I’m going to write up yesterday’s adventures in Halloween hopefully for a venerable news outlet near you. In the meantime, cuteness: Winning the selfie game! pic.twitter.com/YL8xhmVhen — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) October 31, 2016 I can hardly believe it, but these magical kids are taking me and my wife trick or treating at the White…
I’m in DC with my family over Halloween. It’s going to be a great but complicated day in which I need to remember the following from my recent Washington Post article: “The effort to find ways to communicate belongs to all of us, not just to a person whose communication methods might be atypical.” I’m going to…
I woke to three stories this morning. 1) Law enforcement cleared the Standing Rock protest, deploying armored vehicles, significant use of force, and apparently injuring a number of the protestors. The escalation was live streamed. The tribe has released a statement. 2) The Bundy Brothers were acquitted for their armed takeover of the Oregon Wildlife…
There’s an argument that “no one really hates disabled people,” and that all acts of violence against them are really about something else (racism, classism, sexism, accident, etc.). But that’s not how intersectionality works. It’s not that we identify one form of bigotry at play and let the others off the hook. Instead, we examine…
I write a lot about academia and public writing, fueled by my accidental stumble into a very public life (it’s all about the 13th century! The 13th Century is a hot media property!). But then once you’ve got some op-eds, some practice at a public voice, then what? It turns out that writing a book,…
Three stories. 1. #SupportTheStrike – Rosa Ines Rivera, a cook at Harvard School of Public Health, writes for the NYTimes that Harvard doesn’t pay her enough to afford healthcare. On my way to work each morning, I pass a building with the inscription: “The highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights…
This was a “wellness check” from local PD after she sent a friend a text. A wellness check. #DisabilitySolidarity h/t @prisonculture https://t.co/uVp6fLMDwB — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) October 24, 2016 Renee Davis, a single mother who was 5 months pregnant, texted a friend that she was feeling depressed. Renee Davis was five months pregnant when…
Here’s my “non-verbal” son dancing to Hamilton and singing, “Awesome! Wow!” I am not a fan of “awareness.” I find that awareness campaigns tend to lead to the most superficial kinds of responses on a passive level, at best. Kit Mead wrote a good essay on mental health “awareness” recently, concluding: I am tired of awareness….
On Tuesday, the NYPD shot Deborah Danner, a black disabled woman. She was 66, naked, and armed with a baseball bat. Let’s say her name. Let’s read her essay about life with schizophrenia. Police cited self-defense, but both the Mayor and the Commissioner have criticized the officer. Both the mayor and the commissioner said the officer…
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times published an essay arguing that Trump is the most ableist presidential candidate in modern U.S. History. Lots of people in the disability community shared it, for which I am grateful, but I also saw a lot of people reacting by saying, more or less, “Duh.” It’s true, of course, that…