Katie

What Would You Have Done? Missing Kitty Cone (1944-2015)

By: Catherine Kudlick

[Note: this Sunday, April 26, 2PM at the Ed Roberts Campus above Ashby BART, Bay Area people with disabilities and allies will gather to honor the life of a woman who history will one day credit with changing US history. Kitty Cone, along with Judy Heumann, was one of the key organizers behind the events that we’ll be portraying on our upcoming exhibit to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July. In the post below I trace her unlikely impact on me.]

As we reach the final stretch for launching our exhibit “Patient No More: People with Disabilities Securing Civil Rights” that opens at the Ed Roberts Campus in July, I’ve been consumed with a burning question: what would I have done? Would I have gone in to occupy a federal building for 26 days with over one hundred people I didn’t know, disabled people? Could I then or now sleep on the floor, bathe in a sink, eat food brought by strangers, live with crabs and who knows what else, for nearly a month? Would I have resisted the siren song of friends and family, clueless about disability politics as they gently mocked me about a cause I didn’t yet know enough about to believe in?

Kitty Cone, who to everyone’s great sadness died on March 21, was a central figure in the Section 504 Occupation of San Francisco’s Federal Building back in April 1977. She understood the deep connections between personal activism and political change. She could explain in basic ways how individual people could make a difference by insisting that President Jimmy Carter’s administration come through on a promise they’d made to sign legislation that had been languishing for four years, Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act that would guarantee people with disabilities their civil rights. And she knew how to build bridges between various local community groups and leaders who could support the protesters inside. Her persuasiveness and carefully-crafted alliances helped ensure the success of 504 and ultimately helped pave the way for passing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990.

In April 1977 I was an awkward kid in college at UC Santa Cruz, excited about my upcoming junior year abroad in France. I didn’t know any other disabled people, because I didn’t want to. My community was friends from my dorm. We had in-jokes and talked late into the night about our classes, our professors, our families, each other, the crappy dining hall food, our hopes for the future. I’d like to think of myself as political, but I wasn’t. I was just an insecure gal looking for myself and hoping people would like me or at least not taunt me like they had for most of my life about my “weird eyes.” I didn’t know to think of what we today call “bullying” as political, as part of a bigger civil rights struggle.

Given how much time I spent secluded in my dorm room struggling to read the small print in my books for class as I hid (from) my vision impairment, little wonder that I had no idea that a revolution was taking place just 75 miles away up in San Francisco.

What if I’d met Kitty back then? Many of the people we have interviewed for “Patient No More” described her as the one who urged them in and gave them strength. Her activism extended far beyond strategizing a revolution of disabled people: there was something deeper, something about her that made you feel part of something bigger, gave you a sense of purpose that was profound, real, full of conviction.

I often fantasize that if I’d met Kitty Cone in 1977, I would have marched right in, claimed my identity as a person with a disability and taken my place in history. But the truth is, I’m not sure I would have been ready.

Yet Kitty made me a revolutionary. Rather than awaken a future me, our talks thirty-five years later put me in touch with that scared Cathy on the threshold and accept that college kid for who she was: someone poised for a new adventure where she’d live in a foreign culture among people who didn’t speak her language. I was about to occupy my own building back then, laying the groundwork for the activist I would become. The remarkable thing was that Kitty taught me this without our actually having spoken of it. She understood something about activism that never gets acknowledged: it is as much about extending tools to draw strength and integrity from a painful past as it is about charting the future.

To celebrate Kitty, the Longmore Institute has compiled a video from clips of our extensive interview with her for “Patient No More.” The video is captioned and audio-described.

To learn more about “Patient No More” that will be at the Ed Roberts Campus above Ashby BART in Berkeley from July 26 – December 18, go here.

Uncategorized

Friends with Words for 2015

By: Catherine Kudlick

What better way to end 2014 than to celebrate friendship? Thanks to the Disability Visibility Project, this past summer and fall scores of people from the SF Bay Area headed to the cozy StoryCorps booth at the San Francisco Public Library to record conversations with friends and loved ones. Assistant Director Emily Beitiks interviewed her longtime family friend Stanley Yarnell, who discussed being a physician as he relied less and less on vision, while I interviewed writer and Berkeley English professor Georgina Kleege about our great friendship built in part upon the idea that we call ourselves “imperfectly blind” because we see more than sighted people think we should. Listen to the interviews or download the transcripts compiled by our dedicated interns.

There’s something profound at the root of these interviews, something daring, even subversive. First, disabled people get to tell the stories rather than have the stories told about us. This makes us experts, especially Stanley who talks openly about what it was like to be a practicing physician with a vision impairment, pushing the boundaries of credulity for many. Yet he also challenges the rules and raises questions such as what is medical care? What do we learn from our doctors about vulnerability, strength, and ourselves, whoever we are? Stanley’s experiences wearing two hats that too often feel mutually exclusive – that of the physician and disabled person – is part of what first drew Emily to Stanley (and why she pestered him repeatedly until he agreed to record his stories for the Disability Visibility Project).

Second, the interviews let the cat out of the bag: disabled people have friends, even and especially disabled friends who bring great joy and mirth to everything. In a world that never portrays more than one blind person anywhere except for special schools, Georgina and I have spent many hours, cooking, walking, gossiping, sharing stories about the odd overheard comment, swapping tips about the latest accessible apps or latest book we’re reading, coming up with new teaching strategies, always leaving with more questions than answers. Just like for Emily and Stanley, disability was what kindled and sustained that inexplicable spark of friendship – a striking contrast with those Hollywood depictions of disability that tear people apart or make the bonding seem creepy!

Just maybe 2015 will be the year of the first mainstream disability buddy film, one played by actual disabled people who can laugh about that ridiculous thing that happened on the bus or have discovered something wonderful about their humanity by helping a struggling nondisabled person. Or even better still, they could just be random friends in a bigger story that wasn’t only about disability.

Let me offer up a new word for 2015, “disabilityship.” In my special dictionary it looks like this: disabilityship [dis′ə bil′ə tē′s̸hip′]

noun referring to a deep connection that two or more people have with one another thanks to disability.
Alt. meaning: an accessible, crip-friendly spacecraft.

Let every dictionary list this blog post as the origin of a word that finally exists to show the world something truly wonderful about disability.

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Fighting Shame with History

By: Katie Murphy

Getting ready to start a new semester is a bit different for me. Like everyone else, I have to buy my books and readjust to a less nocturnal schedule. But, as a disabled student, I have the added preparation of having to work through a lifetime of internalized ableism at the beginning of each semester. You see, at the start of each term, I have to meet with my professors and explain to them my accommodations. And no matter how awesome and with it my professors are, requesting accommodations makes me a wee bit anxious. Before I even walk into office hours, I have to go to battle with all the awful ideas about disability that I’ve been exposed to since birth.

I have to engage in a little mental boxing match with self-doubt: “Do I really even need those accommodations? I could get by without them, right? I did before.” And guilt: “I’m wasting my professor’s time. They’re going to hate me. I’m such an inconvenience.” And shame: “A good student and a stronger person wouldn’t need all this stuff. I guess I don’t deserve any praise I get from my family about going to grad school. I guess I’ll have to give my Uncle Jimmy back that sweet card he sent me when I graduated from Berkeley. Oh my god, where did I put that card? Where did I put that card?”

And I’m guessing a lot of other disabled students go through the same thing. (Minus the card from my Uncle Jimmy part.)

But we don’t have to. We really, really don’t have to.

And I think most of us know this. Intellectually, I know that accommodations are my right and I’m not getting some unfair advantage over everyone else. My accomplishments are my own, and I don’t need to torture myself by going without accommodations.

And yet…

Pure logic isn’t always the best tool for fighting feelings like self-doubt, guilt, or shame. Disabled people grow up learning to hate themselves, to hate their disability, because the world we live in hates disability for no logical reason. And sometimes the best way to fight that kind of illogic is with more illogic.

If I can’t completely get rid of that part of me that demands I feel bad for being a disabled student, I can at least trick it. “Hey ‘Part of Me That Demands I Feel Bad for Being a Disabled Student’! I don’t owe you any feel bads. Somebody else already felt bad on my behalf. My bill is paid. My debt is settled. You can stop leaving harassing voicemails.”

You see, in 1977, years before I was born, 150 disabled people occupied the old federal building in San Francisco to force the government to enact the first civil rights legislation for disabled people in US history. As I’ve learned going over interviews with some of the occupiers for the Longmore Institute’s Patient No More exhibit, one of the major motivations for occupying the building was the right for people with disabilities to get an education. Some of the sit-in participants went to segregated schools—separate schools for disabled children. Some were lucky enough to go to one of the few universities that admitted disabled students. They all sat-in so I could go to school and have the accommodations I need.

Just think: For twenty-six days, around 150 disabled people lived in a single floor of an office building. Only a handful were aware that they would be occupying the building at all, let alone for a month, so most participants didn’t have any bedding or a change of clothes with them. Many participants required attendant care for eating, using the bathroom, or preventing pressure sores. All of that care had to be improvised inside the building with everyone helping wherever and whoever they could. Some protesters had medicines that needed refrigeration, so a makeshift fridge was created with a window air conditioner and a plastic sheet. When the phone lines were cut, they communicated with the outside world by signing to people picketing in front of the building. Their struggle was supported by the Black Panthers, who made the protesters (including Black Panther Bradly Lomax and his attendant Chuck Jackson) two hot meals a day. When a bomb threat was called in, they didn’t leave the building. The protesters were in such close quarters with such limited opportunities for personal hygiene that many of them got crabs.

Crabs.

On top of all that, the building was completely inaccessible. The protestors were fighting for the implementation of the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which made it illegal for entities receiving federal funding to discriminate on the basis of disability. Under Section 504, the very building the protestors were occupying would have to be made accessible to disabled people. Yet they stayed in this inaccessible building for nearly a month to demonstrate the need for disability rights legislation, showing the nation the strength of the disability community and its allies.

If you, like me, ever find yourself feeling guilty or ashamed about being a disabled student, doubting whether you really need or deserve accommodations, I encourage you to think back to the 504 protests. If you ever feel society tugging at you to “get by” without accommodations, “toughen up,” “suck it up,” “stick it out,” because “the whole world doesn’t cater to you,” remember that you are part of a community that has spent enough time living in an inaccessible world. If you feel tempted to do an ableist society’s work by torturing yourself for being disabled, remember that over a hundred protestors (and an infestation of crabs) stayed in a building for nearly a month without the comforts of home or any accommodations or accessible structures. Remember that all the discomfort and indignities they faced as protestors were so that you wouldn’t have to go through the same thing. You’re relieved of any duty to feel guilty or ashamed about being a disabled student.

At the same time, you’re not completely off the hook. Remember that you have a legacy to uphold—a legacy that was forged in part at the 504 protests. Remember to honor the qualities that made the 504 sit-in so successful and such a life-changing experience for those involved: community pride, collaboration, and commitment to education.

Remember that the 504 sit-in did not occur so that one disabled person could scale the social ladder while the rest of the disability community remained on the bottom rung. The 504 sit-in was an effort by the disability community for the disability community. Remember that when you next come across fellow students who might be eligible for accommodations but are unfamiliar with the disability services offered by your school. Remember that you have knowledge worth sharing about disability services when a friend discloses that they are struggling due to a disability or medical condition. Remember to honor the confidentiality of anyone who confides in you.

Remember the invaluable work performed by the Black Panthers, the Grey Panthers, the Butterfly Brigade, and the International Association of Machinists. Remember that their support, supplies, and expertise enabled the sit-in to last. Disabled students gained the right to an education in part because of the different social justice groups that collaborated with the protestors. Remember that when students aren’t getting a fair shake at an education for reasons other than disability. Remember the power of collaboration when you come across women facing isolation in STEM fields, working class students going into debt to afford textbooks, trans students being referred to by the wrong pronouns, or students of color having their names mispronounced or mocked. Remember that as someone who has benefitted from different groups coming together to support disability rights you have the responsibility to pay it forward and support the right to an education for everyone.

If you can do all that without getting crabs? That means you’re one step ahead of the 504 protestors.

Katie Murphy is a graduate student in Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University and student assistant at the Longmore Institute. She also runs Space Crip, a blog about disability in sci-fi/fantasy.