Journalist – Historian – Speaker
117 victims made known to us since our last day of mourning, 11 since the start of 2018. Stop murdering our people. #DisabilityDayofMourning #DDoM2018 — autselfadvocacy (@autselfadvocacy) March 2, 2018 The folks at DDoM are aware of 143 disabled people killed by their parents or other caregivers in 2017 (if I counted correctly). 117 since the …
In San Francisco, Disability Rights Advocates is suing Uber. Report from SF Examiner: Although Uber has a wheelchair-accessible service, called Uber WAV, in the Bay Area, Disability Rights Advocates wrote in the complaint that the service is “a sham.” The group conducted a test of the service and found that in Alameda County, not a single …
I’ve been thinking about the way that “treating everyone the same” functions to magnify privilege and reinforce extant power dynamics, rather than promoting equality. Two examples from divergent worlds. First, Daniel Handler’s statement on Gwenda Bond’s blog. At one point he writes, “As someone who’s been a struggling author, I take seriously the responsibilities of …
I like incrementalism, but the NRA has made it impossible. Even the massacre of children, churchgoers, country music fans, and teenagers, hasn’t helped. So let’s change the context. I wrote against the Second Amendment for Pacific Standard: When I say “repeal the Second Amendment,” I am not saying that we should criminalize all private ownership …
My friend Karen Cooper writes about the local history of the Stoneman Douglas family. Marjory, after whom the school in Florida is named, was born here. Cooper is a brilliant scholar of the history of the Cities. She knows more about the area than anyone else I’ve ever met, especially the history of Minnehaha Falls. …
Check this out, if you missed it – Drunk History covers the longest sit in of a federal building in U.S. History, with disabled actors playing disabled characters (imagine!). It’s pretty great. More to come on how this happened soon.
I wrote this today. A little context, including the fact that Wesleyan University intends to put him on stage with, of all people, Anita Hill /1 https://t.co/G9289DC6sj — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 22, 2018 A lot here on my latest article. More to come on Wesleyan, in particular, as I watch how this moves.
I’ve written a lot about ableism in job ads. Here’s one from last year. I’ve never seen this before – I see it as a compromise move. For a disability services associate director at Texas Christian University: Physical Requirements (With or Without Accommodations): Visual acuity to read information from computer screens, forms and other printed …
In case you missed it, the correlation between mental illness and violence towards others is not in evidence. The belief that the mentally ill are more likely to take part in a mass shooting appears to be a misleading. There were 198,760 homicides committed by a firearm in the United States between 1999 and 2015, …
Last week I wrote a column for Pacific Standard on the Gerber Baby. He has Down syndrome. Yay! Now what? I wrote: I contacted Gerber to find out more about their commitment to disability rights. Initially, Business Insider reported on parents who complained that Gerber Life, the baby food company’s sister affiliate, was refusing to provide …