Disability Wrongs: Advocacy gone awry

This video is from ACCSES, an organization representing disability service providers including providers of work centers (sheltered workshops). On 7/25/18, the organization held a Capitol Hill Briefing in defense of a broad range of work settings for people with disabilities including work centers for people who would otherwise be unable to compete for employment. Self-advocates who participate in these work programs were scheduled to speak, but they were shouted down and the meeting disrupted by other self-advocates from disability organizations with opposing views. 

According to ACCSES, this is what happened:

“Despite what disability policy seems to indicate: People with disabilities are not a monolithic group. Rather, people with disabilities are individuals, with the same right to choose where they want to live, work, and thrive as anyone else. That basic civil right to live life with dignity and respect is being subsumed by feel-good laws that do not benefit many individuals, and advocates who support those laws over individual rights. That’s the rub. Right now, current and proposed laws and regulations, as well as policymakers, agencies, and some advocates—even those with good intentions—are putting a broad range of employment, residential, and community support options for people with disabilities at risk. In doing so, they are taking away the civil rights of individuals with disabilities.

“That was never made more clear than on July 25, 2018, when a dozen people with disabilities, some of whom work on the Capitol campus and others who traveled all the way from the middle of the country, wanted to share their stories of why their jobs matter. Instead, they were shut down by advocacy groups that crashed an ACCSES Capitol Hill briefing and frighteningly shouted over the self-advocates with disabilities who were scheduled to speak. The Capitol police had to be called, the individuals who came to speak never got to address the audience in the room. This is where current disability policy has led, not to increased opportunity and respect, but to a concerted effort to take away the civil rights of individuals with disabilities by limiting their choices. It must end. Individuals must be allowed to live, work, and thrive in settings that best meet their needs – not the needs of others.” 

The organizations taking the lead in these disruptive activities were ADAPT and NCIL, the National Council on Independent Living. They put out their own version of events on 7/25/18, “Disability Rights Groups Protest Provider Efforts to Continue the Exploitation and Isolation of People with Disabilities”.

The ACCSES briefing included support of a House bill called the "Workplace Choice and Flexibility for Individuals with Disabilities Act". You can read the bill, H.R. 5658, in less than 5 minutes and see for yourself if it has anything in it that would produce the cataclysmic results that ADAPT and NCIL are predicting. There is nothing in it that would limit or impede the opponents of the bill to receive the employment services in integrated, competitive work settings that they say they want. In the ADAPT/NCIL hyperbolic assessment of the bill, they claim that “This bill resurrects walls of exclusion by segregating people with disabilities both socially and economically, allowing service providers to keep disabled people in workplaces that are isolated from the rest of society, and to pay those workers pennies on the dollar for the value of their work.” 

In the ADAPT/NCIL version of events there is no mention of disability self-advocates and their families supporting the bill who believed they had a meaningful opportunity to express their support, only to be shouted down by other advocates from opposing advocacy organizations who claim to represent everyone with a disability. One of the ADAPT organizers, Anita Cameron, is quoted as saying, “They need to hear from disabled people, they need to hear about the lives we want to live and the communities we want to build. 28 years after the signing of the ADA it is insulting that any organization would pretend to know our needs better than we do.” This was not intended ironically, even as the demonstrators were shouting down other people with disabilities and disrupting the meeting to the extent that the police had to intervene and make arrests. 

Another well-known advocate supporting the demonstrators was Ari Ne’eman, a founder of ASAN, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, and a former member of the National Council on Disability. He is currently an advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union on disability policy and Medicaid. He is seen sitting in the audience holding up his cell phone at 2:37 in the ACCSES video. He was covering the event by tweet, saying among other things that this was a “Historic event”. He makes no reference to others with disabilities who have opposing views to his own. 

No one deserves to be silenced by the kind of bullying displayed by the aggressive tactics of ADAPT, NCIL, and their supporters.

This whole debacle was exacerbated by disability organizations using the royal “we” when they claim to represent everyone with a disability. I found a word for it, something to add to the multitude of “isms” and other terms that get thrown around and at people who one disagrees with: Nosism. According to Wikipedia, Nosism, from the Latin nos, "we", is the practice of using the pronoun "we" to refer to oneself when expressing a personal opinion. At least “we” learned something new from this tawdry event.