Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability - Americans with Disabilities Act

An Open Letter to the Contemporary Jewish Museum

Emily Beitiks — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 16:06:13 +0000

To Lori Starr, Executive Director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum,

We are writing to express our dismay to learn of the blow you’ve dealt to Bay Area disability arts and culture with your recent layoff of Cecile Puretz, CJM’s Access and Community Engagement Manager. While we are fully aware of the challenging economic situation the Contemporary Jewish Museum now faces, we also note that recent communications stated your institution’s support for disability on the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. To share such messaging after dismissing the person solely responsible for promoting access at the CJM gives a misleading impression to a community just being won over. You must understand that Cecile Puretz built a powerful, innovative set of practices and partnerships that has shaped the practices of museums locally and nationally.

During her 10+ years at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Cecile was a dedicated and passionate advocate for the Bay Area’s disability community, with extra attention paid to those most marginalized within this group. Most prominently, she fought to get Superfest Disability Film Festival an annual home at the CJM, which, by many accounts brought a different kind of social justice prestige to the museum. The internal staff training on disability that ensured physical and cultural openness to a new clientele and features for your older patrons (many seasoned donors) set a standard that is being copied by other museums.

A crisis such as the one every institution now faces provides opportunities for new ways of doing things. Eliminating a position and laying off an employee who has done so much to change perceptions of museums in general and make accessible the programs and spaces of the CJM to the broader public suggests limited imagination.

While we have the utmost confidence that Cecile will bounce back from this heartbreaking blow, we are concerned for the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Bay Area disability community. We hope that you have put into place a management structure that can continue to improve access as effectively as Cecile previously did, and when the economic situation changes, we hope you will prioritize hiring people with disabilities to bring more disability expertise into the museum. We hope that this letter urges you to realize that you have let your disabled constituents and their allies down, and we hope that you again find your way to recognize that even in times of economic hardship, access cannot be compromised.

For more, see this panel discussion with Amanda Cachia, a disabled educator, independent curator, and writer and Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project in conversation about museums in the 21st century hosted by Philadelphia Contemporary.

Sincerely,

The Longmore Institute on Disability

The Disability Visibility Project

The Blind Posse

VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_0cMvZf5CY&feature=youtu.be

Tags:

access

museums

Americans with Disabilities Act

Disability Visbility Project

Blind Posse

Longmore Institute Director's NY Times Op-ed: The Price of 'Disability Denial'

Visitor — Wed, 24 May 2017 19:39:44 +0000

By: Catherine Kudlick

The following piece is cross-posted from the New York Times Op-Eds; see the original post here.

It was 1989 and I was immersed in my first teaching job, a one-year gig at Barnard College, with the possibility of something long-term. During that time, I had become friendly with a senior colleague named Bill. On our many walks along Broadway to grab deli sandwiches, we’d talked about our grad school days at Berkeley, the high rent of tiny apartments in New York and how to get the Barnard women to share our passion for European history in the small classes they’d asked me to teach.

One morning outside his office something felt off. Bill, who would be part of the team deciding whether to hire me, seemed nervous. Then he came out with it: “I’m wondering if you’d be able to guest lecture in my 100-person western civ class.” As I took this in, he added, “It’s part of, um, your interview for getting a permanent job here.”

I always knew my day at the podium would come. In fact, on one of our walks I’d asked Bill for advice about teaching larger classes. I told him about the details of my lifelong vision impairment and of my terror of public speaking, and asked about how I’d deal with calling on students when I couldn’t see them. In smaller classes, I learned quickly where people sat, and the give-and-take of conversation told me who was engaged. But applying this to more than 30 people seemed overwhelming.

I have nystagmus, a condition in which involuntary, jumpy movement of my eye muscles makes it difficult to focus, a chore that constantly challenges my brain as it frantically tries to keep up. As a child, my thick bifocal glasses and lack of confidence made me the brunt of cruel names and pranks, like being surrounded by kids who threw things on the ground and forced me to look for them. Later there were awkward, sometimes hostile encounters with potential landlords, dates and employers who I tried to brush off as a few gross kids who never grew up.

It had been a huge step to “come out” to Bill about the lifelong vision impairment that I thought I could hide. Starting in a new place with my doctorate safely in hand seemed like the perfect time to try on a new identity, one where I could be more upfront with others — and with myself — about what I could and could not see.

I remember the door frame with its chipped paint, Bill’s messy desk, the scuffed linoleum, the fluorescent lights that made us both ghastly as we stood on the threshold. I imagine an old clock ticking in the background. A soft, cracking voice — mine but not mine — finally broke the silence: “Is this something all job candidates have to do?”

“Um, well uh, no. It’s just that there’s, uh, concerns we don’t have about other candidates, about how you’d handle a large class, you know, because of your … well, you know.”

Of course I knew. At the same time, I didn’t want to know.

I paused, sensing that whatever I said next could destroy my chances for this job, and even future ones.

“I won’t do something that nobody else is required to do,” I said at last with a quiet force that surprised me. It was my first awareness of a visceral complicity between my body’s memory and my soul’s need to cry out — a feeling that one day I’d call conviction.

“I’m disappointed,” Bill said, “but of course it’s up to you.”

All at once, my nystagmus was on a rampage, not just in my eyes but throughout my body, from the hair on the back of my neck to my toes digging into the front of my shoes. I’m frozen. I’m tangled. I’m powerful from the force of it, oblivious and achingly hyper-aware. I want to vomit. I want to lash out. I want to run screaming.

Bracing against the door frame, I wondered how much of this was apparent to Bill. I said nothing, even as words formed: This is betrayal. This is wrong. This is discrimination.

It’s a painful revelation. The mind and the body fuse into one ugly knot of humiliation, anger, fear, doubt. You’re at this crossroads: You can suck it up and carry on as before. Or you can fight back.

All this happened the year before the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed. One of the little-recognized side effects of disability denial is that it inhibits the firing of the synapses that enables people to think of themselves as having rights. In other words, I was still many years away from believing that laws like the A.D.A., or any precursors that were in effect, applied to me.

But Bill and I — like most people around us and too many Barnards then and now — had been brainwashed in the same well-meaning society that still fails disabled people. We sat through tear-jerking movies where helpless blind girls groped and stumbled. Our heartstrings were pulled by fund-raisers showing blindness at its worst to raise money for cures that could be many years away. Images like these isolate people with disabilities not just from society but also from one another.

Though I am not fully blind, my vision impairment, and the challenges it presents, has made me particularly attuned to how others perceive blind people. Our words equate blindness with being out of control and clueless — phrases like “love is blind,” “blind rage,” “blind to the possibilities,” to “blindly carry on.” Such ideas slip quietly into our souls. They find their way onto playgrounds and into news stories, and before long they’re floating inside and outside of doctor’s offices, in sports competitions, film studios, policy debates. And in job interviews.

For the decade after Barnard it would be three steps forward, two steps back: a therapist who helped me ask if I’d rather imagine myself as an incompetent sighted person or a competent blind one; finding an exciting research topic in the history of blind people; discovering I’m a real ham when it comes to lecturing — the bigger the crowd the better.

But at my core I remained haunted and hurting. I couldn’t find a healing way to tell the Barnard story: Either every little detail poured out in a frightening rant or I clammed up, wondering if I really wasn’t qualified after all. Even as I researched and learned more about blind people’s history, I did everything I could to avoid being seen as “one of them.” Using a magnifier in public mortified me as much as the white cane I shoved into the back of my closet.

Then one day I met Bryan, a dynamic blind guy on the other coast who was several steps ahead of me on the journey. Each intense phone conversation upended years of denial and self-loathing. A wall I’d unknowingly constructed between me and the world began to crumble as I found strength and beauty in places I’d assumed to be off-limits.

He introduced me to the National Federation of the Blind’s Kernel Books, matter-of-fact stories told by blind people explaining how they did things nobody thought they could do: babysit, barbecue, teach. Each concluded that blindness isn’t the real problem; society’s responses to it is. Reading the first few, I began to sob uncontrollably. I had spent my life avoiding blind people, and in these pages I met scores of them living life with dignity. Now I was open to anything or anyone who would actively challenge my self-imposed limitations by encouraging me to embark on exciting adventures.

If Bill were still alive, I’d strut up to him with my white cane and proudly lead him to “Patient No More: People W ith Disabilities Securing Civil Rights,” the disability history exhibition I spearheaded. I would take him to the yearly Superfest International Disability Film Festival that my organization co-hosts with Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco to experience real camaraderie among disabled people and our allies. At both he’d discover captions and audio descriptions that he’d appreciate as someone entering old age.

Future Bills and Cathys need more fresh ideas like these about disabled people. Once freed from prejudice and shame, they can teach the largest class of all — society — to imagine people with disabilities as innovators, problem-solvers and true agents for change.

Tags:

Americans with Disabilities Act

Catherine Kudlick

disability history

education

LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

op ed

Patient No More

Superfest: International Disability Film Festival

Uncategorized

Disabled People's Forgotten Revolution

Visitor — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 16:23:52 +0000

The 504 protest in San Francisco - outside the building. Photograph by Anthony Tusler.

By: Catherine Kudlick

As the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 2015, the Paul K. Longmore Institute will celebrate the unique Bay Area contributions to disability rights. Our ambitious exhibit “Patient No More!” will focus on what is known as "the 504 occupation" in 1977 when more than one hundred brave women and men paved the way for so many of us and passing the ADA thirteen years later. We must return to thinking of the Americans with Disabilities Act as the product of grassroots activism and disabled people’s political savvy rather than a mandate somehow passed down from on high. To quote Paul Longmore’s speech at the 20th ADA Anniversary celebration in San Francisco, “We are the ones who did this. This wasn’t handed to us. This wasn’t an act of charity. This wasn’t something done paternalistically. We made it happen. We did it.”

The little-known story of the 504 protests is amazing. On April 5, 1977, dozens of disabled people from diverse racial and social backgrounds entered San Francisco's office of Health, Education, and Welfare for twenty-five days in what remains the longest occupation of a federal building in US history. They came on crutches, using canes, and in wheelchairs; some used American Sign Language, others augmented communication devices. Many others contributed simply by showing up to offer support. Most arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs, guided by a few vague ideas about why they were there. Yet enough of them had political smarts, experience with building coalitions, tenacity, and fire in their bellies to confront the government of a major world power about their civil rights, and win.

They had come because of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. Buried in the law to accommodate returning Vietnam veterans was a provision based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act stipulating that individuals with disabilities “should not be denied the benefit of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Cast in broad terms and bureaucratic language, Section 504 - which would serve as a model for the Americans with Disabilities Act thirteen years later - basically said that everything touched by the U.S. government needed to be fully accessible to people with disabilities: schools, universities, public offices, transit systems, hospitals. After over four years of government stalling that extended to the newly-elected allegedly pro-disability rights Carter administration, the regulations still awaited a final signature.

Infuriated, hundreds of protesters around the country occupied several federal buildings. Most were starved out within a day or two. But San Francisco was different. The organizers' incredible resourcefulness and months of cementing relationships with local community organizations resulted in an unlikely, dedicated coalition of supporters that included the Black Panthers, the gay community's Butterfly Brigade, labor unions, Glide Memorial Church, Safeway and McDonald’s, along with sympathetic local and national politicians. Thanks to food, showers, and other forms of help, the 504 occupiers held on for nearly a month, generating national attention and ultimately helping to gain the support necessary for signing the regulations.

The 504 Occupation would be a watershed personal and political moment, one that solidified the Bay Area’s key role in the struggle for disability rights. The Americans with Disabilities Act would not exist in its present form - or even at all - without the energy, people, and determination galvanized by this unparalleled historical moment. Thanks in no small part to the 504 sit-in, cross-disability thinking would be central to the ADA’s scope and reach and would shape the disability rights movement in general. The experience of spending more than three weeks in close proximity among people with a wide array of disabilities during what became simply known as “504” fostered an esprit de corps and coalitions that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. When officials first cut the phone lines, Deaf people stood at the windows and used American Sign Language to convey messages between protesters inside and outside the building, while, blind people fed and toiletted quadriplegics. Friendships and romances formed. The experience of 504 helped create a sense of community grounded in successful activism that in turn gave people with disabilities a sense of their historical agency. Once people with disabilities had shown this prospect to the outside world and to themselves, they could continue to fight for expanding their civil rights. Indeed, a number of 504 participants would go on to help forge the ADA as well as key organizations such as Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund -DREDF (1979) and the World Institute on Disability – WID (1983) that promote disability rights.

And thanks to insisting that 504 be signed unchanged, language linking disability rights to civil rights would find its way into the law of the land. Section 504 states in part: “No otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall, solely by reason of his handicap, be excluded from the participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act is far from perfect. But thanks in no small part to our brave sisters and brothers 37 years ago, at its core the ADA is more about rights than about charity. Let us not forget that this movement, like our nation and its other ongoing struggles for civil rights, was forged in revolution. By sharing this history, we hope to inspire? incite? future generations to continue this important work.

To learn more and to get involved, visit: http://longmoreinstitute.sfsu.edu/patientnomore

Tags:

Americans with Disabilities Act

Catherine Kudlick

disability rights

Paul K. Longmore Institute

San Francisco

Uncategorized

The Americans with Disabilities Act: Nowhere to Go but Up for Local Fox News

Visitor — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:43:48 +0000

Recently, the Longmore Institute was contacted by KTVU, our local Fox affiliate, about how a “SF firehouse gets costly ADA compliant makeover” to the tune of approximately $400,000. What is it with all the cheap shots at the expensive ADA? It’s incredible how the media is filled with stories of the outrageous and the egregious – the $1000 grab bar ripped out for being an inch too low, the small business forced to close its doors because of having to redo its counter or seating area. Sure, one can always find the most extreme and costly transgressions that hitch a ride along with anything big-ticket and far-reaching, be it the recent scandals over the Bay Bridge bolts, the bloated costs of California’s High Speed Rail, or – for that matter – big banks’ behavior since new finance laws went into effect in recent decades.

But the root of the resentment at the ADA suggests something more profound, a simmering sense that when it comes to disability, it’s somehow wrong to fix the environment rather than the person. Where are the stories of disabled people really benefitting from the ADA to go to school, be able to work, eat in restaurants, ride public transportation, and who now, thanks to access contribute to the US economy as innovators and taxpayers? Where are the stories of able-bodied people who benefit from this same law every time they follow a sports event thanks to closed captioning in a noisy bar or effortlessly push a stroller over the curb? And where are the stories that explore links between these curb cuts and the construction jobs they created or the great increase in product development and sales of rolling suitcases and other urban devices with wheels?

According to the Fox news story the Alleycats of Fire Station #1 south of Folsom Street couldn’t discern any advantages either, having been left “shaking their heads” after moving into their new $12-million facility. The controversial renovations included three ADA-accessible restrooms on the second floor “where the general public is not allowed to go,” features that “won’t even benefit injured fire-fighters who aren’t allowed in the station.” To reach these accessible facilities, they needed to install an especially roomy ADA-compliant elevator. The camera pans over extra-large lockers with wheelchair symbols on them and shows footage from upstairs, “where hallways are wide and for wheelchairs.” The story ends with a lingering shot of a toilet as it mentions “advocates for the disabled at San Francisco’s Longmore Institute on Disability [who] state that ADA compliant features also help able-bodied people, and say it’s better to make space universally accessible now than have to upgrade in the future.”

The reporter, David Stevenson, got our message right. But were we made to seem ridiculous as my Dad later claimed?

I struggled with his reprimand. I’d been pleased that our message came through unaltered, figuring that even if the not-so-subtle association between us and a toilet said one thing, surely our enlightening words prompted some viewers to think differently. But here was my 87 year-old father, one of my most vocal advocates, finding this as yet another case of Fox News and the right-wing media skewing stories at his daughter’s expense. His visceral reaction to the segment’s using the Longmore Institute to show disability advocacy at its most extreme suggested that our case for finding unintended benefits for everyone in disability accommodations remains completely foreign. Even though our message wasn’t taken out of context and was presented on its own terms, the report on Fox appeared to confirm the outrageousness of our stance and with it, our naïveté.

As with any news story, our message got distilled down to a shadow of its bare essence from a much longer interview. David Stevenson seemed genuinely open to our examples, not in a preparing for a “gotcha!” but in a “whoa, never thought of that!” way. Assistant director Emily Beitiks described the ADA’s gifts to her when she was pregnant, which she blogged about on “Disability Remix” several weeks ago. I invoked the history of curb cuts in the early 1970s, which most city officials initially decried for similar reasons to those concerning the firehouse renovations; for such huge costs, few would use them. An official in Berkeley, home of one of the first curb cuts, allegedly argued that they were useless because one never saw disabled people in wheelchairs on the streets.

Such chicken-or-egg reasoning suggests profound ambivalence about the places people with disabilities should and shouldn’t occupy in US society. The ADA has brought us out in larger numbers with greater expectations and louder demands. People with disabilities have crossed a threshold that is simultaneously visible and invisible, a transgression that leaves some – disabled and nondisabled – uncomfortable without realizing it or knowing why.

The Fox story touched on this by opening with the hook that these were “renovations for those who might never become firefighters.” True enough, at least for those on active duty. But who wouldn’t appreciate more space in a locker and locker room, airy hallways (probably meeting basic safety standards as much as ADA ones), and an elevator that not only had made moving in easier but that might one day hoist a giant fridge, water heater, or any number of awkward-to-transport, costly objects useful in a fire station, from the hefty to the fragile? Possibly these accommodations reminded these brave men and women of their own vulnerability, as if enjoying the same benefits as “the handicapped” would be tantamount to being one of them.

Often, disability reveals how all of us come with largely unexamined preconceptions about the world around us, to the point that we sometimes miss some obvious questions. In the case of KTVU and Fire Station #1: if they expected public visitors on the ground floor, wasn’t it surprising that the architect hadn’t planned for an accessible toilet downstairs? Surely the hardworking staff servicing the trucks and preparing to race out to fight fires would have found it a godsend. And what about that grateful little wheelchair-riding kid with a full bladder and a love of fire engines visiting the station with classmates?

Link to the news segment here.

Tags:

Americans with Disabilities Act

Accessible Presents

Visitor — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:05:47 +0000

By: Catherine J. Kudlick

With this entry I hope to introduce a regular feature for which we’ll gladly accept guest contributions. Our work at the Longmore Institute is devoted to discovering advances in universal design - the idea that innovations put into place to benefit someone with a disability can often have unintended benefits for everyone. We always come back to the curb cut, originally put in to help a few wheelchair riders, but now used by people who walk: parents with strollers, folks with rolling bags, delivery people, and skateboarders, to name a few. There are also television captions for deaf and hard-of-hearing people that help non-native speakers, multi-taskers, and no-doubt others. The screen-reading software first-conceived for blind people helps commuters. Of course not every innovation benefits every user; sometimes they even compete, such as in the early days of curb cuts when blind cane users couldn’t use the curb to make sure they were crossing the street in a straight line. But still, there are many instances where these innovations offer surprising gifts for all. Hence the name: Accessible Presents, my incurable penchant to pun. Get it? To get things started, here is my first contribution.

This week students have returned to campus in droves from near and far. These laughing, sneezing, coughing hordes bring with them a fresh batch of germs: flu, colds, conjunctivitis, mononucleosis…..

Very few cough into their sleeves.

Hundreds of them per hour stream in and out of the Humanities Building, in and out of classrooms, in and out of restrooms where they’re pulling on door knobs, pushing on bars, grabbing a door before it closes.

Thank goodness for the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires automatic doors for hands-free opening and closing!

Tags:

access

accessible design

ADA

Americans with Disabilities Act