempt by her then partner. Since this experience, I have watched this dear person struggle to find stability because of the aftereffects of this trauma.

# data[].attributes.headline
NYTimes Article: Disability Pride: The High Expectations of a New Generation

# data[].attributes.subject
NYTimes Article: Disability Pride: The High Expectations of a New Generation

# data[].attributes.body
[Image: white button which says "I heart ADA"]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Millions of young people grew up knowing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act as a birthright. They now demand its guarantees - and even more.

[Image description: A button reading "I heart ADA."] A disability awareness button celebrating the Americans With Disabilities Act. Credit... National Museum of American History

Listen to This Article

Audio Recording by Audm

To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
To get to her job as the communications director of a legal office in Philadelphia, Imani Barbarin gets in her car - when the coronavirus pandemic doesn't require working from home - and drives to a train station 20 minutes away.

There's a station closer to her house, just a two-minute drive. But Ms. Barbarin, who has cerebral palsy, walks with crutches; the nearby station doesn't have an elevator, and the steep steps are too hard to climb.

Ms. Barbarin was born four months before the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act became law in July 1990. She belongs to the A.D.A. generation - at least 20 million people with disabilities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau - that grew up knowing the transformative civil rights law as a birthright. They expect the law to guarantee, not just promise, that they will get access to transportation, jobs, schools and other public places and to the same opportunities as anyone else.

Members of the A.D.A. generation are quicker than earlier ones to claim disability as a crucial part of identity - and with pride. The A.D.A., after all, erased some of the stigma. Now, it's not just those with evident physical or sensory disabilities who say they are part of a disability civil rights movement, but younger people and those with invisible disabilities, too. The A.D.A. generation is more likely to disclose a learning disability, a chronic condition such as lupus, or a psychiatric disability likebipolar disorder.

Ms. Barbarin, 30, finds daily reminders of how the A.D.A. makes her world easier: the fully accessible office buildings and restaurants, or simply the expectation that a woman with a disability will have the same chances to take part in everyday life.

There are also the markers that mock those raised expectations. The A.D.A. doesn't require every old structure, like that train station, to be retrofitted for accessibility.

And then there was her job search. After graduate school, Ms. Barbarin sent out hundreds of applications and disclosed that she has a disability. She didn't get one interview. She sent out more, without mentioning her disability, and did.

It's "disheartening," Ms. Barbarin said, for people of her generation, "who feel like the A.D.A. is the floor of what our rights should be. But we should be so much further along."

Ariella Barker, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy, says people often assume that disability civil rights laws provide an advantage they do not. One of Ms. Barker's classmates at the Kennedy School at Harvard told her that as a woman in a wheelchair she held the "golden ticket" to a good job.

But high unemployment persists for people with disabilities, even after the A.D.A. banned discrimination in the workplace. Only 31 percent of working-age people with disabilities people held jobs last year, compared with 75 percent of those without disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When she graduated with a master's degree in public administration this May, Ms. Barker, who already had a law degree, didn't find the jobs she wanted and instead returned to an old one.

Since long before the A.D.A., there have been accepted roles for people with disabilities. They could be the objects of pity or of inspiration. They wanted neither.

Doron Dorfman, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, argues that a new generation has grown up with an added unwelcome role - as objects of suspicion. The public knows little about the A.D.A. or the frequent discrimination faced by people with disabilities, Mr. Dorfman says, and one result is what he calls "the fear of the disability con."

People with disabilities constantly pay "a tax or price," he said, "this idea of the disability con and always needing to prove they are actually disabled" and therefore worthy of protection.

Ms. Barker, who lost the ability to walk at 11, understands. When she was in law school, one day she was in the checkout line of an Atlanta clothing store, clutching a dress, a pair of pants and some tops. Another customer approached, explaining that she was curious about the young woman in the wheelchair: "How do you have the money to buy all of that?" the woman asked. "Did you get injured and sue somebody?"

The A.D.A. generation grew up expecting its rights but also found resentment instead - propelling a need to keep pushing back. "There's more of us who've grown up disabled and proud," said Stephanie Woodward, 32, of Rochester, N.Y.

Ms. Woodward, who was born with spina bifida, was 7 or 8 when she first heard of the A.D.A. She had just started using a wheelchair at school, and a teacher complained that it was a safety hazard. The next day, her father went to demand an apology. Told that the principal was unavailable, her father - an electrician and a "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy" - raised the issue of his daughter's rights and announced he was going to "find an A.D.A. lawyer." That threat got results. Ms. Woodward recalls thinking: "What's the A.D.A.? Like I really needed to know because it got such a reaction."

Today, Ms. Woodward is a disability rights lawyer and activist. A widely circulated photograph showed her getting arrested in a U.S. Senate office in June 2017, her hands zip-tied behind the back of her pink wheelchair. She was arrested with members of the disability group Adapt, protesting a Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

For people with disabilities, access to health care can have life or death consequences. They were among Obamacare's biggest beneficiaries, especially its Medicaid expansion. The willingness of activists, especially younger ones, to get arrested and the impact they had in the fight for Obamacare, bolstered their political power - at least with Democrats. Notably, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, now talks about expanding home care for the young and old with disabilities - a central issue to Ms. Woodward's protests - as "just an absolute, basic right."

There's a long history of successful disability rights protests. Judith Heumann, considered a founder of the movement, led a 26-day takeover in 1977 of a federal building in San Francisco and drove the Carter administration to enforce a law considered the precursor to the A.D.A.

That story is told in her recent memoir, "Being Heumann," and in the new Netflix documentary " Crip Camp.: A Disability Revolution." Ms. Heumann, who had polio as an infant, is now 72 and a mentor to the rising generation of leaders.

"The A.D.A. generation wants their lives to be benefited by the A.D.A.," she said. "They also believe that the A.D.A. is not enough."

The earlier generationmodeled their movement after "the civil rights struggle of the '60s and the women's rights struggle of the '70s," said Maria Town, 33, who has cerebral palsy and is president and chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities. Members of the A.D.A. generation, she said, "are informed by the marriage equality movement, the fight for the Affordable Care Act and are informed by the Black Lives Matter movement."

One result is that they have an expanded view of disability justice, one that embraces other causes and other marginalized groups.

Keri Gray, 29, helped organize scores of people with disabilities at a June protest in front of the White House after the death of George Floyd, holding signs that read "Black Disabled Lives Matter." For Ms. Gray, a diversity and inclusion consultant who lost a leg to childhood cancer, policing is a disability issue, too. At least a third of those in American jails and prisons have disabilities, according to the Justice Department.

She argues that disability and racial justice issues encompass Covid-19, too. Black and Latino people have died from the coronavirus in disproportionate numbers, in part because of unequal access to health care and other causes of their greater prevalence of pre-existing conditions - including disabilities like diabetes and chronic lung illness.

There are more young people with disabilities now than in the past, or, at least, more who are willing to accept the label. Today, almost one in four college students report having had a diagnosis of depression, according to the American College Health Association. That's up from one in 10 college students in 2000.

"It's a perfect storm," said Mary T. Hoban, the association's chief researcher. Students face an exceptionally stressful world, she says: the pressures of social media, fears of school shootings and, now, the pandemic's many disruptions. Far more seek mental health services than used to be the case, she says. One reason: The A.D.A. erased some of the stigma of mental health care issues by requiring schools to make accommodations - like private rooms for tests or liberalized permission to take a leave of absence.

Also true to their age group, members of the A.D.A. generation use social media to meet and organize. Ari Ne'eman was 18 when he started the Autistic Self Advocacy Network online in 2006 to challenge the prevailing narrative about autism, one that was driven by parents' groups and researchers. It largely saw autism as a tragedy and the answer as a cure.

For Mr. Ne'eman and other autistics, that ran counter to the proof of their lives, which were rich and fueled by the ambitions promised by the A.D.A. He and others wrote and organized to shatter the old images of autism. A recent academic study of newspaper content credited their work for a dramatic shift to positive depictions of autistic life.

Mr. Ne'eman, now a visiting scholar at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University, said, "Finding the autistic community online was important to me because it sent the message that you don't actually have to take, as written on stone tablets, everything that professionals say about you as true."

That freedom to think big is what most marks the A.D.A. generation. After Micah Fialka-Feldman helped move his sister into her college dorm, he decided he wanted the experience of dorm living, too. At the time, he was taking a two-hour bus ride to get to his nondegree program at a college outside Detroit for students with intellectual disabilities and Down syndrome. When the university said he couldn't live on campus, he used the A.D.A. to sue - and won in 2009.

Today, he works as a teaching assistant at Syracuse University's school of education. He helps grade papers, reads students' journals and talks to future educators about what it's like to have an intellectual disability.

"I sometimes wonder if I'd been born at a different time, how much different my life would be," said Mr. Fialka-Feldman, now 35.

Let Us Help You Manage Your Pandemic Burnout

Looking for a way to describe that blah way you're feeling? It's called languishing, and it may be the dominant emotion of the year. We can help you work past that awful feeling, to its companion emotion, flourishing.

Maybe anxiety is a habit you can unlearn? In his podcast, Ezra Klein, a New York Times Opinion columnist, speaks with an addiction psychiatrist for some advice for changing your relationship with your thoughts.

We are all grieving right now about many things. And there is no singular way to respond to heartache or sorrow. Find the strategy that works best for you.

At this point in the pandemic, it feels like we have all, collectively, hit a wall. Our readers reported that they have coped by turning to everything from edibles to Exodus.

Looking to change your priorities? For a growing number of people with financial cushions and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are giving way to a new kind of professional fearlessness.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Disability Pride: The High Expectations of a New Generation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Millions of young people grew up knowing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act as a birthright. They now demand its guarantees - and even more. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

# data[].attributes.headline
A Black woman with a disability fights back against racism and ableism in the doctor's office

# data[].attributes.subject
A Black woman with a disability fights back against racism and ableism in the doctor's office

# data[].attributes.body
[Image: two women posing in front of buildings]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After a surgery to remove an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in her spine, Robin Wilson-Beattie has lived with a spinal cord injury causing partial paralysis and an auditory processing disorder. Since then, Wilson-Beattie has learned that being a Black woman with disabilities means she has to self advocate to receive the care that is best for her, especially when some still cling to racial and ableist stereotypes.

Yet, she hopes to inspire others to speak up about their health.

"You are the expert on you. You may not know how it all works," the 42-year-old diversity and inclusion educator in the San Francisco Bay Area told TODAY. "Because this is your body, you have a right to be involved in your health care decisions."

More than 15 years ago, Wilson-Beattie's doctors noticed the AVM nestled in her spinal cord. It had to be removed: If left untreated it could "explode" and be fatal. Yet, taking it out caused risks. Doctors had to cut into her spinal cord and "flay" it to remove the abnormal growth and doctors presented her with bleak possibilities.

"I wasn't expected to walk again. I wasn't expected to be able to use the bathroom in a typical way," she explained. Now, "I do those things," she said.

On top of it, she was six weeks pregnant. Doctors urged her to undergo a medical termination. But that simply wasn't what she wanted.

"There were a lot of unknowns about the surgery. I understand why they advocated for it," she said. "With the pregnancy, they really had a whole bunch of dire predictions and those did not happen."

But she faced a lot of judgment from her doctors. Still, she refused to end her pregnancy.

"I am really glad that I pushed hard. Even up to the day before the surgery they were pressuring me to terminate and now my kid is 15," she said. "But out of that, I learned the power of self-advocacy."

While recovering, she recalls an interaction with a doctor that seemed typical of how people thought of her as disabled, pregnant Black woman.

"He looks at me with just a disgusted disgusted look on his face. Not with a genuine question. 'Why didn't you use birth control if you knew you were going to be like that?' and he waved at my body," she said. "It's as fresh as day that person's attitude toward me and not respecting my decisions."

Stereotypes sometimes influence the care Wilson-Beattie receives. Take pain. Some doctors don't believe Black women experience pain like others. So some doubt Wilson-Beattie when she says she's in pain. She recalls a doctor at a spinal cord pain clinic who wouldn't prescribe something to relax her during a nerve ablation, a procedure where nerve is heated to stop it from sending pain signals. According to the Cleveland Clinic it's routine for doctors to numb the area and provide a relaxing medication prior. Yet, the doctor she saw refused this.

"He didn't listen to my lived experience with this condition, with these procedures. I know what is going on. I had this before," she said. "He still dismissed me and ignored me and dismissed the nature of my pain."

While Wilson-Beattie faced racist and ableist thoughts and attitudes in health care, she now has culturally competent providers and encourages people to advocate for themselves if something feels wrong. Finding a good doctor requires some research, but one's health is worth it.

"They are genuinely hearing what I have to say. They listen and we have a conversation," she said. "All of the medical providers that I work with treat it like a partnership."

Also, she encourages people to question people if something doesn't feel right.

"I don't go in there with this reverence that has been traditional in patient-doctor relationships. I treat it like any other service that I am hiring for," she said. "We are partners going in there to make something better or maintain my health."

Patient advocates can educate medical professionals and Wilson-Beattie has spoken to medical students and other professionals about her experiences so they understand cultural and ableist biases. She finds that students (and doctors) are stunned when she tells them not to assume disabled patients are asexual, for example.

"As a human being I have sex," she said. "Disability is a natural part of the human experience. I need to do all the same things that humans do, eat, breathe and I have a sex drive."

She hopes patient advocacy and education helps health care providers and others understand the people with disabilities are just people.

"I'm just as nuanced and varied as any other person," she said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Black woman with a disability fights back against racism in the doctor's office

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After a surgery to remove an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in her spine, Robin Wilson-Beattie has lived with a spinal cord injury causing partial paralysis and an auditory processing disorder. Since then, Wilson-Beattie has learned that being a Black woman with disabilities means she has to self advocate to receive the care that is best for her, especially when some still cling to racial and ableist stereotypes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Disability Justice and Community Care Conference

# data[].attributes.subject
Disability Justice and Community Care Conference

# data[].attributes.body
The Portland Disability Justice Collective is hosting its first Disability Justice and Community Care conference the weekend of September 12-13! I am so happy to have connected with Rebel Sidney Black who is organizing this *free* online conference with 8 speakers covering "disability justice 101, community healing, the anti-Black roots of mental health systems, trauma informed care, Black Lives Matter medicine garden, safer protest strategies, and more!" Please consider attending and sharing this opportunity with your networks. The work of disability justice is crucial to the beautiful, imagined futures of collective liberation so many of us are hoping for and working toward.

http://www.pdxdisabilityjustice.org

[Image: black and white graphic with decorated ceiling and various people]

# data[].attributes.body
[Image: paint colors spilling into sign]

# data[].attributes.headline
Abolition and Transformative Justice Webinar

# data[].attributes.subject
Abolition and Transformative Justice Webinar

# data[].attributes.body
🌈 On Tuesday, July 21 at 1 pm est / 10 am pst, join us for a conversation on Feminist Abolition & Transformative Justice Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha @leahlakshmiwrites and Leila Raven @bubblybutfierce. Learn about bringing our histories to abolition as a vision and practice, as well as healing after harm and community-based processes for care and accountability in our communities and movements. RSVP: bit.ly/amc2020event1⁣
[Image: pictures of two people in black and white next to purple sign with webinar info, background of swirling colors, and flower]