Journalist – Historian – Speaker
One of my absolutely favorite writers on disability, Lydia Brown, is at Georgetown. She’s an increasingly well-known voice on disability issues and, not surprisingly, was asked to provide a training to student organizations about accessibility. She agreed. No one showed up. In a powerful post, Brown explains what the empty room means. Nothing demonstrates more …
In the world of Down syndrome, we talk about “presuming competence” (hey, go buy a shirt!). That instead of “awareness,” we’d like to see a shift to a general presumption of competence first. More on this in pieces to come. I’ve been working, though, on ways of re-describing the strategic problems with police procedure as …
Ableism in Action – These are comments from my recent CNN article on Kanye West. These are not trolls. These are people genuinely trying to express their thinking. Italics are me. Many of the issues here relate back to my post on “Hidden Disabilities,” featuring longer comments from readers. hgflyer lollardfish • 7 minutes ago …
This week was focused on what the Kanye West incident tells us about disability in our culture. I wrote a brief blog post about it here, linking it to another post on the “pencil test.” It got a very good response, so I wrote another piece about it for CNN, building on the argument. That too …
Last Tuesday, CNN published an essay of mine that took the occasion of Kanye West’s bad behavior, in which he demanded fans prove their disabilities, to talk about the way that this happens to people with disabilities all the time. Response was mostly very positive, but I always pay attention to criticisms, even though I …
I started writing about police violence and disability because of the death of Ethan Saylor. I had read stories like this for years, but when Ethan died, unlike during previous tragedies, I had a few links to media. I first wrote this piece for The Nation. I then wrote this widely-read piece for CNN and …
Today I have a new piece on CNN about Kanye West. I build on yesterday’s blog post, expanding my argument that the Kanye West’s behavior is a magnified celebrity egotistical version of the kinds of skepticism and suspicion faced people with disabilities all the time. In the piece, I write: Reaction to this incident throughout …
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog that was pretty widely read and shared (compared to my other posts) on the “Pencil Test” for disability. It focused around a man flung to the ground by Florida police, to see if he was really disabled or just faking it. There’s actually a lot of discourse …
Lock In is the newest book by the well-known sci-fi author John Scalzi. In my review at Huffington Post, I wrote: On a certain level, this is a story about “wheelchairs,” or rather assistive mobility devices. That’s unusual. While many science fiction stories depict advanced technological responses to plagues or injuries, such stories usually involve seemingly …
Here are four stories literally just from last night (they happened at different times, but made news yesterday). They illustrate the way racism enables and is enabled by the cult of compliance. The cult provides an intersectional lens in which race and class dominate the middle, with disability not far behind. When these categories overlap in …