pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf, 5
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CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2018-04-11 | 5 | ITEM 2-A COMMISSION ON DISABILITY MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 11, 2018 6:30 p.m. the bills are constructed, the laws are constructed in ways that enable that category of people to work, but it leaves out a whole group of other forms of disabled people in their imaginations. Karen Nakamura: And we can see this in all the ways that the ADA hasn't helped people. So if we think about the ADA and I'm sure you're all familiar that in the 28 years since the ADA has passed, employment rates for disabled people have not increased, in fact they've actually decreased. And so what does that mean? What does it mean when our employment rates are decreasing? What does it mean that the number of disabled people are also increasing? Why is there so much difficulty accessing services? Why is our infrastructure breaking in particular ways? So these are deep questions that we need to ask ourselves and at the same time we need to ask ourselves what are the protections we're building and who are we imagining are the people who are worth protecting. So in many ways the important question here is, who's getting left out? What questions are getting left out when we have a particular imagination of who a disabled person is. Karen Nakamura: So I'm going to have a couple of categories of people. One for example, is when we think about disability we often don't think for example about diabetes as a disability. We may if we think oh, yeah I'm sure, sure. But diabetes is a major cause of amputation and amputations caused by diabetes disproportionally affect African Americans. And so in any imagination of what disability policy is, we can't think of just people with amputations but we have to think well, if diabetes is a health crisis that affect populations disproportionately, then really we should start to think, well, if we have a disability policy we should start thinking about diabetes which then leads into earlier concerns, well what are the pre-cursors to diabetes? It high cortisol levels. What's causing high cortisol levels? Stress. What communities are encountering a lot stress? Many of our racialized minority communities are engaged in that. Food supply; so in many ways you can think is being in a food desert a disability issue? Yes, it's a disability issue because if you're in a food desert that doesn't have access to fresh food and vegetables then it's going to lead to a particular health conditions which then lead to disability. Karen Nakamura: So you can see the expansion of what we might think about disability moving into other areas. Okay, in a similar vein we might also think about asthma. Do we think about asthma as a major disability issue? In some ways we do, in some ways we don't. But when we again think about the disproportionate effect of asthma across various racialized populations, then of course it becomes more apparent. Well, then what becomes the disability issue? Access to clean air, access to exercise and so forth. Policies that affect equality all become disability issues too. Karen Nakamura: Okay, so I've done food, air, next we move to water. Water is also an important disability issue and we don't have to think beyond Flint, Michigan, right? Even in Alameda County, we have disparate impacts. We have a disparate lead measurements between children in different communities. So it's not only our water supply and which of the water mains aren't freed of lead pipes, we also have paint concerns. Which children are living in buildings with leaded paint still remaining? And so forth. So there's an environmental concern about the consumption of toxic chemicals that might still be in our ground water system. This is a particular concern in Alameda because of the remaining effects of the naval base and some of the chemicals that might have been stored. Policing as a disability issue. Yeah, now I'm starting to sound like a broken record but again policing has a disparate impact. 04/11/18 Page 5 of 18 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2018-04-11.pdf |