Removing Barriers

 

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Removing Barriers title displayed prominently atop a construction barricade. Subtitles positioned above the barrier indicate various aspects of barriers: Related to Race, Related to Gender, Related to Age, For People with Disabilities, and Related to Culture. Subtitles positioned below the community access barrier list specific areas affected: To Programs, Services, Events, Life Activities, Information and Communications, and Full and Equitable Participation.

Barriers keep people out of the life of their community: out of programs, services, and events, out of information and conversation, and out of full and equal participation. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes that disability results from the interaction between a person and attitudinal and environmental barriers, and that those barriers hinder full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others. The barrier is in the environment, the plan, or the attitude, not in the person.

Every one of us has a stake in removing them. Writing from the Birmingham city jail in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The Seven Most Common Barriers

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) describes the seven most common barriers that People with Disabilities face:

• Attitudinal: stereotypes, stigma, prejudice, and discrimination. The CDC calls these the most basic barriers, because they contribute to all the others.
• Communication: print with no large print, braille, or screen reader version, videos without captions, and spoken presentations without sign language interpretation.
• Physical: structures that block movement or entry, such as steps at the only entrance to a building.
• Policy: rules and practices, often the result of a lack of awareness or enforcement of existing laws, that keep qualified people out.
• Programmatic: inconvenient scheduling, equipment that is not accessible, and little or no communication with participants.
• Social: the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, learn, work, and age, including lower rates of employment and education and higher rates of poverty.
• Transportation: a lack of accessible, conveniently located transportation.

Disability rights advocate Stella Young described what these barriers look like, and why good intentions alone do not remove them:

“No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn’t going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It’s just not going to happen.” -Stella Young, I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much

Attitudinal barriers often take the form of low expectations. The National Federation of the Blind says:

“Every day we raise the expectations of blind people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams. Our collective power, determination, and diversity achieve the aspirations of all blind people.” -National Federation of the Blind

Permeates the Structures of Society

The same pattern holds for every marginalized group. Prejudice does not stay inside individual hearts. A 2017 letter on religious prejudice, written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice, observes: “This prejudice, along with many others, permeates the structures of society and is systematically impressed on individual and collective consciousness.”

June Manning Thomas, writing in The Bahá’í World, shows how this happens with race:

“Eliminating individual prejudice is a necessary, but insufficient, part of promoting racial unity. Human beings have embedded racial disunity within geographic space, where it is hard to change and is reinforced by political, economic, and social boundaries.” -June Manning Thomas, Spatial Strategies for Racial Unity, The Bahá’í World

Writing to the Bahá’ís of Iran in 2008, the Universal House of Justice named, as chief among the pressing issues facing that country, “the critical need to remove barriers hindering the progress of women in society”. Speaking in Paris in 1911, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá asked why such barriers are built at all:

“In the eyes of the Creator all His children are equal; His goodness is poured forth on all. He does not favor this nation nor that nation; all alike are His creatures. This being so, why should we make divisions, separating one race from another? Why should we create barriers of superstition and tradition bringing discord and hatred among the people?” -‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Paris Talks

Participants, Not Recipients

Why remove barriers? In The Prosperity of Humankind, the Bahá’í International Community wrote:

“Future generations, however, will find almost incomprehensible the circumstance that, in an age paying tribute to an egalitarian philosophy and related democratic principles, development planning should view the masses of humanity as essentially recipients of benefits from aid and training. Despite acknowledgement of participation as a principle, the scope of the decision making left to most of the world’s population is at best secondary, limited to a range of choices formulated by agencies inaccessible to them and determined by goals that are often irreconcilable with their perceptions of reality.” -Bahá’í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind

Removing barriers is a matter of justice. Treating accessibility as an act of charity, done at our convenience, is a Grave Injustice.

Barriers also cost everyone. Writing to the Bahá’ís of the United States in 2020, the Universal House of Justice said of racism:

“Racism is a profound deviation from the standard of true morality. It deprives a portion of humanity of the opportunity to cultivate and express the full range of their capability and to live a meaningful and flourishing life, while blighting the progress of the rest of humankind.” -The Universal House of Justice, 22 July 2020 – To the Bahá’ís of the United States

The remedy it describes is “the establishment of just relationships among individuals, communities, and institutions of society that will uplift all and will not designate anyone as ‘other’”. Judith Heumann put it simply: “We know discrimination when we see it, and we need to be fighting it together.”

Nothing About Us Without Us

Who should lead the work? The disability rights movement answers with a slogan that James Charlton took as the title of his 1998 book, Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment. People with Disabilities know where the barriers are. The Universal House of Justice has observed the same principle at work in community building:

“In its early stages, the systematic effort to reach out to a population and foster its participation in the process of capacity building accelerates markedly when members of that population are themselves in the vanguard of such an effort. These individuals will have special insight into those forces and structures in their societies that can, in various ways, reinforce the endeavours under way.” -The Universal House of Justice, 29 December 2015 – To the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors

Leading does not mean carrying the work alone. Disability justice writer Mia Mingus explains:

“Liberatory access calls upon us to create different values for accessibility than we have historically had. It demands that the responsibility for access shifts from being an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility.” -Mia Mingus, Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities makes this principle an obligation:

“In the development and implementation of legislation and policies to implement the present Convention, and in other decision-making processes concerning issues relating to persons with disabilities, States Parties shall closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, including children with disabilities, through their representative organizations.” -United Nations, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Article 4.3

So What Can We Do Specifically to Remove Barriers?

Begin with one step, and invite People with Disabilities in your community to guide the next one:

1. Plan ahead, in consultation with People with Disabilities. Invite them into the planning from the start, and choose places people can reach and enter. This removes physical, programmatic, and transportation barriers before anyone meets them.
2. Make materials accessible. Ask privately for each person’s preferred format: braille, audio, large print, or electronic, provided in time to use. This removes communication barriers.
3. Describe your images. Give every meaningful image ALT text, so a Screen Reader user receives the same information.
4. Use Audio Description in video. Choose and create videos that Blind and Low Vision viewers can follow.
5. Write accessible email messages. Messages that work with a Screen Reader build belonging instead of exclusion.
6. Replace print and PDF with formats readers can control. Print and PDF publications shut out many readers.
7. Learn the International Accessibility Standards. Free training shows how to make every email, website, video, and newsletter accessible.
8. Change our mindset from the Medical Model to the Social Model of Disability. Fix the barrier, not the person. This removes attitudinal barriers, the ones that contribute to all the others.
9. Use respectful, inclusive language. The words we choose can welcome a person or push them away.
10. Raise awareness about accessibility. Share what you learn, so that policy barriers built on a lack of awareness disappear.

Barriers come into view as a community grows. Introducing the Nine Year Plan, the Universal House of Justice wrote:

“As the intensity of community-building work in a cluster increases, the friends there inevitably become more conscious of social, economic, or cultural barriers that are impeding people’s spiritual and material progress.” -The Universal House of Justice, 30 December 2021 – To the Conference of the Continental Boards of Counsellors

Questions to bring to your next devotional gathering, class, group, or study circle:

• Which of the seven barriers are present in our gatherings, materials, and communications?
• Who is missing from our community activities, and what barriers may be keeping them away?
• Were People with Disabilities and members of other marginalized groups part of the planning from the start?
• Does every person have a way to contribute, not only to attend?

Judith Heumann closed her talk with a call to action:

“[T]ogether we can make a difference. Together we can speak up for justice. Together we can help change the world.” -Judith Heumann, Our fight for disability rights and why we’re not done yet

Read more letters from the Universal House of Justice on Removing Barriers, see the specific steps on our main page, and join us in our efforts!