Journalist – Historian – Speaker
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 …
Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope …
Yesterday I wrote about an ID Card for autistic drivers, with links to similar stories. Now we have “autistic wrist bands.” These are well intentioned efforts to stop police from hurting neurodiverse people. There’s a better way, though, and that’s to train police not to hurt people who aren’t causing active threats. As always, I …
There are three new bills working their way through the Florida legislature on policing and disability. One of the interesting things about disability is that even people who refuse to consider most structural reforms to policing and reject the #BlackLivesMatter movement are still willing to push for reforms when it comes to disability. That’s actually …
My friend RC alerted me to this piece on a police training simulator for learning how to reduce misuse of force when encountering autistic people or people with various mental disabilities. It touts the virtues of the virtual playback versus role-playing-based training. Through the simulator, deputies are immersed in true-to-life scenarios — exactly the kind …
There’s a new hashtag campaign around saying the word “disability.” It is initiated and led by my friend and writing companion Lawrence Carter-Long. I am wildly in favor. I am trying, in my writing this year, to write the sentence: “There are no special needs, only needs” as often as possible. We all have needs. …
#CripTheVote has become an important hashtag, founded by Alice Wong, Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan, intended to bring disability into the conversation around the 2016 presidential campaign. Like most forms of online activism, its primary function (to my mind) is to thicken networks. We tweet, we use the hashtag, we encounter each other and find …
Until last week, neither Sanders nor Clinton used the word “disability” at most rarely. Then, in her close to the final debate in New Hampshire, Clinton concluded her remarks as follows: You know, we didn’t get to talk about the continuing struggles that Americans face with racism, with sexism, with discrimination against the LGBT community, …
Mount St. Mary’s University gave a survey to its incoming class that allegedly was used as a tool to identify the most at-risk members in order to try to drive them from the school. I will have a piece on this with The Establishment soon. Here’s the survey via Scribd. Given its alleged purpose, I find the …
Two weeks ago I saw a tweet that alerted me to a job ad for the CEO of The Arc of Texas, along with other ads on their site, that basically said no disabled person need apply. I posted about the ad, with screenshots, and started a mini social media storm in the disability community. …