Last fall, a South Carolina school resource officer (a school cop, called SROs) was called into a classroom to deal with a student who wouldn’t get off her phone, and who refused to leave the classroom when ordered to do so by the teacher and then the assistant principal. He ripped her from her desk…
Great writing from Lydia Brown on healthcare disparities for disabled people of color. From both personal and professional experience, I am keenly aware that healthcare disparities are one of the most insidious and pervasive forms of discrimination impacting any underrepresented or minoritized group. These disparities are evident in quality of care, diagnostic accuracy, network adequacy,…
There are two distinct types of message driven inspirational videos. One type focuses inward at the community it represents; the other pushes outward. #HowDoYouSeeMe claims to be directed outward. The makers and their PR folks claim that its goal is to change the way people see Down syndrome. In fact, headline after headline over the…
Here’s a big study on taser use from Maryland, thanks to the hard work of the Baltimore Sun. In reporting Taser incidents to the state, police departments must record the reason for discharging the weapon. Officers have only three options: “non-compliant and non-threatening,” “use of threat” or “use of force.” Of all incidents from 2012 through…
As I wrote about the job discrimination ads last month for Al Jazeera America, I kept thinking about the hashtag #ILookLikeAProfessor and Kelly J. Baker’s work. My thesis is that the inadvertent part of this was based, at least in part, on people who had just never considered that a disabled person might be able…
In the book History Matters, as well as the focused studies on which the book is based, Judith Bennett discusses the curious history of the medieval village alewife. She tracked the way that the internal ale-based economy worked, then, as ale shifted to beer, suddenly men took over the field. It turns out that beer,…
The worst elements of inspiration porn appear in local papers, then move outward. So I was pleased to see the local River Falls, WI, paper respond to a disabled student winning a big scholarship by just talking about Alma’s dreams and academic achievements. This is a screenshot link, so I don’t have an accessible version,…
“Ally’s story, and Penny’s story, don’t negate the significance of these new neurological findings, or the fact that drug interventions for cognition will come as good news for some people with Down syndrome. I am not certain that Penny needs medical interventions to improve her cognition, but I know she needs a social context that…
It’s voting day in Illinois. Today I’m going to vote in my first consequential presidential primary of my life. In all other primaries since 1992, the decision had been pretty much made by the time the primary got to me (except in 2008. IL was consequential, but Obama was obviously going to win his home…
Today at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley, CA, I’ll be attending a showing of Where is Hope, a film on police violence and disability. I’ve seen the film, and it’s direct and powerful, forcing viewers to really think about the experience of violence at the hands of law enforcement, and particularly why that violence…