Erin Sember-Chase, diversity, equity and inclusion learning consultant in Cornell’s Department of Inclusion and Belonging, and Allison Weiner Heinemann, senior lecturer and director of writing at the Cornell ILR School, discuss disabilities and ableism with host Chris Wofford.
In this episode of the Cornell Keynotes podcast from eCornell, Erin Sember-Chase, diversity, equity and inclusion learning consultant in Cornell’s Department of Inclusion and Belonging, and Allison Weiner Heinemann, senior lecturer and director of writing at the Cornell ILR School, discuss disabilities and ableism with host Chris Wofford.
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Chris Wofford: On today's episode, I'm joined by Erin Sember-Chase from the Cornell Department of Inclusion and Belonging and Senior Lecturer Allison Weiner Heinemann from Cornell's ILR School. Today we're talking about ableism and we're looking at it from all sides. How it's embedded in the workplace, in the built environment, even in our media and throughout our culture.
Chris Wofford: This is a really insightful and personal conversation as we hear from our guests about their lived experience and get their keen insight into how we can flip the script on ableism to stop the ongoing systematic exclusion of people with disabilities. Enjoy the show and check out the episode notes for useful links and details on the Workplace Disability Inclusion course and related certificate programs at eCornell.
Chris Wofford: Thank you for listening.
Chris Wofford: Okay, Erin, so I'd like to get some terminology straight before we get into ableism. So when we say people with disabilities, who does that include? What disabilities are we talking about?
Erin Sember-Chase: Yeah, it's a good question, because it's actually a lot more broad and diverse than you might realize, because we tend to generalize when we say it that way.
Erin Sember-Chase: But in fact there are so many different conditions that could be considered disabilities. You may automatically think of wheelchairs, right? Because wheelchairs are sort of that universal symbol, if you will. But in fact when you're talking about disabilities, you're talking about things like mental health conditions, depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder.
Erin Sember-Chase: You're talking about things that might fall under the neurodivergence category, like autism, learning disabilities, ADHD. You're also talking about a lot of conditions that you can't see, things that might be more like chronic health conditions, Crohn's disease, lupus, fibromyalgia. I mean, really, the list is unbelievably endless.
Erin Sember-Chase: There's no way we can name them all. And so when you think about it that way, no great surprise that the Center for Disease and Control tells us that 1 in 4 Americans have a disability. 1 in 4. That's 25%, of the American population. And I think it's worth noting that when I started working in the disability field many years ago, that number was actually 1 in 5.
Erin Sember-Chase: So you're also talking about a population that is growing. As we get older, we're more apt to acquire a disability, right? If things happen, we might get a disability. It's a group that any of us can join at any time.
Chris Wofford: There was some discussion before we got started here about COVID's impact, which as of now, we haven't done that reckoning or tried to understand that. But Allison, you had something to say about the visibility versus non visibility of disabilities.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: So many of the diverse experiences that Erin just referred to, so chronic physical illnesses, diabetes, epilepsy, certainly mental health disabilities which I personally live with, these are non visible disabilities, right? They're non obvious. And as we'll get into in terms of constituting what ableism is, certainly the very assumption that disability is only a visible experience or only looks a certain way, right? Or folks who use an accessible parking space at a store have to look a certain way or use a certain mobility device.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: That in and of itself is an ableist assumption. So yeah, not all disabilities are visible so of the statistic Erin cited, one in four, which is roughly around 61 million Americans, it's estimated that about 10 percent of that number are folks with invisible disabilities. And that's likely a very low estimate given a lot of the stigma around disclosing disability or even how disability gets measured, right?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And according to whom, by what surveys or what mechanisms. So that's another thing. And yeah, certainly, again to point out that's actually the CDC number is one that was formulated pre COVID. So given that COVID was. An event that disproportionately impacted people with disabilities and is also a mass disabling event, that number is only growing.
Erin Sember-Chase: And we got a new disability out of it. Long COVID. Right? That has actually become a condition. And Allison's reminding me that I think another complexity here that's worth mentioning is just the difference in what your disability experience might be from one person to another. What I mean by that is I have a craniofacial condition that I was born with that came with a hearing impairment.
Erin Sember-Chase: That's my disability. It's also been my only disability experience. Pretty much the same every day. There's nothing about it that changes. A lot of the conditions I was talking about earlier can actually fluctuate day to day in terms of what they feel like, how they impact you, what your symptoms are. So I think it's important to note that your disability experience can look very different from one day to another depending on what you're living with.
Chris Wofford: So tying up our language question you had mentioned the identity versus person, that kind of thing. Could you talk a little bit more about that? I find that interesting and certainly sets us up for the conversation that's to come.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Sure. So there are mainly two ways of referring to disability.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And one is known as person first. So that's putting the person before the disability. So person with a disability, individual with a disability individual with a mental health disability, right? So qualifying it in terms of the specific experience. And the people first movement was one that, initially emerged in the 1970s and certainly coinciding with the rise of the disability rights movement.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: So, it was one that was very much pushing back on dehumanizing and problematic language. Unfortunately, a lot of the terms that we do encounter, you'll still encounter quote, handicapped, right, which is actually a really problematic term and is increasingly being replaced by accessible. So that's been an important push of recognizing the value in humanity, right, of folks with lived experience.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: At the same time, however, it's not a, or should not be taken as a one size fits all. There are many folks within the larger disability community, which as Erin established, is very diverse, by no means homogenous. And who prefer what is known as identity first language. And so that is identifying with the disability first, disabled person mentally disabled person.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: It is especially prevalent in certain communities, like the autism community. There is a general preference for autistic person or autistic individual. And that is to not separate one's identity. from the disability, because to do so, in fact, ascribes to an ableist assumption that disability is a bad thing.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And it also, Erin's going to talk a little bit about various paradigms or frameworks of how we understand disability and have done so historically. And Erin's going to help us understand, by what mechanisms are people disabled. And so, In one way and in another way, aside from identity, using the identity first language calls attention to those processes.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: I'm a disabled person, which means I'm disabled by the various environmental barriers around me.
Chris Wofford: When I first spoke to you, we were talking about ableism. It's relative mainstream understanding. You know, I've been kind of kicking this idea around talking to people that I know. I'm doing a podcast on ableism.
Chris Wofford: I'm recording and working with some people at the ILR school. It's not as mainstream as, you know, you two live this, right? You work in this world. Ableism is not, super mainstream. So let's talk about it. What is ableism? How pervasive is it? Where does it come from?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: You often encounter ableism defined in rather narrow or shallow terms, which refers just to discrimination.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: But it's much more than that. It is a system of marginalization and oppression and it is. Essentially, it privileges and it values normative and by which I mean according to dominant majority culture standards, ways of being or interacting or engaging with a world that essentially has not been built for people with disabilities.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: That is very much set up in a way that is exclusionary. which in and of itself, right, is the essence of ableism. The disability justice activist and scholar T. L. Lewis refers to it as, quote, a system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And so given those kinds of values you can also see how ableism as a system is, of course, very much akin to other systems of oppression like racism or sexism or homophobia, but it also very clearly intersects with those systems as well, right? So when there are certain kinds of standards about what a body should look like or behave like.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: According to these standards of, quote, fitness or productivity. And, you know, Erin will get into some frameworks and this harkens all the way back to eugenics movements and ideologies and practices. So you can see how it's really intersecting as well with other systems of oppression. Which is important to recognize in identifying what ableism means in a larger sense.
Chris Wofford: Erin, how do you think about ableism?
Erin Sember-Chase: It's interesting to think about how it's not really mainstream, but we live it. And I think it's worth mentioning that even though I lived it We're not going to say how many years. I lived it, but I lived it. I never knew that word until I was well into my adulthood. It wasn't something that was taught in classes, in school.
Chris Wofford: Was there an analogous concept that you used to kind of walk around with and think about this, or?
Erin Sember-Chase: No, I think it was just To be honest with you, it was when I started learning about other systems of oppression, like racism, sexism, that I was starting to see the parallels between the experiences of discrimination and oppression.
Erin Sember-Chase: And I was able to personally connect with it, obviously not for the same reason, but because I could understand, oh yeah, that's happened to me because of my disability. I have felt that. I have experienced that. And so it's interesting because it's allowed me to understand better the concept of privilege because it helped illuminate where I don't have it in other ways, if that makes sense.
Erin Sember-Chase: Right. So like Allison said, you know, you're talking about something that is rooted in these, you know, age old ideas of what's normal, what's healthy, what's beautiful, what's intelligent.
Erin Sember-Chase: And really, it all comes down to the fact that, unfortunately, disabilities are looked at through a very medical lens, right? Very medicalized. Even if you think about, in medical schools, you know, you're taught how to fix a disability. You're taught how to treat it, how to cure it, right?
Erin Sember-Chase: And so right off the bat, it's a very medicalized approach to even viewing somebody with a disability as opposed to thinking about disability as actually being more constructed by our environment by our social surrounding. I have a hearing impairment. There's no denying that. There's no questioning that. That is what it is. I have to live with it.
Erin Sember-Chase: I have to deal with it. However, whether or not I feel disabled in everyday life depends more on the environment that's around me. So, what do I mean? I mean, I'm going to have a very different experience if I go to, let's say, a large meeting, or a large event, where there's a lot of people, but nobody's using microphones.
Erin Sember-Chase: There are no captions up on the screen to help say what people are saying, even if there's no carpet. You know, the acoustics are bad. You've got, you know, a lot of ambient noise. I am suddenly having, going to have much more difficulty following along, keeping up, being able to participate, contribute. As opposed to if I go into a large meeting where everybody's using a microphone, and everybody's using their presentation voices, right?
Erin Sember-Chase: Suddenly I'm able to participate. I'm able to contribute. I'm able to follow along. My level of hearing loss has not changed from one situation to the other. I have the same level of hearing impairment, but what has changed is the environment around me where I can, you know, be there with that hearing impairment.
Erin Sember-Chase: I often say I'm only as disabled as my environment makes me. Simple as that.
Chris Wofford: So, Allison, talk a little bit more about the environmental factors, similar to what Erin was just describing here.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Right, and yeah, and to qualify, you know, again, what we mean by environmental, so we're certainly talking about the built environment, the physically constructed environment, but also attitudinally speaking, which I know Erin is going to speak more to.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: That's certainly something that really affects me, and I'm also going to speak more to the kind of structure of work and the working world and that's certainly something that really impacts me as a person who is living with multiple mental health disabilities. The kind of cultural expectations about productivity and you know working endlessly and that kind of actual competitive culture of Well, I worked 20 hours and you only worked 18 and kind of thriving on a culture of no sleep.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: That's all really damaging to anyone's well being. But it's certainly extremely catastrophic for folks like me who live with various mental health conditions. So it's these very kinds of expectations that are just seemingly so ingrained, right? We just take them at face value. And that's part of the perniciousness, I think, of ableism as well, is that what most people seem to take for granted is just the way that the world is, or the way that certain processes work. They're built on inherently ableist kinds of standards, or values, or expectations. And so, in and of themselves, they really perpetuate that, that exclusionary nature in terms of ableism and, and even language, you know, folks like to use terminology that is really problematic and, you know, often I encounter the word, quote, crazy, which is used to refer to anything that is meant to be problematic or even something that was quite a good experience and, kind of hyperbolized to that extent.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And, some folks are of the mind that a word is just a word. If it's not meant in that register, then it doesn't matter. But when these words, or when this language is tied to a long history of folks being forcibly, incarcerated in institutional spaces, or again via the eugenics movement, forcibly sterilized for these reasons, that carries a weight.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And that's, the ableism that is not always so readily detected because people aren't necessarily recognizing those histories.
Chris Wofford: Let's talk about the broader culture, Erin. You have some thoughts on how ableism is kind of Baked into the cake, as you know, and in media as well.
Erin Sember-Chase: Yeah, you and Allison just said that. It is so unbelievably baked in to our society as a basic ingredient that we don't even realize it. I think all of us are probably guilty of perpetuating it at some point or another just because it is so inherently in there. you know, as I said, I see it a lot when I deal with the medical field because it can be So just to give an example, I have sinus problems, right?
Erin Sember-Chase: Many people have sinus problems. But because of my craniofacial condition, it impacts how I'm able to treat my sinus problems. And so, if one more doctor recommends to me to use a neti pot, I think I might seriously scream at the top of my lungs because it doesn't matter how many times I say, I can't use a neti pot.
Erin Sember-Chase: And then basically it's a, oh, well then I don't know what to tell you. Right? So there's an example of, maybe they would know how to treat my cranial facial condition, but they don't know how to treat me for other things where my cranial facial condition might impact that. Right? That's ableism. Right?
Erin Sember-Chase: That's an ableist way of treating people. It's also really just baked into, I see, I'm a big, I'm a big person for watching TV. I love my TV. I'm a big one for looking at media online. And it is just unbelievable how much I see. The media influencing how we perceive people with disabilities, and it is in a very ableist way.
Erin Sember-Chase: If you think about it, we all know that news and media have a huge role in shaping public perception, right? They have a huge role in informing people about certain identity groups or certain cultures or certain issues, right? So they have a real responsibility as to what they're choosing to portray and how they portray it.
Erin Sember-Chase: And unfortunately, still in this, we're here in our 2020, you know, decade, I still see very challenging portrayals and representation of people with disability. Maybe a better way to put it is very narrow, very narrowly focused representations. And so, for example, if I want to read about Issues, current events, legislation, anything like that is going to have a real impact on people with disabilities rights or access.
Erin Sember-Chase: I'm probably not going to find much about that in mainstream news. I'm going to have to go find disability sourced types of news outlets, listservs, that sort of thing, to read about that to understand what's going on. What I probably will find in mainstream news is those human interest stories that tug at your heartstrings about people with disabilities, right?
Erin Sember-Chase: Look at how the community all came together to raise money for Little Johnny, you know? Look at how all the school kids we're so nice to that kid who has Down syndrome, right? I'm not taking anything away from people being nice. Yes, please. I'd much rather you be nice to the little kid with Down syndrome and not, you know, be horrible toward them.
Erin Sember-Chase: But what I am saying is that attitude of That we have to have people be nice to us, right? That, somehow we're not worthy of that on our own, and somehow everybody else is getting the accolades for being nice and raising money for us, right? It really paints this picture of us as being people who need people to take care of them, who are dependent, who, and anything they're doing for us is an act of charity, as opposed to doing things with us, right? It's a very, it evokes pity, it evokes all that. When that's your dominant representation out there of people with disabilities that is no wonder that we're having trouble seeing people with disabilities being capable, productive people that would bring value to your organization, that can excel in school. You know, that can rise to levels of leadership in our country and our world, right? It's no wonder. So that's shaping that public perception and then why we have such a high unemployment rate of people with disabilities, as far as I'm concerned.
Chris Wofford: Speaking of which ableism in the workplace. How do you think about this, working at the ILR School at cornell?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Yeah, it's incredibly pervasive in the workplace and again, I think, unfortunately, not surprisingly given, as Erin was just importantly speaking to, these dominant media representations of people with disabilities as either being incapable or you know, inspirational, based on again, really problematic stereotypes and, you know, for folks with mental health disabilities it's especially problematic in terms of the kind of conception swinging from folks with mental health disabilities are violent and erratic.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: When the reality is statistics consistently show people with mental health disabilities are far more likely to be victims than perpetuators of violence. Or it's, well, everybody has a little sadness or anxiety. It just It's tough it up, right, which is not comforting. It's actually quite minimizing, right, to the specificity of people's experiences and what they need.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: So, but needless to say and again, what I was speaking to before, these kinds of cultural expectations, especially in American society about work, that you have to be all productive and hustle culture that it's especially you know, exclusionary for people with disabilities.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: In terms of the disparities, so the according to the most recent statistics, which are at the end of year 2023, by the Office of Disability Employment Policy of the Department of Labor, the labor force participation rate for people without disabilities is 67. 6 percent and for disabled folks it is 24. 5.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And actually really noteworthy because that's up a few percentage points from 2022, which is due to remote work, which we're going to get into in a little bit. And then when you look at the disparities for multiply marginalized people with disabilities, so people of color with disabilities, BIPOC folks with disabilities.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: You're looking at even lower employment rates. And there, again it's certainly the kinds of particular attitudes that do pervade workplaces. It's also, without being able to get into the full extent, but, you know, employment is so bound up with access. Or deprivation with respect to other systems, right?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: If we're talking about education, transportation, infrastructure healthcare policies. There are so many particular disability policies that are structured in a way that Well, either you work and you don't qualify for support in terms of income maintenance or healthcare or, you you forgo the opportunity even if you want to participate in the labor force um, due to fear of giving up those benefits.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: So, you know, you're often caught in a catch 22 because of the really restrictive ways in which disability policy has been imagined and is enacted. There are laws. That's notable. And so, there are a number of laws that cover the workplace. But in the U. S., most broadly speaking, we're talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And so, that does mandate that private and public employers with at least 15 employees or more um, do not discriminate on the basis of disability and also provide what are known as reasonable accommodations, which refer to any sort of change or modification to a physical workspace, or certainly to the very processes of how work is conducted.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And on the one hand, the law is a very powerful force, and this is meant to be a leveling of the playing field, as it were. Some disability legal scholars have even suggested that the nature of reasonable accommodations is really revolutionary, because it allows people to question the ableist structures of a workplace.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And that you can actually negotiate with your employer in what is meant to be an interactive process. But, the reality all too often is that, of course, there are power imbalances between employees and employers. And so, when employers have The last word, and courts usually defer to employers and courts themselves have narrowed the promise of the a DA in many ways.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: There are obviously certain limitations and so despite the passage of the ADA over 30 years ago now, right, we're not seeing those gaps in terms of employment disparities closed. You know, essentially that again, is to say that. And we'll get into this later, that while laws are important deeper culture change is really needed to combat the the full thrust of ableism.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And also just to go back briefly to what I was talking about with respect to non visible disabilities, that also puts people with invisible disabilities, so to speak. In a precarious position where they're essentially forced to disclose a disability in order to request a reasonable accommodation.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Really uh, landmark study that was done by our own Yangtan Institute on Employment and Disability at ILR. A few years ago, found that nearly three quarters of the participants who were surveyed expressed what are not unfounded fears and concerns about not being hired or being fired on the basis of disability due to the stigma that exists.
Chris Wofford: So we're talking about 75 percent of people do not disclose that they have a disability.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: That was, these are the specific figures that were revealed in this particular surveyed pool. But yes. Yeah, that it's very indicative of, you know, and a lot of employees with disabilities will they will later feel more comfortable disclosing and thus being able to request reasonable accommodations once they have the employment.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: But the thing about reasonable accommodations and the ADA is that it's meant to apply to any part of the employment process, including hiring. So then you're in this very tricky position of needing a reasonable accommodation. Right? To ensure that you have full access to the hiring process, but you disclose that, right, to get your reasonable accommodation, then you risk not getting the job.
Erin Sember-Chase: And never knowing that was the reason. Maybe they'll just tell you, you know, that you weren't the best candidate. Yeah. You're never going to know if that was really true or not.
Chris Wofford: How did the pandemic change things and make it worse, better? Probably a little bit of both.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Yeah, I mean, broadly speaking, I mean, there are obviously so many considerations that we can talk about.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And as I said earlier on the pandemic has disproportionately impacted disabled folks and especially multiply marginalized disabled folks. So, a study in 2023 by the Economic Innovation Group actually found that the employment rate for people with disabilities didn't simply reach the pre pandemic levels by mid 2022, but it actually rose past it for the highest rate in over a decade and so as the study found that folks with disabilities who were age 25 to 54 were 3.5 percentage points more likely to be employed in the second quarter of 2022. Then they were pre pandemic and Remote work is something that folks with disabilities have been asking for for decades. Ever since, the introduction of certain technologies that would permit working from home.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And continually, they have been denied by employers, by courts, saying that, no, You can't do this. You can't perform the essential functions of the job. This has to happen within the workplace setting and, you know, it was a kind of bitter irony, right? Obviously, in March 2020, when so much of the working world just very rapidly transitioned, suddenly this was possible, right?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: and, you know, as those numbers show, clearly it has benefited people with disabilities in terms of being able to participate in what were previously exclusionary structures. And again due to so many of the larger, intersecting systems like infrastructure barriers or transportation, etc.
Allison Weiner Heinemann: And the hope was that this would really usher in a new recognition of different modalities of work and the benefits, not just to people with disabilities, but to many different folks, but that's not been the case.
Erin Sember-Chase: Now, I distinctly remember I was working in student disability services at Cornell in March of 2020.
Erin Sember-Chase: And I distinctly remember the day I was standing at my desk and we got the message that basically pack up your stuff and go. Right? As many people did, right? Because um, and you're going to be working remote. And obviously, like everybody, I was confused. I was, you know, worried. Didn't know what this was gonna mean, but I also remember saying to my colleagues at the time, You know guys, this could really be interesting to see what happens because now everybody's gotta go remote for school, for work.
Erin Sember-Chase: We could see people finally realizing that it can be done. That it can be done. This could end up being something amazing. For a reason that none of us wanted, but still, could be amazing. Unfortunately though, I think what ended up happening more is that you had You know, thousands and thousands of people who had to suddenly do something that was uncomfortable to them.
Erin Sember-Chase: You know, you had to suddenly work remotely, you had to suddenly figure out how to teach, how to do their jobs, right? With no real precedent, right? It's just like, everybody figured it out. And, That was hard, that was uncomfortable. People didn't like having to work differently than they were used to.
Erin Sember-Chase: And so, there was a huge push to quote, return to normal. Right? Return to normal. That phrase, was so, almost like a gut punch. A lot of people, not just people with disabilities, but people with other marginalized identities too. Because what you're actually saying is you want to return to a normal that benefited privileged majority people, but was not necessarily ideal for those of us with marginalized identities.
Erin Sember-Chase: Because I talked to so many students and so many employees with disabilities who said, No, I don't want a pandemic. The pandemic's awful for so many reasons. However, I just had my most productive year ever as a student or as an employee. I did so much better for all the reasons Allison mentioned and much more.
Erin Sember-Chase: I was able to be so much more effective, so much more productive. So the thought of this quote, return to normal, right, was essentially completely disregarding the fact that you have these populations of people That normal, you're talking about a different definition of normal for them, right?
Erin Sember-Chase: Completely different definition. And really, I think, the fact that the unemployment rate decreased slightly, right, and really speaks to the fact that the more successful workplaces have been the ones that have recognized, okay, maybe we don't. Go back completely. Maybe we redefine what normal is in terms of how we teach our classes, how we conduct our workplaces.
Erin Sember-Chase: Maybe we redefine that. Maybe there is a possibility here that it can look different than the way it's always looked. And we will end up including far more people to be able to have that opportunity.
Chris Wofford: And that's the way it's kind of played out, right? You know, that's how you become or you continue to be an attractive employer.
Chris Wofford: Yeah. Frankly, saw this stuff happening. early pandemic where it was like the powers with the employees. I was like, don't know. We'll see. We'll see how that goes. But it eventually did play out that way, which is fascinating to see. Yeah,
Allison Weiner Heinemann: no, that same study that I cited earlier suggests that, By companies embracing remote work policies but even, you know, flexible policies , right?
Allison Weiner Heinemann: Hybrid policies where people can choose the modality that best fits their needs that it that offers an opportunity for companies to expand their talent pool by up to 15%, right? In very dynamic and important ways. So it's a missed opportunity for companies that are kind of doubling down on the that quote, return to normal.
Chris Wofford: So going forward, how do we address ableism? How would you like to see this play out?
Erin Sember-Chase: I have a couple ways that I think about that question. Some of it is simply us recognizing and owning, you know, how we are interpreting. And we're, you know, again, how we are representing and interpreting individuals with disabilities, what it means to live with a disability. And so, what I mean by that is we said this a little bit earlier about how one of the other ways that we often get depicted is, you know, we get most admired or most applauded when we look like we are, quote, overcoming.
Erin Sember-Chase: So again, think about that. I'm getting more positive praise for when I'm not acting like I'm disabled. Really, that's what it's telling me. It's telling me, oh, you're so, you know, you're just like everybody else. You know, you're overcoming your disability. You think about how, you know, again, back to the media, cause I live there.
Erin Sember-Chase: But, you know, back to it, you think about like, you know, how it, the news or whatever, media will show that. That person with one arm who's climbing a mountain, right, and they're saying, Oh my goodness, look at the way he overcame his disability and he climbed that mountain. No, he didn't. He got to the top of the mountain, and he didn't suddenly have a second arm.
Erin Sember-Chase: Right? He didn't overcome. But, perhaps what he overcame was our assumptions about who's able to climb a mountain. Right? What it takes to climb a mountain. But we're not seeing it. So many people don't see it that way. So many people aren't stopping to question, Wait a minute. What is it here that I'm really seeing in front of me?
Erin Sember-Chase: And what am I really attributing it to? And so that's what I want to see more of, right? I want to see more of us recognizing, again, what our assumptions are and how that is what we are basing success and productivity, all the other things we talked about, and that we're seeing that people with disabilities are able to do anything and we're standing in their way because of our assumptions and ideas about what they can do.
Erin Sember-Chase: I think the other piece of it is, again, this is so baked into our systems. The social way of looking, the social model way of looking at disability is by shifting. Stop looking at the person, right, and start looking at the environment. I am so happy when it's somebody other than me. who I know doesn't have disability experience, is the one to point out that something is inaccessible or non inclusive to people with disabilities.
Erin Sember-Chase: It's like a huge sigh of relief, not only me noticing or pointing out, right, that somebody else is recognizing that, and they're taking the steps necessary to change that. When we can start looking at people asking for accommodations for disability, Not as a fault that lies within them that they need an accommodation, but a fault that lies within our environment that they can't work without it.
Erin Sember-Chase: Right? That's the difference. That's really the difference. I saw a great quote recently that said, Ableism looks like calling people inspiring for navigating a system that is designed for exclusion while doing nothing to hold that system accountable. That's ableism. We have to start holding the system accountable, and it starts with us questioning our own attitudes and assumptions.
Chris Wofford: Thank you listeners. Again, check out the episode notes for useful links and details on the Workplace Disability Inclusion online course and related certificate programs at eCornell. Thank you for listening.