Part 3: Disability Awareness

There are broad categories that we can use to describe different disabilities. These categories are not mutually exclusive and are at times contextual. It is important to note that these are broad generalizations and cannot adequately address the nuances of individual lived experiences within each category, and that each individuals brings their own strengths, personalities, and support needs. Below are descriptions of these categories and some broad themes and challenges that people within that category may experience.

Types of disabilities (not an exhaustive list):

• Visual impairment: blindness, low vision
• Deaf/hard of hearing
• Mobility disability: wheelchair, walker or crutch users
• Intellectual and developmental: Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder
• Psychological disabilities: depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder
• Chronic illness: diabetes, Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis
• Learning disabilities: dyslexia, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

What you should know

• Disability status is personal information that may not be disclosed to the employer. 
• Steer clear of assumptions.
• Listen to your team member: Accommodations are unique to every individual, and providing an accommodation that has not been requested may be unnecessary and can cause discomfort.

Watch this video to learn about some of the obstacles faced by people with disabilities.¹⁰

Ableism is “a form of discrimination or prejudice against individuals with physical, mental, or developmental disabilities that is characterized by the belief that these individuals need to be fixed or cannot function as full members of society.”²⁴

Just like other systems of oppression, such as sexism, racism, ageism, sizeism, and classism, ableism fosters the belief that one group’s experiences are the norm and people who do not match or adhere to that experience are oppressed, marginalized, and excluded. In the case of ableism, the “norm” is having a physically and mentally able body, which provides able-bodied people with certain privileges and social power. Disabled people thus face exclusion in all levels of society, whether it is in work environments, education, social settings, public spaces, relationships, and more.

There are three primary categories of ableism:

1. Institutional ableism: An institution’s culture and practices communicate that disabled people are less-valued members of that system than able-bodied people, affording less access, opportunities, and inclusion to disabled people.

   Example: An organization does not include disability in their diversity and inclusion strategy.
   Perception: “We do not have disabled members on our team. I don’t think a person with a disability could do this job so it is not a recruiting priority.”
    

2. Interpersonal ableism: An individual’s actions and language toward others demonstrate they have negative views of disabled people or living with disability. These views, informed by institutional ableism, may be conscious or unconscious. Interpersonal ableism is communicated through microaggressions.​​​

   Example: A tour guide does not make eye contact or speak directly to a patron with Down syndrome.
   Perception: “Your disability makes you different and makes me uncomfortable. I do not want to address it.”
    

3. Internalized ableism: When an individual, able-bodied or disabled, has adopted the idea that disabled people are unworthy of equal access and inclusion. These beliefs, developed from living in a culture grounded in institutional ableism and personal experience with interpersonal ableism, may also be conscious or unconscious.

   Example: A patron cannot read the small print on the exhibit placards but chooses not to ask for help because they don’t want to be “annoying.
   Perception: “I should be able to read as well as everyone else and asking for help is burdensome and will annoy others.”
   Example: A museum offers a community event specifically for community members “living with disabilities.” A schoolteacher invites several students with learning disabilities to go, but one student’s parents politely decline the invitation, saying “we don’t want our child to feel different around the rest of their class.”
   Perception: “We do not want our child to be labeled as ‘disabled’ because it will ‘other’ them in the class. We want to distance our child from that label even if they could gain community from this opportunity.”

What you should know

• Acknowledge your unconscious bias, we all have them.
• Listen to the experience of others and learn.
• Our ableism lens can exclude a talented and dynamic workforce.

Watch this fun video describing the dos and don'ts of disability:²⁶

Learning can be frustrating. You may feel like you’re “never going to be able to learn everything” and “it’s too hard to keep up.” There is a lot of information out there, and it can be challenging to learn about an experience outside of your own and do justice to that learning process. Where do you start? How will you know you’ve learned enough—let alone even the right things?

Much of that angst and anxiety stems from an emphasis on cultural competence in many of our learning institutions. We’re taught that once you learn enough about another culture you are “competent,” and ready to move on. But where does that thinking leave us? We can become overwhelmed by shifting cultural practices (e.g., including personal gender pronouns in email signatures), evolving language (e.g., “Do I say ‘person with a disability’ or ‘disabled person?’”), and what can feel like an insurmountable amount of new information to consume in order to not say or do the “wrong thing.” What if instead we coupled our efforts for competence with a framework of cultural humility, owning our ignorance and striving for a lifelong process of learning and growth? This philosophy affirms statements like “I don’t know” and fosters a celebration of curiosity and cultural immersion.

Cultural competence: “the ability to interact effectively with people of different cultures, helping to ensure the needs of all community members are addressed.”¹⁴

Cultural competence is centered around building knowledge about cultural experiences through training and education. The philosophy posits that by consuming specific information about a diversity of experiences, providers will be better equipped to provide more effective, culturally competent services.

Organizations can create (or draw upon) consistent, concrete frameworks of knowledge necessary for staff, trainees, and providers to learn or review prior to engaging in service or being cleared to perform public-facing duties. Upon completion of mandatory new employee trainings (e.g., “Trans 101” and “Disability Awareness” or continuing education units on “Racial justice” or “Unpacking Privilege”), staff across positions can equally assert “competence” regardless of prior training, educational background, and life experiences.

Establishing a specific set of knowledge as the prerequisite for providing effective service promotes a monolithic and limited view of cultural experiences. For example, if a disability culture training is grounded strictly in a person-first philosophy, the facilitator is erasing the lived experience of disabled folks who prefer the identity-first approach. Upon completing the training, attendees will have no incentive or expectation to pursue other potential perspectives outside of their own personal curiosity. Achieving “cultural competence” evokes the image of a finish line, with the belief that a staff member has acquired all of the relevant information needed to provide culturally sensitive services—when really it is just the beginning of a journey toward greater awareness and understanding.

Cultural humility: “the ability to maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented (or open to the other) in relation to aspects of cultural identity that are most important to the [person].”¹⁵

A concept proposed by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1988, cultural humility is an approach to cultural competency that emphasizes a philosophy of lifelong learning rather than a terminal process—a treadmill approach rather than a finish line.

Cultural humility is comprised of three tenets:¹⁶

1. Lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and critique. This tenet is the basis of the treadmill metaphor. Culturally humility demands we accept that we are never done learning about experiences outside of ourselves and we never will be. This humility offers room to be curious about new experiences and can foster a desire to continue learning, owning when we do not know things rather than being ashamed of our ignorance.
    
2. Fixing power imbalances. Cultural humility celebrates the unique perspective each individual brings through their own lived experience.
    
3. Develop partnerships with people and groups who advocate for others. The final tenet is a push for larger systemic change. Self-evaluation and fixing power imbalances must occur at a larger community level, not just individually. Developing partnerships with community organizations and advocates creates more far-reaching ripples, leading to more meaningful cultural shifts than what can be achieved by individuals alone.

Balancing humility and competence

Cultural competence establishes an expectation that staff must learn specific information about marginalized cultures in order to provide culturally relevant services. The expectations are associated with concrete, measurable markers of competence and can be implemented in a way that cultivates organization-wide, fundamental understanding of the lived experiences of certain marginalized communities.

Cultural humility encourages staff to continue learning beyond the basics, understanding that introductory trainings are limited and typically only have the capacity to provide cursory reviews of broad themes and content. In order to avoid patterns of treating marginalized communities as monolithic, cultural humility requires staff to commit themselves to an ongoing process of learning, owning biases and ignorance, listening to members of marginalized communities as experts on their own experience, and collaborating with established community advocates to create larger, community-wide shifts in service provision practices.

Making an internal priority to train, retrain, and refocus your conversation over time allows for ownership of cultural humility to become part of the fabric of your organization and a lens through which you make all levels of organizational decisions.

What you should know

• Whether it’s a pilot program or a training, just get started!
• Be open! This will be an ongoing process and will not be perfect the first time.
• Leverage community-based partners and local educators. They are eager to share their knowledge.
• This type of work may bring up discomfort within your team. Take the time to build trust with your staff.

“The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.”¹⁷

Intersectionality is a theoretical lens coined by black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw,¹⁸ originally to shed light on the oppression of black women. Intersectionality is a necessary approach to developing inclusion work for people with disabilities.

While adequately acknowledging disability culture still remains a challenging first step for many organizations, focusing solely on disability instead erases the multitude of identities that can intersect with that marginalized experience. Disabled people can also be people of color, women, on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, experiencing homelessness, undocumented, lower socioeconomic status, and so on. Intersectionality is a means for us to explore how ableism intersects with other oppressive systems, providing each individual certain social power and exerting marginalization at the same time.

For example, “Barry,” a white, cisgender, gay man who is a wheelchair rider living in the Bay Area’s affluent Marin County, has a complexity of intersecting privileges and marginalizations. As a gay person who is a wheelchair rider, Barry is more likely to experience marginalization due to ableism and homophobia. However, as an affluent, white, cisgender man, Barry holds social power within racist, classist, sexist, and cisnormative spaces. These privileges may mitigate or reduce the marginalization he experiences more than someone who lives within more marginalized identities.

Examples to practice viewing situations from an intersectional lens:

Bathroom privileges: A museum has accessible bathrooms within the building. A patron who is a wheelchair rider files a complaint citing discomfort using the restroom. Staff assume it is due to poor access features. The patron clarifies that the binary gendered men’s and women’s bathroom signs are the issue, not the access features.

• Intersectional lens: Some disabled people need access features to use the bathroom independently or with support. Additionally, some individuals, such as trans and gender non-binary folks, do not identify on the gender binary. They may face stigma, microaggressions, and/or violence in a bathroom based on their gender presentation. By focusing on only the physical access features of public restrooms without acknowledging the dangers of binary gendered bathrooms for non-binary people, the environment is ignoring the reality that people with disabilities can identify outside of the gender binary. By installing accessible, all gender bathrooms an environment is demonstrating awareness of the intersections of disability and a spectrum of gender identities.

English language learners with disabilities: A new employee who has Down syndrome and is an English language learner is participating in an onboarding training with a seasoned staff member. When describing a project, the seasoned staff member advises the new employee to “ping them” when they’re done. The new employee appears confused. The trainer then goes to their manager to share that the new employee with Down syndrome does not understand the onboarding training and suggests a one-on-one specialized training instead of the traditional group training due to their disability.

• Intersectional lens: People with intellectual and developmental disabilities may need different training timelines depending on the person. In this case, the new employee was tracking with the training until jargon that was not part of their vocabulary was used. Before making an adjustment or accommodation, check in with the employee.

What you should know

• Avoid making assumptions about someone’s lived experience, needs, or accommodations.
• Understand that people with disabilities come from different backgrounds and may face other barriers or experiences outside of and in addition to their disability.

Watch this video of Kimberlé Crenshaw describing intersectionality.

Accessibility is a critically important part of the “access and inclusion” discussion. Without the ability to physically access a space, disabled people cannot fully participate in a community, contributing to feelings of exclusion and isolation.

While creating physically accessible spaces may seem like an imposing challenge to some, it is not an impossible feat. There are certainly logistical factors to consider, such as determining which access features to include, the feasibility of incorporating these features, and the cost and time involved, but ultimately, allowing the “what ifs” to deter the creation of accessible spaces prevents many communities from enjoying even the basic civil rights conferred upon them by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Embracing philosophies like universal design from the beginning provides a template for creating accessible environments for people of all different ability levels—and a culture of universal access for everyone.

What you should know

• Universal design helps all of us. Many people have invisible disabilities and may need supports that are not evident in everyday interactions.

Microaggressions are subtle or overt snubs toward marginalized people that reinforce the negative messages and stereotypes about that group, and are communicated through language, behavior, and environment.

A group of authors in the queer community refer to microaggressions as “death by 1,000 cuts,”²¹ evoking the image of countless small, sometimes imperceptible, slights cumulatively contributing to one’s “demise” as opposed to previous notions of identity “destruction” through major, explicit, observable incidents.

Microaggressions toward people with disabilities tend to deny their personal identity, ignore any sense of personal privacy, erase their experiences living with disability, and communicate that their needs are less important or more burdensome than able-bodied people.¹²

What you should know

• Honor the comfort and privacy of others over indulging your curiosity.
• Be open to changing your thinking about the way you talk to people.

References

1. Cone, K. (n.d.). Short History of the 504 Sit in. Retrieved February 10, 2019, from https://dredf.org/504-sit-in-20th-anniversary/short-history-of-the-504-sit-in/

2. Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund. (2010, August 22). The Power of 504 (full version, open caption, English and Spanish). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyWcCuVta7M&t=304s

3. ADA - Findings, Purpose, and History. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.adaanniversary.org/findings_purpose

4. US Department of Justice. (2009). A Guide to Disability Rights Laws. Retrieved from https://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor62335

5. Sheber, V. (2017, December 16). Feminism 101: What are the Waves of Feminism? Retrieved February 10, 2019, from https://femmagazine.com/feminism-101-what-are-the-waves-of-feminism/

6. Berne, P. (2015, June 10). Disability Justice – a working draft by Patty Berne. Retrieved February 10, 2019, from http://sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne

7. Sins Invalid. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.sinsinvalid.org/index.html

8. Disability Justice Collective. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2019, from http://www.littleglobe.org/portfolio/disability-justice-collective/

9. Falvo, D., & Holland, B. E. (2017). Medical and psychosocial aspects of chronic illness and disability. Jones & Bartlett Learning.

10. Greens, T. A. (2018, August 12). We need to talk about disability. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3faUGgMsNI&t=2s&fbclid=IwAR2P_9iuv4pgQ9onXwnu2S8dV7uk0asQD3hCn1lKXJ7zeVanskL7yHAXApo

11. Marini, I., Glover-Graf, N. M., & Millington, M. J. (2018). Psychosocial aspects of disability insider perspectives and counseling strategies. New York: Springer Pub.

12. Keller, R. M., & Galgay, C. E. (2010). Microaggressive experiences of people with disabilities. Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact, 241-268.

13. Lambird, R. (2017, October 26). Let's talk about the Social Model of Disability [CC]. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZCPztgvrqU

14. SAMHSA. (2016). Cultural Competence. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/capt/applying-strategic-prevention/cultural-competence

15. Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., Owen, J., Worthington Jr, E. L., & Utsey, S. O. (2013). Cultural humility: Measuring openness to culturally diverse clients. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 60(3), 353.

16. Tervalon, M., & Murray-Garcia, J. (1998). Cultural humility versus cultural competence: A critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education. Journal of health care for the poor and underserved, 9(2), 117-125.

17. Intersectionality | Definition of intersectionality in English by Oxford Dictionaries. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/intersectionality

18. Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. U. Chi. Legal F., 139.

19. Sue, D. W. (2010). Microaggressions in everyday life: Race, gender, and sexual orientation. John Wiley & Sons.

20. Desmond-Harris, J. (2015, February 16). What exactly is a microaggression? Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2015/2/16/8031073/what-are-microaggressions

21. Nadal, K. L., Issa, M. A., Leon, J., Meterko, V., Wideman, M., & Wong, Y. (2011). Sexual orientation microaggressions:“Death by a thousand cuts” for lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. Journal of LGBT Youth, 8(3), 234-259.

22. TED. (2016, December 07). The urgency of intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akOe5-UsQ2o&t=4s

23. Decoded, M. (2018, November 02). 5 Phrases Disabled People Are Tired Of | Decoded. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DSL-2hsRk8&t=4s

24. Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W. J., Castaneda, R., Hackman, H. W., Peters, M. L., & Zuniga, X. (Eds.). (2000). Readings for diversity and social justice. Psychology Press.

25. About This Project. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://whatisableism.tumblr.com/about

26. Dcgovernment. (2014, October 02). Disability Sensitivity Training Video. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv1aDEFlXq8