Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - chronic illness

Triple Minority and Triple Threat: Eboni Freeman

Visitor — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 17:47:40 +0000

Eboni Freeman describes herself as “a future tech consulting titan who happens to be a Black female with a disability - a triple minority and a triple threat.” As a rising senior at Emory College in Atlanta, Eboni knew Google was the right place for a summer internship due to its positive professional culture. When she disclosed she had a chronic illness in a different company interview, it was suggested that the accommodations Eboni might need would be taxing on the company. Eboni knew that this was not an acceptable response; “I’m not a challenge. I am an exciting, value-adding person on your team. And the fact that I already felt like my disability was going to be seen as a liability was really not exciting.”

In school, Eboni participated in Lime Connect’s national fellowship program, which provided her the skills to ask for the accommodations she needs as well as the confidence to seek employers who would invest in her talents and potential. Eboni admits that during the hiring process, conversations about disability with employers can be difficult. On top of that, having an invisible illness adds to the complexity. The invisibility of Eboni’s illness “is a privilege and a weight to carry.” While people with invisible illness sometimes “pass” as being able bodied and have the option of not always having to disclose, they are often asked to prove that they have a disability. Before her current position at Google, Eboni enjoyed her last internship at a finance service center but occasionally her “Lupus fog” (moments of cognitive impairments that can come with the chronic inflammatory disease) would momentarily get in the way. Eboni struggled to think about the best way to tell her manager without threatening perceptions about her productivity.

Eboni thinks these communication issues could be avoided if these conversations were had at the start of the hiring process instead of becoming an HR problem down the line: “I’d love it if we didn’t even start talking about disability, we just talked about accommodations. Because every single person has different tools that would make them one hundred percent more spectacular at their job. And those tools, resources and open communication can make it better for everyone to work well together and individually.” If companies were up front in initiating causal talk around accommodations, Eboni believes it would signal that they offer a supportive environment for people with disabilities to succeed.

As a “Noogler,” (a new employee), or “Googler” at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA serving as an associate account strategist intern in the global customer experience team, Eboni uses a standing desk along with many other employees. Her desk, along with the company’s instated every half-hour breaks and exercise balls, are not considered accommodations but are instead integrated into the workplace infrastructure itself. Eboni also cites the Google shuttles that she uses to catch an early 7 am ride from Cupertino to Google’s headquarters and around campus as another productivity perk for people of all abilities. But, Eboni says, a generally accommodating workplace culture is not one size fits all: “True disability inclusion means not just providing the custom version of the same solution to each person that requests. True disability inclusion is a conversation, research and analysis of what someone actually needs not just what other people think should work.”

When Eboni began her three-month internship at the beginning of the summer, she discovered Google’s internal disability alliance resource group and joined right away. The group offers a list serve where folks can share perspectives and resources. Eboni also sometimes runs into other Lime Connect fellows around campus and is always happy to see other people with disabilities from her cohort building their careers along-side each other. As a Black, disabled woman, Eboni knows that her identity as a triple minority is not considered to be the typical techie profile, but she tries “to keep it in my mind that not only am I a triple minority, I am also a triple threat because that means I get to bring in three unique perspectives that often aren’t discussed or considered in tech.”

Eboni majored in strategy and management consulting and sees the lack of disabled workers in tech as a business issue. She thinks the tech industry needs to realize that disability is not something separate from them. If approximately 1 in 5 Americans have some form of chronic disability, Eboni said, then this “affects employees, their customers, their stakeholders, and people all over the supply team network.” Hiring more people with disabilities isn’t just an equitable practice, it gives a business access to more perspectives and creates a more accessible product which provides a competitive advantage and affects your bottom line. Eboni cited a recent McKinsey study that backs up her thinking. The 2015 study showed that ethnically and gender diverse companies are more likely to out-perform non-diverse companies above the national medium.

Even though disability is yet to be accounted for in major business diversity studies, Eboni, as a true tech consulting titan would say; “if you are addressing something in the market that other people aren’t, you are going to win a little faster.”

Interested in more on disability in tech? On Tuesday, August 22nd, from 2-3:30 pm PST the Students for Access will be hosting a free webinar “Beyond Diversity 101: Learning from the Perspectives of People with Disabilities in Tech.” To join us, please RSVP. Captioning will be provided.

Read more from our Disability in Tech series here:

Tags:

chronic illness

disability

Diversity

Google

Intersectionality

Lime Connect

Lupas

People with Disabilities in Tech

Silicon Valley

technology

When Social Media Lets Us Down: A Search for Community (in all the wrong places)

Visitor — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 23:02:22 +0000

By: Robyn M. Ollodort, Longmore Institute grad student assistant

In an age of technology, sometimes the community we seek is best found in real life.

Chances are good that if you're reading this post, you're online hoping to connect with community. Type the name of one of your identities into a search bar, and you expect to find results that call to you, that draw you in. But what happens when they don’t? I am not an ambassador of the chronic illness brand. I can't run a race to find a cure. I don't own any Livestrong-style rubber band bracelets. I don't participate in hashtagged challenges, ice bucket or otherwise, on social media.

But I am #sick.

I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis in the summer of 2012, just days before my 21st birthday. AS is a flaring condition that generally involves the spine, resulting in eventual fusion of the vertebral column or effected joints. But, because I had juvenile AS that went un- and misdiagnosed for at least ten years prior, the effected joints in my body were the sacroiliac and hip. I have experienced the pain and joint discomfort I now know to call 'flares' for as long as I can remember; however, AS in my body does not just mean flares of chronic pain and inflammation. I also experience chronic fatigue as a result of AS, which may be the even more debilitating symptom. I have been tired all the time, for as long as I can remember, and no amount of sleep or stimulants has changed that this far. I have never been an athlete. I was not robbed of my ability to climb mountains. And no amount of healthy eating or exercise will stop me from needing to take a nap OR having a flare. Because, believe me, I have tried.

The thing is, this is not the common experience of arthritis, and I know this, because as soon as I was diagnosed, as soon as I had a term to type into search bars, I wanted to find other people with this disease. Other people who gave themselves shots. Other people with chronic pain and fatigue.

Taking to the internet, I found a Facebook support group, with people sharing their stories of spinal column fusion, childbirth and heredity concerns (AS has a genetic component), and an overabundance of #spoonie and #spondy baby talk photoshopped over generic images of awareness ribbons and nature scenes. This is just not who I am.

And that's what makes it so hard for me to navigate the social media communities of support set up for #chronicallyill people with #arthritis like myself. I was born in the 90’s and grew up with technology; shouldn’t I be able to find the community I’m looking for through it? Especially when it seems like everyone else in their early-to-mid-20’s is doing just fine, connecting over twitter and Facebook groups on all kinds of issues and experiences. Why was this so different?

I’ve written previously about how important I think representations are for identity. I wanted to see people, around me or otherwise, who also have to stab their abdomens with burning serums. I wanted to see people who sneered at running, and curl up on couches with bags of popcorn for Netflix marathons instead. Watching reality TV (a thing I do quite often, and am very passionate about), I was excited when Real Housewives of New York City’s Jill Zarin’s daughter, Aly, had some kind of undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy that no one really talked about, and I watched with anguish as the cast of Shah’s of Sunset doubted Golnessa “GG” Gharahedaghi’s struggle with rheumatoid arthritis and chemotherapy. But I wanted to know people in real life who deal with similar things as me. GG, looking defensive while receiving chemotherapy as treatment for her rheumatoid arthritis. Image found here.

My body betrays me constantly, I can't trust it, and maybe that's not the best way to relate to others. It's not the best basis for connection, the disease that makes me feel trapped in my own body.

But also, what these groups seem to be bonding over (pregnancy stories and decades of anguish in the healthcare system, respectively) were not the things I was concerned about; they weren’t the same questions as the ones I was asking.

Beginning my second semester of my second year of graduate school, I received an email seeking paid interns for the Superfest: International Disability Film Festival. I write about representations in tv and film, so naturally I jumped at the opportunity. In pursuing an interview, I noticed that the ad specified that the participants had to be students with disabilities – the first time my having a disability qualified me to do something special, let alone a major career move! The difference I found between support groups/Facebook pages and my experience with Superfest is that watching the film submissions, we were discussing the deeper issues of the social constructs of disability: how we are seen in society, how we want to be seen, how to make our experiences funny, and political, and REAL. The people I met were like me: college students, with full lives and career plans, and also real, life-changing experiences that shape our views of the world. We take our bodies seriously, and use our experiences of them to inform our political perspectives. Plus, we got to spend three hours a week eating snacks and watching the best movies I’ve ever seen (links direct to curated list of trailers of my favorite Superfest films: Breakfast at Ina's, Neighbors of the Other Type, Underland pt. III, Terminal Device, Supersonic, Awake, respectively)

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m still struggling to find community, especially in places that I thought it would come naturally; but the critical gaze is much more fun when shared with friends. Author on the left. Image courtesy of SFSU Academic Technology, via Youtube.

Tags:

Ankylosing Spondylitis

Superfest: International Disability Film Festival

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