Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
A teenage wheelchair user shopped with their mother and spent the trip steering around product left in the aisles. Afterward they emailed the store to name the barrier. The store phoned back. There was no apology and no word about the aisles. What came instead was an accusation of shoplifting and a demand for payment for bread, milk, formula, and lunch meats. A store that watches its shelves more closely than its aisles has already chosen who gets to shop there. This call showed what it costs a customer to say so out loud.
One wheelchair user had passed through that week, so this one must be the thief. Pressed for a description beyond that single fact, the employee offered an older Black woman with long hair. That described nobody in the conversation. The branch she named was one the teen had never entered. None of it moved her. She said footage existed. She listed the groceries owed. She raised the police. A disability had already been taken for a description, and the person behind it was never looked for.
That reasoning collapses against the count. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health puts the share of American adults who have a disability at about 27 percent. That is better than a quarter of the country. People with Disabilities outnumber every other minority group here and worldwide. The figure keeps growing, since most people acquire a disability at some point through age, illness, or injury. People with Disabilities are ordinary and everywhere. A store that expects to meet exactly one of them in a week is not reasoning at all. That is bias dressed up as evidence. Surveys of attitude keep reporting steady public regard for People with Disabilities. Then a quarter of the complaints reaching the federal anti discrimination agency turn out to concern disability.
Look at the disability and you will never see the person. A regional executive eventually wrote to call the whole thing a mix up, apologized, and offered store credit worth ten dollars. The teen refused it and said the access problem that started all of this had still not been dealt with. The employee who made the accusation lost her job. A decade after the Equality Act 2010, a YouGov study found 51 percent of People with Disabilities saying the protections do not go far enough. Only one in five said the law as written does enough. Access is not something we grant when it is convenient for us. A credit slip does not stand in for removal. Access is planned before anyone arrives, and settled with the People with Disabilities who meet the barrier. Here the person who met the barrier named it themselves. What came back was suspicion, then a coupon.
The store saw a disability and a wheelchair and never a person, and the narrow minded description it produced fit somebody else entirely. We should know the people who come to us, and we should acknowledge a disability as only one attribute among many, never the description. One shopper should never have to answer for a whole group, and knowing each person as a person is how we build Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.
Know the person first!
Read the Full Article: Store Employee Accuses Wheelchair User Of Stealing, Her Ableist Logic Ends Up Costing Her The Job.
By: Louise Pieterse and Rūta Zumbrickaitė
