Disability Advocates Quotes

Spend your privilege.” She got it from disability rights advocate Rebecca Cokley. It is the concept that the privilege we have in this world is endless. It doesn’t run out. You don’t use your voice today and have to re-up the next day. Power is limitless, and using ours for other people does not diminish it.

She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World’s Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon. been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted,"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Watch,' the posters tell the potential advocate, but only if you embody normalcy. For it is normalcy, the posters point out, that is endowed with the power of the qualification to see. Abnormalcy is unseeing. . . Autism is not qualified to see itself.

self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness! If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma.

Spiritualism provided an important audience for radical reform and a source of affirmation for embattled radical leaders. In their zeal for “self-ownership,” Spiritualists advocated a broad woman’s rights program, combating every disability imposed by church, state, or social convention.

Ask the young man in your life to prove his love for you twenty-first-century style, by embracing feminism. After all, feminism is no more than advocating for equal rights and opportunities for women everywhere . . . all women everywhere, no matter their race, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.

Helen Keller, author, speaker, and advocate for disabled persons, asserted, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.

You know, those single-use masks everyone is wearing in the pandemic are made of plastic too,” my friend Imani Barbarin said to me. Imani is a talented disability advocate who often speaks about the intersection of disability and environmentalism. She pointed out that the acceptable use of plastic is always set according to what a healthy person needs to be healthy (think masks, gloves, plastic prescription bottles, kinesiology tape… even home delivery supplements that individually package your daily vitamins), but when it comes to someone with a disability using plastic, everyone wants to shame them for killing the planet. “You need what you need,” she said to me in a gentle but firm voice. She was right.

There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin. Pushback to this idea often comes in the form of the social model of disability, which states that we are disabled by society and lack of access rather than by our bodies. For many, the social model can be liberating: by locating the cause of our problems outside our bodies, we can begin to love ourselves again. Tackling systemic ableism may feel like tilting at windmills, but it is still easier to address than some kind of failing within ourselves. There is a criticism of the social model of disability, located in the idea that some disabled people may want a cure. Particularly with matters like chronic pain/chronic illness, a cure is seen as something that can itself be liberating: a way to simply be in one’s body without feeling pain, for example. There is a danger in the cure mentality, as it can be a slippery slope toward eugenics when it is applied by abled people. Many in the Deaf and autistic communities do not want a cure and feel that those who advocate for a cure are advocating that they not exist anymore. Sometimes it comes down to how we see our individual disabilities: Are they an intrinsic part of who we are? Or are they an identity that comes with a side of agony we would gladly give up? How do we feel when abled people start advocating for “cures”—which may come in the form of eliminating our people entirely—rather than when the desire for a cure comes from disabled advocates?

Amber was painfully aware of the mismatch between her politics and her desires. She was an intersectional feminist, an advocate for people with disabilities, and a wholehearted ally of the LGBT community in all its glorious diversity. As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore the voices of those without the same unearned advantages, who had more of a right to speak on many, many subjects than she did. It went without saying that she was a passionate opponent of capitalism, patriarchy, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, bullying, and microaggression in all its forms. But when it came to boys, for some reason, she only ever liked jocks. It kind of sucked ... And of course they used her like a disposable object, without regret or apology, because that’s what privilege is—the license to treat other people like shit while still getting to believe that you’re a good person.

The concept was attacked immediately. Many longtime advocates for the protection of the elderly saw the design as fundamentally dangerous. How was the staff going to keep people safe behind closed doors? How could people with physical disabilities and memory problems be permitted to have cooktops, cutting knives, alcohol, and the like? Who was going to ensure that the pets they chose were safe? How was the carpeting going to be sanitized and kept free of urine odors and bacteria? How would the staff know if a tenant’s health condition had changed? These were legitimate questions.

As it represents and thus conceives of autism as a threat to the normative individual and social body, contemporary advocacy work issues an effective and powerful 'call to arms' against autism. The orientation of contemporary advocacy is clear: to be a 'good' autism advocate is to be positioned 'against' autism, to 'fight' it, 'combat' it, 'defeat' it, and so on. . . It is this war on autism that I take as my focus for the remainder of this book. I do this so as to interrogate how a militarized autism advocacy is systematically producing and sustaining a social environment that is hostile to autistic difference—an environment that, as we shall see, structures and supports possibilities for violence against those who embody autistic difference.

Shriver brothers Robert and Mark have also found ways to support the family commitment to the disabled. With the musician Bono, Robert helped found DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade in Africa), which advocates for the eradication of poverty through education, debt reduction, development assistance, and campaigning for access to treatment for AIDS and malaria in Africa; and Mark serves as senior vice president of U.S. programs for Save the Children. Eunice’s only daughter, Maria Shriver, sits on the boards of Special Olympics and Best Buddies, and

The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. Winston Churchill in a letter to Prime Minister Asquith, advocating the forced sterilisation of disabled people

A growing industry of privately run nursing homes and board and care facilities began to emerge with the phase-out of the hospitals and in some cases gained a lobby that advocated proactively for closure in order to increase their profits, leading to the modern-day institutional and deinstitutional industrial complex.

want you to be famous as hell,” Melina said. “I want your stories out there, about people I’m not, and lives I’ll never live. But I want my work out there, too. Yes to Black theater and brown theater and playwrights with disabilities and queer musicals. Yes to all of it. But… I’m still here. I feel like I keep getting told: Step aside, it’s not your time yet.” Melina twisted her hands in her lap. “I was thinking so much about me, I forgot to think about you… or anyone else who’s still trying to make a place for themselves in this industry. I don’t know how to be ambitious and be an ally, Andre,” she said. “I don’t know how to advocate for myself as a woman without sounding petty or entitled. I just know that theater is about as postfeminist as it is postracial.

It was the beginning of his personal crusade to make life easier for the more than forty million disabled Americans. By 1990 he had moved Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that mandated changes in public buildings, accommodations, and transportation to make it easier for the disabled to function in American society. For Dole, it was his greatest legislative victory. Yet it was also a classic example of the two sides of Bob Dole. Although he was a champion of this federal directive that imposed on states and businesses rigid requirements that were costly and, in some cases, little used, he was also known for advocating a reduced role for the federal government. On

Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women’s organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society.

Rhetoric coming from outside medicine among lay rehabilitation advocates suggested that nursing could do more harm than good in the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers. Rehabilitators worried that a soldier, when showered by acts of womanly kindness and care, would lose the will to get well, failing to overcome his disabled state.

My life as a parent was a battleground for various belief systems,” she writes,[43] “all of which had one thing in common: an inability to come to terms with human variability.” Singer and her family were disabled in a way that no one knew how to name, so she created a name for them: they were neurodiverse, and they suffered because the world demanded they be neurotypical. These terms would be popularized by journalist Harvey Blume and widely adopted by disability advocates a few years later. The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder.

Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University advocates the killing of disabled newborns. Reports the New York Times, “To Singer, a newborn has no greater right to life than any other being of comparable rationality and capacity for emotion, including pigs, cows and dogs.”6 This is evil. Equating newborn humans with animals is absolutely sickening. But that is what Singer is teaching in his course at Princeton.

Moltmann distinguishes between a general diakonia, the diaconate of all believers, and a specialised diakonia, that of attending demanding challenges – as, for instance, caring for mentally disabled people through institutional and professional work. Such distinctions should not however lead to separation, as often has happened, and he strongly advocates the ‘becoming-diaconal of the congregation as well as the becoming-congregational of diakonia’.

The injustice my neighbor suffers, whether poor or a minority or disabled or unborn, makes a claim upon me because we all belong to Christ and to this particular community. At times, working toward the common good in a community will require me to advocate for causes that cost me or those who look like me. I may be called upon to accept a loss of freedom that I would never accept if I only thought in terms of identity politics. Our conception of the good ought to arise from our understanding of God’s revelation in His Word and nature.

Advocacy is a natural process that comes from within. It emerges when someone gets to the point where they are tired of witnessing the injustice imposed upon others and decide to do something about it. It is not something you can buy or pay for. It comes from the heart. That is where the fiercest warriors come from.

Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience at this time in the U.S., and Bell was a big advocate. The belief was used to justify the forcible sterilization of disabled people, a program that Hitler admired and is said to have learned from. Bell was against forced sterilization himself, but instead believed getting rid of sign language was the key to eradicating deafness. Without sign, deaf people would integrate into the general population rather than marry one another, thereby producing fewer deaf babies. Besides his ethics, Bell’s actual science was wrong—most deafness isn’t directly hereditary—but his ideas remain prevalent in deaf education circles today.

One of the coaches and disability advocates whose work has helped to inform this book, Heather R. Morgan, stressed to me that before we examine our masks and learn to take them off, we must first recognize that the version of ourselves we’ve been hiding from the world is somebody we can trust. “I think it can be risky for people to try to think about where their mask comes from and think about taking the mask off before they first know that there’s somebody safe underneath of it,” she says.

It was an awareness of the frauds that Disability and Workers Compensation have become that turned me into a civil rights advocate for the disabled.

I support black people. I support women of all races. I support all disabled persons. I support all poor people. I support all children. Basically, I'm rooting for everyone on earth who is an underdog. I'm rooting for the mistreated individuals. Regardless of their race, gender, or religion.

Over the past few years, a loose coalition of advocates like Campbell had accomplished a goal many would have thought impossible. They had pushed through Congress a civil rights law barring discrimination against people with disabilities in jobs, in public services and public accommodations. It had passed almost unanimously, and with President Bush's support.

Why was there so little support for disability rights? It was true that the organized disability rights movement avoided the media. Its leaders felt they had good reason. Most stories about disability were inspirational features about disabled people who had overcome personal affliction with a smile and a bundle of courage, and disability rights advocates said this was not the story they wanted to convey. They seemed to believe, perhaps with justification, that they could not convince reporters or editors of any other approach.

Brittany Packnett Cunningham, introduced me to the phrase “Spend your privilege.” She got it from disability rights advocate Rebecca Cokley. It is the concept that the privilege we have in this world is endless. It doesn’t run out. You don’t use your voice today and have to re-up the next day. Power is limitless, and using ours for other people does not diminish it. We have to utilize our influence, capabilities, and MONEY for the greater good.

Spend your privilege.” She got it from disability rights advocate Rebecca Cokley. It is the concept that the privilege we have in this world is endless. It doesn’t run out. You don’t use your voice today and have to re-up the next day. Power is limitless, and using ours for other people does not diminish it. We have to utilize our influence, capabilities, and MONEY for the greater good.

advocate that people self-identify as disabled for the purposes of gaining a group identity (postmodern theme), to engage in postmodern disruption of the knowledge-production capacity of medical science (postmodern knowledge principle), or as a politically motivated disruption of the dominant belief that disability is a thing to be avoided or treated (postmodern political principle). It is unclear how any of this can be helpful to disabled people.

The corporate reform movement has co-opted progressive themes and language in the service of radical purposes. Advocating the privatization of public education is deeply reactionary. Disabling or eliminating teachers’ unions removes the strongest voice in each state to advocate for public education and to fight crippling budget cuts. In every state, classroom teachers are experts in education; they know what their students need, and their collective voice should be part of any public decision about school improvement. Stripping teachers of their job protections limits academic freedom. Evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students undermines professionalism and encourages teaching to the test. Claiming to be in the forefront of a civil rights movement while ignoring poverty and segregation is reactionary and duplicitous.

My journey with Kareem has taught me that change starts with understanding. By challenging stigma, educating ourselves, and advocating for inclusion, we can create a world where every child feels seen and supported.