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troubleI know a lot of people skip titles of posts. Please read the title of this one.
I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.
The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.
Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.
The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.
The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.
This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)
So, let me lay some facts on you:
The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.
Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.
Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.
In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.
And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.
The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.
My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."
This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.
Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.
I had an argument with someone at school on Thursday and it's still sitting with me. I think this is because we'd had an earlier argument on a similar subject on Tuesday. As you can probably imagine, it was about disability, or more specifically, about how disabled people have existed and advocated for themselves since long before the mainstream folks started paying attention, and well before I ever started paying attention.
The argument on Thursday was about my colleague's disagreement with the abstract for a master's research paper on disability discrimination in the Montreal Metro System. I'm not from Montreal, so the place this system has in Montreal was a bit much for me to grasp. Apparently it's a big thing, a progress thing. A thing about how Montreal has been advancing into the future. When it was opened in 1966, it was opened to everyone.
Everyone, of course, except people who can't walk up and down stairs.
The presentation and follow-up short video talked explicitly about ableist constructions of public spaces. She called it out very bluntly: this is discriminatory. This has always been discriminatory.
The part that others tend not to get, the part my colleague at the university didn't get, is that the people at the time knew this.
This is one of the things about disability-based discrimination that drives me up the wall. The theory that many people express is that no one in the past could possibly have been expected to think about disability as a category because this whole disability rights thing didn't start until [the speaker learned of it, whatever time period that is] and obviously not a moment before. (See: many feminist responses to disability-based critiques online that ignore even something as simple as the presence of disability activists at the Beijing conference in 1995. I've been told again and again and again that disability only became a "thing" to consider in the past few years and it's mostly "oversensitive" types at that. Arg.)
So, let me lay some facts on you:
The late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Metro was being built to be inaccessible to many people with physical disabilities, was also the time when people with disabilities were getting out of unwanted institutional settings. It's called "The Great Exit," and I'm pretty sure you haven't learned of it. The Great Exit didn't happen spontaneously, and it wasn't an austerity measure. People with disabilities campaigned for it. They fought for it. Just like they fought for employment and education in the 1800s and early 1900s in Nova Scotia.
Once they left institutions, people with disabilities fought for employment rights and to live free from discrimination. To some extent, they won. The Quebec Human Rights Act included disability as a protected class, passed in 1975.
Except for transit users. Explicitly, transit was not included, you could not sue for a human rights violation for not being allowed on a bus if you were disabled.
In 1988, ADAPT (a US-based protest group) came to Montreal to highlight how inaccessible the transit system was. This PDF has some of their information [in English] about the protest. It was all over the news, and people were arrested for crashing through barricades with their wheelchairs.
And still, the Metro remained inaccessible. In fact, it wasn't until 2004 - Sixteen Years Later - that the law saying that you couldn't sue for inaccessible transit was struck down, and it wasn't until 2006 that a Metro station was made wheelchair accessible. And even then, it was a debate, and one that apparently was won because it "looked bad" that the Metro was still inaccessible. Not that it was bad, that it looked bad.
The Metro in Montreal is currently being retrofitted to be accessible. The current rate is less than one transit station becoming accessible per year. Again, The Montreal Metro System will be fully wheelchair accessible in 2058.
My colleague argued that it is wrong ("presentist," the worst thing to accuse an historian of being within the discipline) to chide people in the past for not thinking of people with disabilities when they made the Metro. "They didn't know better then. We know better now."
This is a lie. They knew. Disability-based historians and disability rights activists know how far back the fight for equal access goes. It didn't spring, fully formed from the head of Hephaestus, in 1995 in Beijing. It didn't suddenly arrive the day you first learned of it. It's always been here. In ignoring that, in assuming that his ignorance is in fact the truth, my colleague (and many others like him) are betraying their own attitudes about disability, about history, and about what matters.
Don will be 78 years old when he can physically get into every Metro station in Montreal. The lifespan of people with Don's disability is less than that.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 08:07 am (UTC)I mean, seriously. Come on now.
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Date: 2011-10-23 03:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 08:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 09:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 12:05 pm (UTC)-J
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 12:31 pm (UTC)from the head of Hephaestus
Oh, nice one. *admires*
It's one thing to be ignorant, but another to be willful about it. You have clean, simple facts at your disposal; what, on god's green earth, is there for people to friggin' debate about? IDEK.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 01:28 pm (UTC)It seems to me that one accessible station is not actually very useful. It would mean that you can get on at that station, but you can't get off anywhere else. Of course, in a refitting to make them all accessible, it makes sense that at some stage there will be a first station.
It seems so bizarre to me that people could build a station in the 1960s and 1970s and not think that a lift might come in useful. I mean, it's not like lifts hadn't been around for decades at that point.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 01:28 pm (UTC)I have seen this with racism, I have seen this with sexism, but good lord I have never seen it more than with disability rights. So far.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 04:26 pm (UTC)To be specific, this is the precise ballad he cited at me, as "proof" of his argument -- written in 1641:
1. There was a jovial beggar; he had a wooden leg,
Lame from his cradle, and forced for to beg.
CHORUS: And a begging we will go, we'll go, we'll go;
And a begging we will go!
2. A bag for his oatmeal, another for his salt;
And a pair of crutches, to show that he can halt.
3. A bag for his wheat, another for his rye;
A little bottle by his side, to drink when he's a-dry.
4. Seven years I begged for my old Master Wild,
He taught me to beg when I was but a child.
5. I begged for my master, and got him store of pelf;
But now, Jove be praised! I'm begging for myself.
6. In a hollow tree I live, and pay no rent;
Providence provides for me, and I am well content.
7. Of all the occupations, a beggar's life's the best;
For whene'er he's weary, he'll lay him down and rest.
8. I fear no plots against me; I live in open cell;
Then who would be a king when beggars live so well?
---
Now, if you're living safely within the cozy bubble of able-bodied privilege, you might be able to read (or hear) that and convince yourself that the beggar is gloating over how easy he's got it. Since I'm not in the cozy bubble of AB privilege, I read that and get nothing but the bitter laugh of someone fighting for a last shred of human dignity.
Just saying...
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 04:32 pm (UTC)I had a real fight with a prof once about this. She claimed that it was perfectly acceptable to argue with no proof that people faked disability all the time in the past, even though the article we were reading that did that also made a list of all the ways that someone could become injured and permanently disabled as a peasant.
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Date: 2011-10-23 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 05:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-23 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-10-23 07:32 pm (UTC)- All the "higher-ups" in Public Transport just had to take a course where they had to use wheelchairs, scooters, etc around public transport, and discuss all the issues they encountered and how to solve them.
- Every single station or tram stop that gets updated at all has to be fully accessible after the update.
- We're producing a whole stack of requirements for making train stations more accessible, covering every possible thing we can think of.
- There are at least two wheelchair users at the top levels of the Transport Dept, advocating for this very issue. Anyone foolish enough to say that accessibility isn't important has to go and tell them, to their faces, that they don't really need to travel. And then get laughed out of the room...
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 02:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-24 05:15 am (UTC)2. I am reminded of the first year or so I got my cane, also being the year in which I went to Boston. **busts out laughing* Oh, it was ridiculous. And funnily enough, about a year or so before, I'd been reading about it, because I noticed everyone in places I was rping was white, able bodied. So I made a character in a wheelchair, who was over 27, who lived in Boston (she was never accepted anywhere) and in researching to create her, realized she couldn't bloody get around ANYWHERE w/o personal access to a car and/or parking. And then I was there, for the lived in experience. And everytime I read stuff like this, I'm reminded of my friend looking at me hobbling along, and the subway system, and it dawning on her how utter crap the system really was.
3. Did the person waving their ignorance in your face realize that THIS IS YOUR FIELD? That the accusation even, that this was sprung straight out of your head with anachroninism is bs, because you read all the old letters and planning committee memo notes etc... ON TOP of general basics? Did they perchance also miss the concept of the continent of North America having a Civil Rights Movement against the concept that SOME PEOPLE MATTERED and others didn't?
4. I did actually learn about The Great Exit. But I can't remember where. I want to say a movie, but it was more than likely a documentary (then again, given my habit of researching a topic that makes me whoa, might have been both).
5. The Ugly Laws
6. There is no six.
7. **hugs muchly**
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 02:41 pm (UTC)And yeah, they know disability is my focus, but they seem to think this is some sort of neutral topic for me rather than one I care a lot about. It apparently concerns people that I'm so enthused about my topic. I don't know what the heck they're doing with their time.
♥
I'm really curious as to the Ugly Laws and if they applied in Canada at all. Halifax certainly had the right environment for them at the time they were being passed in Chicago.
(no subject)
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Date: 2011-10-24 07:08 am (UTC)Linking.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-24 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-25 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-10-25 09:51 pm (UTC)Actually, that's one thing I really liked about the presentation I went to. She basically pointed out exactly that, and said she wanted to look at history in a way that centered disabled people's experiences rather than looking at separate things that were specifically about disability, which is what I tend to do.
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Date: 2011-11-01 08:31 pm (UTC)I just.
DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD