Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
Emily Ladau first talked about disability on Sesame Street when she was 10, and decades later she is still speaking up. The author and disability activist has Larsen syndrome, a rare inherited disability that shapes bone growth. As her book Demystifying Disability returns in a revised edition, she makes her first point plainly. Disability sits at the core of who she is, with its own history, community, and culture behind it. One of the clearest ways to stand with her is to recognize her as a disabled woman and to treat disabled lives as whole. She still offers people grace, sorting those who are cruel on purpose from those who simply have not caught up yet.
Joy, for Ladau, is a way of pushing back. An airline damaged her wheelchair, and the harm left her feeling shut out, as if her world had shrunk and travel no longer had room for her. Her answer was to start bedazzling the chair. Her mobility equipment works like part of her body. It does not define her, but it is how she moves, and she feels no shame about it. The sparkle turned a damaging experience into something that makes her happy every time she sees it. It also changed what strangers say to her, trading unwanted remarks for delight over a glittering chair and a real moment of connection.
The new edition also tracks how fast disability rights are being taken away, and Ladau warns that more losses are on the way. Those rights were hard won, and education shows what is at stake. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) affirms the right of disabled children to a public education, and since the 1970s the federal government was supposed to pay its full cost. That promise has never been kept by any administration, and protections for disabled students are now sliding further backward. With the federal Department of Education taken apart, disability is being reduced to a medical matter instead of a question of access to school and to a full life. Future generations stand to lose free and appropriate public schooling in the least restrictive setting that fits them.
A guess about a neighbor is no substitute for asking the neighbor. Ladau has been teaching nondisabled people since childhood, and she admits it is exhausting to be a living lesson every day. She also says there are no hard rules for being an ally, because she is only one disabled person and disabled people do not all want the same thing. What works is to ask the person in front of us how to stand with them, not to lean on sweeping assumptions. We already hold that removing barriers means planning ahead alongside People with Disabilities, the ones closest to those barriers. Yet this interview shows the cost when the same few people carry all of that teaching, with no one else picking up the load.
As we plan, we ask each disabled person directly how they want to take part, instead of copying what another disabled person once wanted. No single disabled person speaks for every other one, and asking one person to teach the whole room every time wears that person out. When we carry the teaching together, and the person we asked is free to set it down and rest, we are building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.
Asking first, and sharing the work that follows, is how the neighbor stops being a guess.
Read the Full Article: She Appeared On ‘Sesame Street’ At Age 10 To Talk About Disability. Decades Later, She's Still Fighting..
By: Rajul Punjabi-Johnson
