Best of BADD (Blogging Against Disablism)

Last Saturday, May 1, was Blogging Against Disablism Day. (Disablism is also known as ableism in the U.S., where I live.) This international event was hosted by Diary of a Goldfish, with hundreds of bloggers participating. Here are a few of my favorite posts:

Red Vinyl Shoes: Full Disclosure

I regularly have to take off work to go to doctor’s appointments. Most employers aren’t too keen on that; luckily my current employer is very willing to accommodate my schedule. Working on writing at home, it’s easy to fit a nap in without affecting productivity. When going on job interviews I keep these things to myself. It’s hard enough getting hired as a fat black woman, much less adding my disability to the pot of stew they’d rather not eat.

Disability: Active Academics: Looking For Parallel Themes

Although as far as the polices, documents and acts are concerned, equality in women’s education has been successfully programmed over the years, no such development has taken place in the case of disabled persons,whose education continues to be haunted by the modern-day segregationists’instrument of special schools.”

Even Grounds: Rosa Parks Is Not Done Teaching Us

We are discriminating against people with disabilities…. You could say that it is incorrect, because of the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act that requires to make information accessible to people with disabilities. It only applies to the Federal Government, and to those states which adopted an accessibility legislation. In the private sector, which creates most of the web sites we use on a daily basis, there is no such regulation. Nobody is required to make a private web site accessible to people with disabilities by law.”

Normal is Overrated: Of Privilege and Auditory Processing

The Normal Auditory Processing Privilege Checklist

I can watch first-run movies in any theater and still understand a majority of the dialogue without having to attend a specially scheduled screening with subtitles.

I can watch movies on streaming services and comprehend the dialogue with the same ease that I could with a DVD rental.

TV shows are equally accessible to me whether I record from TV or watch them online. I could drop my cable TV subscription without losing access to those shows. continued….”

Wheelchair Dancer: Movement is Radical

Movement — no, moving as a disabled person — is the most radical thing I/you can possibly do. Let me say this again. Moving your body is possibly the most radical thing you, I, and we can do. I have often danced around this topic, saying things like “Mobility is at the core of the movement.” Now, I want to pop a wheelie, spin around, turn a cartwheel and say loud and clear: “Movement is the movement.

Women’s History Network Blog: Blogging Against Disablism

How much more problematic then was the disabled female body? And perhaps this is the question that historians have yet to answer. There is a growing body of work on mental illness and on the impact of institutionalisation on both care of people with certain types of disabilities and how this impacted on their civil and human rights- yet, there is a lot less work on what it meant to be disabled- and particularly what it meant to be female and disabled.

There are many more BADD posts listed at Diary of a Goldfish so please, go check them out!