pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf, 4
This data as json
body | date | page | text | path |
---|---|---|---|---|
CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2018-04-11 | 4 | ITEM 2-A COMMISSION ON DISABILITY MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 11, 2018 6:30 p.m. intersectional within, there is gender, there's race, there's ethnicity, there's immigration status, disability of course, religion, socio-economic status, geographic locations, I don't think I have sexuality up there, occupation. Karen Nakamura: And so all of these are interacting in extremely complex ways, so that someone who might be, for example, might be a DACA status, also disabled, who's female but might identify as gender queer, they're in a very particular location. And it becomes difficult when all of our services, for example, at the university are compartmentalized. So we have the program for the Dreamers, we have the program for the LGBTQI students, we have the program for the disabled students. But each of those are only addressing one component and unable to grasp, or in many ways pushing out to other things, to the other units. If you're coming to the disabled student and you're having questions about also race, well, that should be handled by another unit, so they find themselves getting passed amongst different departments. I think this is a common experience for many people who find themselves in intersectional categories. Karen Nakamura: So in some ways the problem of intersectionality can get boiled down to really two types of questions. One is who are we imagining when we think of the problem of X? And because we come up, we have a particular thought or imagination of who X is dealing with, our solutions take a particular bent. So that sounds kind of on the ambiguous side, so let me be more specific. So when we think of "Well, what are the problems that disabled people have?" Well, the question then gets begged, "Who do we think of when we think of who are disabled people?" And to a great extent when we think of disabled people, and in Google Image when we search famous disabled, we get a particular array of faces, most of them are white, most of them are male. There are a few who are not. Most of them have mobility disabilities, so physical-apparent disabilities, and so, well that might an unfair one. So let's just do a Google Image search for disabled people, and still that same array of faces. And I think to a large extent when the public thinks "Well, who are disabled people? Who are the disabled?" and this becomes important when it comes to government organizations such as your commission you think who are the disabled people that we should be helping? Who are the disabled people who need access? Karen Nakamura: You have a particular imagination about certain groups of people and in that imagination other people fall out of those categories. Because we think of disabled people and in many ways the first things that do come to mind focus around apparent disabilities for example People with non-apparent Disabilities fall out of this imagination. This affects what our solutions look like. So if we think about the signature legislation that's come out of the disability movement over the past 40 years most of them have in their basic construction, a model of who the ideal disabled person is. Who benefits the most from the ADA? Who benefits most from the Rehabilitation Act? Who benefits most from how we construct social security? Karen Nakamura: And in many ways the person who benefits the most is the one who approximates the closest to the model. And part of this harkens back to the original roots of the Rehabilitation Act which was a white middle class male soldier who unfortunately got injured in the war, comes back, gets the GI bill, gets access to university, graduates and then cannot find a job. And from the Rehab Act then to the ADA that's really the model of some white cis heterosexual male who has a physical disability which doesn't affect his ability to be a white collar worker and so 04/11/18 Page 4 of 18 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf |