Creativity & Leadership

D’Oh! Undermining the ADA Will Hurt Ordinary Americans

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
Since there are were a number of Democrats in Congress who are still not grokking that their vote voting for H.R. 620, the ADA Notification Act, is a vote against civil rights and disabled Americans, I’m going to show this absurd bill in action against real Americans.
By showing it in action against those really-real Americans, The Simpsons.
Lisa Simpson throwing up her hands in horror

“WHAT??? Democrat Representative Jackie Speier co-sponsored H.R. 620, the ADA Notification Act, that undermines vital civil rights protections for millions of disabled Americans?! HOW DID WAL-MART GET TO YOU, JACKIE???”?

Continue reading →

Your 3-Point Take-Down of the ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, or Why Your Representative Should Vote NO on HR 620

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment
Here’s how to tell your Congressional Representative to OPPOSE H.R. 620, and any other bill that weakens the ADA! 

Here’s your 3-point take-down of the central flaw in HR 620:

Point #1: HR 620 claims the ADA is so easy that a random person should carry the responsibility for teaching corporations how to obey the ADA, aka civil rights law.

Color still from Saturday Night Live. A parody commercial for Shimmer Floor Wax. Chevy Chase is spraying Shimmer on Dan Ackroyd's pudding while Gilda Radner looks at the Shimmer on her mop.

“HR 620 is BOTH!” Courtesy NBC Universal.

Point #2: HR 620 claims the same ADA is too hard for corporations to learn how to obey.

Point #3: HR 620’s claim to be both a floor-wax AND a dessert topping isn’t reality-based.

Failing the reality test makes HR 620 a NO vote

Tell your Representative to vote NO on HR 620 because even when a corporation is suffering from the heartbreak of toohardism, sabotaging the civil rights of people with disabilities goes well beyond a corporation’s demand for reasonable accommodation.

BONUS POINT: Ignorance of the law is NOT an excuse, so why does HR 620 make it okay for corporations to NOT obey the law because they don’t understand the ADA after 27 years?

You want more on why HR 620 is a hot mess? Here you go.

This #Crip Stays in the Picture: A Past Plaintiff on Opposing H.R. 620, the #ADA Notification Act

/ Ingrid Tischer / 5 Comments
Colorful cartoonized portrait of Ingrid Tischer's face

This crip is staying the picture of ADA litigation.

I’m Ingrid Tischer. You may remember me as “headless female torso using a walker” from Anderson Cooper’s “ADA Hit-Piece of Horror” on 60 Minutes. But I’m here today to tell you about a different type of horror: Being a plaintiff in an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuit, in which you’re presumed greedy and where whatever happened to you was no more than an inconvenience.

Four years ago, I began a multi-year metamorphosis into “non-vexatious litigant wanting to use a toilet.” That makes me the face of ADA lawsuits. But, in the 60 Minutes segment and the continuing slew of hand-wringing pieces about ADA scam-artists, you don’t see any faces like mine. A face like mine disrupts the narrative of the selfish — or gullible — cripple who financially kneecaps overwhelmed small business owners over access technicalities. You don’t hear much about how the proposed H.R. 620 would also apply to our considerably larger corporate citizens. So I’m putting my face right out there. This crip stays in the picture.

Despite the media’s fixation on “drive-by litigation,” — a completely non-accidental choice of phrase that associates fighting for my civil rights with gang violence – I was using the ADA as it was intended to be used, and should be used. As a civil rights law that, in 1990, made me a full US citizen at the age of 25. But in addition to the external changes in public spaces that have literally opened doors for me, the ADA is responsible for a profound internal shift in my thinking: I have expectations now that I didn’t grow up with: that I can enter a store, eat at a restaurant, cross a city street, open my office door.

Continue reading →

#IAmaPreexistingCondition Says NO to #AHCA and YES to Protecting People Not Profits

/ Ingrid Tischer / Leave a comment
Call, email, use social media to tell your Senators to vote NO on the AHCA:
Sample Script: “My name is ________________, and I’m calling to tell you that I oppose, and expect you to oppose, the American Health Care Act. We’re not going back to a pre – ACA era where insurers could ignore the needs of people with disabilities and pre – existing conditions and everyone was one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. If you value the health and well – being of your constituents, you must speak and vote against the AHCA.”
Transcript:
My name is Ingrid Tischer and I live in California.
My pre-existing condition is muscular dystrophy with chronic respiratory failure.
Without healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions, I wouldn’t have a machine called a Bi-PAP S/T and I would have died in my sleep a long time ago from carbon dioxide narcosis. 
I wouldn’t have been able to keep walking for as long as I did because I wouldn’t have had orthotics. 
I wouldn’t have been able to transition to a wheelchair when I finally needed to.
Because of this, I would tell my senators to vote NO on the AHCA and against any legislation that protects profits over people.
Including people with preexisting conditions.
I am a preexisting condition.

Thank you, Rooted in Rights and National Council on Independent Living (NCIL)!

The Crip Sense: “I See Women and Girls With Disabilities. In Your Organizations.”

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
In my particular line of work — fundraising — I have the “challenge” of making the case for funding cross-disability civil rights work from institutional funders who are still predominately stuck in the disability = tragedy trope.
I need allies from outside the cross-disability communities because that’s how philanthropy — and everything else — works: it’s who you have relationships with, who you can ask for help, give help to.

I was really excited about closing out Women’s History Month this year by developing  and delivering an interactive workshop, “Building Your Organization’s Capacity to Ally With Girls Who Have Disabilities: Principles to Practices” for fellow (sister?) Alliance for Girls members, as part of my work at DREDF.  (To the members who attended — you were GREAT participants!) Based on issues I’d recently written about, I wanted to call it “The Crip Sense or ‘I See Women and Girls With Disabilities. In Your Organizations.’” (Scroll down for 3 “posters” of workshop content.)

I said that part of having The Crip Sense is seeing things that are painful:
  • Disability human and civil rights violations. Way too many of them.
  • Violence against disabled children and adults – especially people of color (PoC) with invisible disabilities — even by caregivers, school personnel, and law enforcement officers, and that such violence at home, in school, and on the street is excused or rationalized.
  • Girls who have internalized stigma that makes it feel “normal” to disown, downplay, or deny having a disability.
  • Girls who hear – even from some disabled people – that “initiative” and “personal responsibility” can defeat systemic barriers born of — and well-maintained by — prejudice, and that they’ve failed if they’re defeated by rigged systems.

Color photo of a fortune cookie that reads,

Why This Workshop, Why Now

In 2017, an inclusive movement includes cross-disability civil rights organizations, as a given.

Continue reading →

Before I Resist and Persist, I Must Exist: Bioethical Choice, Living “Like That,” and Working the Early Shift of Cleaning Up Ableist Narratives

/ Ingrid Tischer / 5 Comments
filmdis-feb-18-1I represented DREDF in this conversation but it’s stirred up a big case of the feels about “choice” and being a liberal woman writer with a congenital disability, and the context this establishes for storytelling, and resisting and persisting. I continue, after 30 years of adult activism, to feel like I have an  early shift of ableism — prepping the world to accept that I exist — while my nondisabled fellow human resisters and persisters get to sleep in.  And if I weren’t white, conventionally educated, cis gendered, unthreateningly queer, and had all sorts of middle-class, married advantages, I’d probably never sleep at all. Image courtesy of the Disability Visibility Project.

 Step 1: I Exist!

As many people who know me know — all too well — I’ve been writing a novel* for the past 400 years or so. The novel, The Cure for Gretchen Lowe, is the exploration of a what-if premise: What if a congenitally disabled woman were offered an experimental therapy that would cure her? The cure itself, Genetic Reparative Therapy (GRT), was never the point of the story because biomedical research, real or invented, never seemed like the most interesting part of the story. What I’ve been stuck on, like an oyster (or barnacle), since the idea first irritated my imagination was how I saw that my character’s situation began as a will-she-or-won’t-she question. From what I’ve observed in 50+ years of congenitally disabled life, that question isn’t typically a question to The Average Reader. “Well, of course a person like that would want GRT!”

I’ve considered that point of view quite a bit — 400 years allows for that — and much more seriously than I make it sound here. But that assumption also irritated me mightily: As a lifelong like-that-ter, I’ve run up against a lot of nonconsensual of-coursing when it comes to my bioethical choices. Simply opening my story — which I refer to as being “CripLit” —  with a genuine choice, not a pro forma one, felt like I wrote in letters across the sky: I EXIST.

Continue reading →

My FEDup ™Rant: RespectAbility, Class and Race Privilege, and Leveling the Erring Field

/ Ingrid Tischer / 3 Comments
The post shows a picture of George H. W. Bush and links to a news story of him saying he will vote for Clinton. Mizrahi wrote: If Hillary wins it will because of white voters who care about people with disabilities. BTW, this is NOT a partisan thing. The same is true of Republican Sen. Richard Burr in NC who is running as the pro-PwDs candidate there.. THE POWER OF VOTERS WITH DISABILITIES WILL DETERMINE THE OUTCOME OF THE 2016 ELECTION! Remember that George H.W. Bush signed the ADA!

Screenshot of Mizrahi’s September 2016 Facebook post.

FED UP TM Ideas worth ranting about

I’m FEDup with transactional philanthropy that presumes disrespectful behavior can be overlooked if the price is right. I have now been witness to The Mistake by RespectAbility’s President, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi; the unpleased reactions by disabled women of color; some thoughtful initial responses; a cringe-worthy apology-type product; the official statement; and now (I’m guessing), The Great Moving On from uncomfortable conversations about ableism,  racism and disabled people of color within the disability rights community.

Part of me — the part that’s still polite to boundary-busting missionaries — initially wanted to say, “I’ve done this kind of racist shit myself. Sadly.” Then I remembered that much of that shit was when I was near the start of my career 25 years ago. When I would have lost my job — and Bi-Pap-providing health insurance — if I kept that shit up in our very progressive free clinic for gyn care. And how I had no safety net if I lost that job.

Everyone makes mistakes but the erring field is far from equal.

Depending on your class, Repercussions, Consequences, & Accountability are either the Three Furies that dog you even when you haven’t screwed up, or they’re the crisis PR firm you consider for damage control.

When you’re poor, unemployed, a woman, a person of color, a disabled person, or all or most of the above, making mistakes is far more likely to lead to words like “unqualified.” You are threatened with unemployment, fired, and/or are cut off from public benefits. In the worst case scenario, you haven’t made a mistake at all but are questioned, blamed, violated, beaten, shot, killed for being the person you are in public, in school, on the road, and at home.

When you’re affluent or “comfortable,” employed, a man, white, not disabled, or all or most of the above, making mistakes is more likely to lead to words like “executive coaching,” and “Let’s bring our communications person in to help.” In the worst case scenario, you “transition out” to what is often a better-paid job, aka “failing up.” If you are in a position to be a volunteer who has significant authority, the usual checks and balances on your behavior can be even weaker.

That’s when I first realized how integral money, class privilege, and power are to this recent incident. I haven’t seen any real repercussions, consequences, or accountability for Mizrahi — except for a bump to her prestige — and that’s just one infuriating aspect of how race and class insulate those with power.

Then I reread the official statement and I hit a whole new level of disturbed. Continue reading →