Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
A woman celebrating her 29th birthday with family and friends at a New Jersey restaurant received a dessert with the word wheelchair written across it where her name should have been. Antonia Sinibaldi and her cousin had ordered the same dish. Only one plate came labeled. Sinibaldi has used a wheelchair since she was two years old, and in that moment a party turned into another occasion where she was treated as less than a guest. She said it caught her off guard, and that she does not require reminding of what she already lives.
The response made the harm plainer. Management first offered her table extra drinks and gave no account of how the word reached the plate. The restaurant later said staff normally mark tickets with table and seat numbers, and that this time someone wrote wheelchair to show where the dessert belonged. So before anything was misread or miscopied, a paying guest had already been filed under her equipment. The business said nothing disrespectful was meant by it, which is exactly how ableism works in daily life: nobody has to intend it for a person to be reduced to a device.
Sinibaldi has been telling her own story for years, and that matters here. She sustained a cervical spinal cord injury at age two in a crash caused by a drunk driver. She uses a ventilator, and eating, drinking, and breathing involve another person. In a 2022 guest post for a spinal cord injury community, she wrote about access and about her life as a quadriplegic. A woman who publishes her own account of disability did not require a dessert plate to introduce her, and she has said she will not go back to that restaurant.
When we label people by their equipment, we lose the people. The restaurant answered by tightening its ticket writing and trying to phone the woman it had labeled, while she is the one who now spends her birthday somewhere else. Communities that are Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, and Accessible get built in the ordinary planning nobody sees, and ableism most often arrives through interactions nobody meant as unkind, which is why removing barriers starts on the ticket, before anyone reaches the table. The friction sits right there in this story: the room had a working system for locating her chair and no habit of recording her name.
Before our next event, we should read our own sign in sheets, seating charts, name tags, and volunteer shorthand, and remove every label that records a device in place of a person. Where we note access details, we note them beside a name and never instead of one. That one edit turns a guest list into a welcome, and it is how we build communities that are Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, and Accessible for People with Disabilities.
Write down the person and not the equipment, and nobody has to read a label where their name belongs.
Read the Full Article: New Jersey woman in wheelchair celebrates birthday at restaurant. Then the offensive birthday cake arrives: ‘Don’t bring up my disability’.
By: William Kennedy
