This page is intended to feature the writings of people with disabilities. It is your page... if you choose to use it. Submit submissions to Jim. I will only edit with the consideration of the sensibilities of others in mind.

“It is an historical fact that the privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but, as we are reminded, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals are. We know, through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Martin Luther King

Discrimination

February is Black history month. Various TV networks are running public service announcements. I actually think of them as public awareness announcements.

One of the announcements, on the History Channel, shows a group of white diners. The film looks from outside of the restaurant through a window with the words “whites only”, across the top. The voice over that accompanies the film is from a black woman. She tells about seeing people eating in a restaurant, when she was a child, and asking her father why she could not eat there. She relates that her father, a proud black man, told her she “should not wish for something she cannot have.”

I have been thinking about that announcement a lot since I first saw it. What I think is that there has to be some way to make people realize that a kid sitting in a wheelchair today, looking in the window of a restaurant that he cannot get into is no different from that black child fifty years ago. 

We know that the black child’s father was wrong. The wanting something thought to be unattainable galvanized a people. They changed the face of America. The children of that proud black man and the children of the man who put those hateful words across the top of a window are now in business together.

Barriers to access are no different from the words written across the top of that window. The barriers which still exist that keep us from full participation in our communities are as hateful an example of discrimination as are any of the Jim Crow laws of the South of the 1950’s. The attitudes that allow those barriers to exist are a rebuke to all the citizens of our Republic.

One of the lessons learned from the brave men and women who challenged the status quo in the 1950’s and the 1960’s is that none of us is free when one of us is not. When a society excludes a group of its citizens all of the citizens of that society suffer. The contributions of the black community, since the death of Jim Crow, only gives a hint at what they would have accomplished if they had enjoyed the blessings of full participation throughout our history. The same is true for the disability community today. When we exclude a child, what do we lose? What contributions are we denying our society?

The thing that makes me crazy is that we can never measure the loss. When we exclude people because of their race or their disability, we write them off. Today, that should be intolerable. Today, with the lessons of the recent past so fresh, how can we do the same thing to another group of citizens? Why is it so difficult for those who exclude us to understand, they are no different from the segregationists of an earlier time. If discrimination against blacks is wrong, than discrimination against people with disabilities is wrong; discrimination is discrimination and every American should be ashamed it still exists.

To the critics who complain that ADA has not achieved total justice ... I say what about the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments? Have they achieved total justice? The vision of justice is an eternal long march to the Promised Land of the good life for all."Justin Dart, Jr. Read about Justin Dar