Store Employee Accuses Wheelchair User Of Stealing, Her Ableist Logic Ends Up Costing Her The Job

A teenage wheelchair user went shopping with their mother and found the aisles blocked by product displays. Afterward the teen wrote to the store's manager to name the barrier, the very report any store must have before it can remove one. The call that came back said nothing about the aisles. It claimed the teen had shoplifted at a branch the teen had never visited. A store that guards its shelves more closely than its aisles has already decided who gets to shop there, and this call showed what speaking up cost one customer.

The only evidence the store offered was that a wheelchair user had been seen in the store that week. On that basis alone, one shopper was made to answer for another. A wheelchair is equipment, and using it as the description of a person erases everything else about who that person is. Nobody checked whether the teen had ever set foot in that branch, because once the wheelchair stood in for a face, the person behind it was never looked for. The store's eventual apology was a shopping credit worth ten dollars, and the employee who made the accusation lost her job.

That reasoning falls apart against the numbers. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimates that about 27 percent of American adults have a disability, making People with Disabilities the biggest minority in the United States and worldwide. A store that expects to see one wheelchair user in a week, and then treats that person as a suspect, is running on bias dressed up as evidence. The same gap shows up in other countries. In Germany, the Robert Bosch Foundation's Diversity Barometer records steady public goodwill toward People with Disabilities, yet a quarter of the inquiries reaching the Federal Antidiscrimination Agency concern discrimination based on disability. In the United Kingdom, ten years on from the Equality Act 2010, 51 percent of People with Disabilities told YouGov that the law falls short of protecting their rights, and only one in five said the current law does enough.

Look at the disability and you will never see the person. The teen did what every access plan depends on, naming the barrier and asking for it to be removed. What came back was suspicion and then a coupon, and the aisles were never mentioned. A credit slip does not clear a display from an aisle. Access is a right planned before anyone arrives and settled with the People with Disabilities who meet the barrier, never a favor handed out after a complaint.

Knowing the person first is how a report about an aisle stays a report about an aisle.

Read the Full Article: Store Employee Accuses Wheelchair User Of Stealing, Her Ableist Logic Ends Up Costing Her The Job.
By: Rūta Zumbrickaitė and Louise Pieterse

Also See:

• What is ableism, and what is its impact?
• Horror movies have an ableism problem. Isn’t it time we found new ‘monsters’?
• Ableism 101: What it is, what it looks like, and what we can do to to fix it
• Intersections Between Racism and Ableism
• How to talk about disability sensitively and avoid ableist tropes
• I was nine when I learned what ableism is
• Anti-Ableism Fast Facts - Ways to Combat Ableism:
• Becoming Anti-Ableist: A Disability Justice- Informed Approach to Supporting the Disability Community
• 8 Ways Ableism Shows Up In Religious Spaces

Questions for Reflection

1. When someone reports a barrier to us, what happens next, and does the person who reported it hear back about what changed?
2. Have we ever met a report about access with suspicion or defensiveness, and what did that cost the person who spoke up?
3. Where in our records or conversations do we describe a person by a disability or a mobility device instead of by name?
4. When we get something wrong, does our apology include removing the barrier, or does it stop at words or a token?
5. Who reviews how our community handles reports of exclusion, and are People with Disabilities part of that review?