No-one can say 2020 has been a boring year. Many can say 2020 has been a crazy year, and very few can say 2020 has been a positive year. Britain’s Disability History Month (18th November-20th December) is in a truly curious position. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Both of these acts, mark what is arguably the greatest advance in civil rights disabled people have witnessed in history. They came with promise, that any citizen no matter their circumstance was granted the dignity to work and live wherever they wanted. But how much of that promise has come to pass?
The pandemic this year really underlines the problems disabled people face today. The thin veil of friendliness, sympathy, and pity have shown niceness has done very little to advance rights or at the very least implement the rights which we fought tooth and nail for.
Despite, having a world which sees the horrendous implications of slurs like retard, cripple, spaccy, spac-hed, mongoloid, spazz, mong, and others, this has not managed to push other situations further. We still see disabled people as the community with the highest rates of unemployment, highest rates of poverty, extremely high rates of suicide, low life-expectancy, and increased chance of homelessness. These rates, have not changed much since 1990 or 1995. This has ultimately shown the failures of ‘Intersectional Capitalism’ — namely, the idea that if we acknowledge the disparaging problems faced by various communities, and send token gestures to make up for our own internal biases, as well as pushing to make our language more inclusive and open — these elements in themselves are positive, and are an advance in dignity for many people, however as we can see from the material problems still be faced, as best they only produce a shiny veneer.
This shiny veneer has, thanks in part to the pandemic and ensuing economic crisis, been almost done away with entirely. At the start, the British government, and in part the devolved parliaments, were gambling on a ‘pack immunity’ which ultimately meant that disabled people and the elderly were simply being left to die at random. This, thankfully was followed by a massive social uproar, meant we went into lockdown in March — which was in turn loosened off in the summer and come crashing down again. What has been most disparaging for the disabled community across Britain is the financial, emotional and material support only came when it affected the rest. It was most prevalent in the summer, when most people were allowed to leave lockdown, while the disabled were simply left to stay indoors, with many having been in lockdown since February. This matched with the crisis within care homes have seen disabled people simply abandoned to face the virus alone with little understanding of how Covid-19 impacts their own circumstance.
This morbid picture, did not just appear out of nowhere, it has been a slow degradation — firstly suggesting there are people taking advantage of support, then suggesting disabled people are too supported and thus not motivated to do better, then being compared to a leech on the broken system. Despite, all of this being essentially false, what it has meant that a simple crisis was enough to bring the whole system crashing down, and arguably, to circumstances prior to the ADA in 1990. Yes, in word we have rights, but what use is the word of law if it is not backed up?
So, where do we go from here? The darker parts of my brain simply say nowhere, because we are losing a huge battle that is not going to be high on the list of things to remedy when things return to ‘normal’. However, the eternal optimist in me thinks, that because the impact has been so universal we in the disabled community need to return to that communal fight of an injury to us is an injury to everyone else, even if it is solely because everyone eventually becomes disabled too, thanks to aging.
The road ahead is long, there are many battles to be had, so lets hope Disability History Month 2020, reignites our vigour and pushes us to do more and go on to win more for ourselves and future generations of humans.
