Lennard J. Davis - Enabling Acts: The Hidden Story of How the Americans with Disabilities Act Gave the Largest U.S. Minority Its Rights

To all the people who gave much of their time and the best of their efforts to pass the Americans with Disabilities Actfrom the politicians to the staffers to the activists. Without them, life would be that much harder for all disabled people in the United States.

MY INTEREST IN writing about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) comes from my having grown up in a Deaf family in which both my parents had zero hearing and were sign language users as well as lip readers trained in speaking aloud. My upbringing showed me firsthand how bad an impact discrimination against people with disabilities could be. As a child, I witnessed countless instances of hearing people treating my intelligent, talented, athletic Deaf parents as if they were lesser beings not much different from troglodytes or the lumbering clay people from Flash Gordon. From cringing when someone called my mother and father deaf and dumb to watching them being excluded from conversations at family holiday gatherings, I felt their isolation from and denigration by hearing people.

My parents lives, before any major legislation relating to disability was passed, were difficult. There were no telecommunication devices that allowed their friends or family to call them and arrange to meet up. Every visit required that a postcard be sent and another one returned with place, date, and time arranged. They couldnt call a doctor to make an appointment or a travel agent to book a flight. No one ever just dropped by, and if someone did, the visitor couldnt get into our New York apartment, since the primitive electrical relay that made the lights flash when the doorbell rang often malfunctioned. There were no sign language interpreters available for doctor visits, hospital stays, or court dates. My parents couldnt go to religious services, because there was no way they could follow what was going on. Conversations in all settings had to be painstakingly written out on scraps of paper. Movies had no captions, so my parents ended up going exclusively to a foreign film theater on Forty-Second Street, where they could understand the subtitles but couldnt understand the existential plots and situations of Antonioni and Resnais avant-garde films.

My parents were routinely excluded from places of public accommodation. We lived in a Bronx slum, and when my parents applied to a more upscale housing development called Parkchester, their application was turned down. No Deaf people were allowed in. My father was a world-class athlete, but he was denied admittance to the New York Athletic Club for being deaf (as well as Jewish). If either of my parents had wanted to drive a car, they would have needed an elaborate set of mirrors in the car. But even this accommodation wasnt possible, since insurance companies charged exorbitant rates for Deaf people (even though they had lower rates of accidents than the hearing).

In other words, although my parents were American citizens, they had few if any civil rights. Life was a series of insults, denigrations, and exclusions that they had to accept because there was no other choice. It was only within the Deaf community that they thrived and were fully appreciated.

The same was true not only for Deaf people, but also for people with any disabilities well into the twentieth century. Before civil rights legislation for people with disabilities, there was a huge catalog of abuses and barriers. As the largest minority, people with disabilities are among the poorest, least employed, and least educated of all minorities. People who have disabilities are nearly twice as likely as people without disabilities to have an annual household income of $15,000 or less. If you had a severe disability that prevented you from taking care of yourself and getting around, you had only two choices: be taken care of by your family or go to an institution.

If you had a mobility impairment, you could not use local public transportation, railroads, or long-haul buses like Greyhound, and, of course, you couldnt drive, since automobiles werent yet easily equipped with hand controls. You were essentially confined to your house. You might try to go around your neighborhood, but you could do so only if you could self-propel a wheelchair, since power chairs werent yet widely used. With no curb cuts or ramps, most streets were impossible to navigate and most buildings were inaccessible. You were left in the unenviable position of only being able to go around the block. You couldnt go to restaurants, movies, or most stores.

If you went to school, you were segregated with other children with disabilities. You were discriminated against in college and university interviews, and if you got into a college or university, you couldnt stay in the dorms, since they werent accessible. If you were deaf or hard of hearing, attending classes in any university was difficult to impossible, since sign language interpretation or real-time transcription services were not provided. And if you were a very skilled lip reader, youd only get around 50 percent of what was being said. Very little material was published in braille or recorded for the blind.

If you were a person with Down syndrome, autism, or other cognitive disabilities, unless you had a lot of family money, you would be shipped off to a nightmarish institution like the now-deservedly shuttered Willowbrook. In places like this, the chances were good that youd be sitting in your own feces or rocking back and forth to comfort yourself in the midst of stultifying ennui and neglect.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Life as a person with a disability was a much reduced if not reprehensively deprived life. Living like anyone else was a right denied to you, and keeping up with the Joneses was beyond imagination. Concomitant with the economic and political realities was the social view that developed along with those problems. Disabled people were treated like childrendependent, helpless, and, unlike children, pitiable. Most disabled people were not allowed the dignities of work, a love life, friends, children, advanced education, and a profession. And worse than all of this, being a person with a disability was tantamount to being an invisible person. No one cared about your plight; society ignored you. You essentially did not exist.

This invisibility is all the more ironic since close to 20 percent of the population are people with disabilities. One out of five people have disabilitiesbut the disabilities are hiding in plain sight. Some disabilities, like diabetes, muscular sclerosis, and depression, can be invisible. Others, like deafness or vision loss, are not immediately noticeable. Some chronic illnesses, like hepatitis C or HIV, arent apparent to other people. Many people with disabilities were kept out of sight in special schools and institutions. Its kind of a magic acthow do you disappear a fifth of the population?

The history of the treatment of people with disabilities was intimately related to charity. All the major religions encouraged the giving of alms to the poor and disabled. And, of course, given the preceding discussion, most of the disabled were in fact poorunable to work because of their lack of mobility, training, education, and access to accommodations. Rather than being gainfully employed and living independently, people with disabilities were therefore slotted to be the recipients of charity from church and later by the statemoney doled out with the proper combination of condescension and pity.