October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month (NDEAM).
As a disabled person, dealing with the effects of a society built on exploitation, subjugation, and invalidation is something that I live with and experience 24/7. This holds true for most of the 61 million people in the U.S living with a disability. The NDEAM campaign celebrates the contributions of America’s workers with disabilities past and present and showcases supportive, inclusive employment policies and practices.
Addressing Ableism in the Workplace
Like other campaigns, NDEAM brings awareness, advocacy, and attention to the disabled voices and experiences of people that are living with disabilities. The challenges and barriers that we face as it pertains to finding gainful and accessible employment. Much like other sociocultural campaigns, there is an increased awareness and marketing from a variety of corporations, activists, and celebrities with a goal to bring more attention and funding to an issue.
The mainstreaming of an issue is always tricky. On one hand, campaigns like NDEAM bring national attention and collective awareness around an issue that is exacerbated by the ills of capitalism and patriarchy but seem to come with little long-term or tangible action around mitigating and ending the systemic issues that cause the historically marginalized community to need the awareness in the first place. The proliferation of social media has fed into more polarized, dissenting, and toxic dialogue. Mainstream media (MSM) is looking for the next viral moment or quick soundbite from anyone including self-proclaimed experts or thought leaders whose voice (for better or worse) becomes the defacto opinion on issues that are highly complex, personal, and more importantly require critical thinking and nuance.
Conversations happen in echo chambers and silos and the disabled people most affected by biased and discriminatory laws and policies are more often than not left out of the narrative. Once the campaign ends what’s left is a society and world that isn’t any more accessible and the cycle repeats the next month with the next issue and the next campaign.
This cycle feels especially insidious when talking about disability. In the U.S. we live in a culture that is woefully ableist and inaccessible to anyone that isn’t able-bodied. This can be seen in how our streets and transportation systems are designed, how our buildings are maintained, and in who we see in leadership positions, on boards, boardrooms, executive rooms, and legislative seats. More often than not, the perspective and lived experiences of disabled people are not only an afterthought but ignored altogether. Executives make decisions without a care in the world about how a policy or practice will affect disabled people. Disabled people have largely been erased from our media, from representations in art, and denied access to even the most basic rights of humanity. Disproportionately, disabled people continue to be unhoused, underpaid, and denied care by members of the medical community. All this despite the fact that many of our most esteemed contemporary and historical activists, leaders, and change agents were disabled.
One such figure is Harriet Tubman.
Tubman is most known as a revered and “respected” abolitionist that dedicated her life to helping hundreds of enslaved Black people escape the institution of chattel slavery and into freedom. She rose from a childhood of brutal abuse by slaveholders to emancipate herself, and she risked her life repeatedly to liberate others (Errick, 2022). She liberated about 70 people on more than a dozen dangerous missions to slave-holding states in the decade prior to the Civil War, and she assisted many others with her knowledge of safe spaces and escape routes (Errick, 2022). Her life story has become the stuff of American legend. Yet few people are aware that Tubman was also a disabled person.
When Tubman was a child, an enslaver hit her in the head with a heavy weight after she refused to restrain a field hand who had left his plantation without permission (Errick, 2022). She suffered severe trauma from the event and experienced headaches and seizures for the rest of her life (Errick, 2022). This traumatic brain injury (TBI) no doubt affected Tubman every single day of her life thereafter because we know that she underwent brain surgery in 1890. Little is known about whether the operation helped or not but what we do know is that she wrote about experiencing hallucinations, visions, and frequent bouts of “sleeping sickness.” No doubt this disability shaped how Tubman moved through the world and carried out her life-saving rescue missions. So much of Tubman’s life and experience has been distilled into the hero trope while her humanity and what she stood for and fought for has been distilled to its most basic parts.
Erasure
Tubman isn’t the only disabled Black woman abolitionist and activist. Fanny Lou Hamer is another figure who until recently hasn’t been given due credit for her legacy and selflessness toward envisioning a world free from slavery, racism, and discrimination. Like Tubman when Hamer’s life story and disabledness are either glossed over, downplayed, or erased altogether. When it is discussed, ableism is centered and tropes like “beating the odds” or “black girl magic” are used in an attempt to whitewash her narrative, her lived experienced, and the reason why she was an activist in the first place. It’s important that we discuss the system that required “heroes” like Tubman to devote their life, energy, and resources to dismantling a system steeped in systemic racism despite being disabled. Both Tubman and Hamer devoted their lives to fighting against a deeply unjust system that saw them as disposable and actively worked against the change they devoted their lives to. Both women died, tired, and penniless.
Disabled people can do great things and this fact doesn’t diminish their work or their greatness. More often than not disabled people work to change the world because they have been left with no other choice. Despite advancements in technology, culture, and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by G.W Bush in 1990, disabled people continue to face unchecked bias, discrimination, and lack of access to jobs, restaurants, parks, and public spaces. In many ways, the world continues to pretend that disabled people don’t exist. It has become incumbent on disabled people to ensure that their work and their experiences aren’t erased from our collective narrative. We have to center the voices of disabled people, listen to them, believe them and share their stories. We must not erase disability nor should we infantilize disabled people.
Here at 540WMain, we are excited to devote a deeper and more nuanced look at the life, legacy, and intersectionality of Tubman’s life at our upcoming virtual panel on Thursday, October 27 from 5-7 PM titled Harriet Tubman: Disability in Black. Register for the program here
Bibliography
- Errick, J. (2022, February 8). 5 Facts You Might Not Know About Harriet Tubman. National Park Conservation Association. Retrieved October 22, 2022, from https://www.npca.org/articles/2314-5-facts-you-might-not-know-about-harriet-tubman
- Blain, K. (2020, August 20). Fannie Lou Hamer’s Dauntless Fight for Black Americans’ Right to Vote. Smithsonian Mag. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fannie-lou-hamers-dauntless-fight-for-black-americans-right-vote-180975610/
- Kolata, G. (2022, October 19). These Doctors Admit They Don’t Want Patients With Disabilities. New York Times. Retrieved October 24, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/health/doctors-patients-disabilities.html
About Calvin Eaton
(he/his/him) Calvin Eaton is a disabled community educator, content creator, and social entrepreneur, whose area of expertise includes antiracism, equity, justice, instructional design, and program development. In 2016 Mr. Eaton founded 540WMain, Inc. a virtual non-profit organization and antiracist education brand that promotes justice for
