False Message: Disability is a joke to be laughed at.
Images, words, and attitudes all shape our implicit impressions of people with disabilities, and many of those words and images create false understandings. We’ve looked at two of these false…
False Message: Disability is a tragedy to be alleviated.
When it comes to disability, we receive many erroneous and incomplete messages from the media and popular culture. Here’s the second of four false messages we receive about disability. FALSE…
False Message: Disability is a problem to be fixed.
Every day, we encounter images and phrases and assumptions and false messages about disability that shape our way of perceiving people with disabilities. Many of these depictions and assumptions are…
You Can’t Move from Exclusion to Belonging in One Step
When it comes to the work of undoing systemic injustice in America, many of us want to skip to the end of the story, from exclusion to belonging. We would…
My Daughter With Down Syndrome Helped Me Understand Racism
How did disability help me understand racism? I am white, married, educated, and affluent. Our daughter Penny was born into many of these same categories, and yet she was also…
Three Harms of Privilege
The harm of privilege is exclusion, injustice, and isolation. When I say the word privilege, I’m talking about a set of unearned social advantages given to one individual or group…
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Changing the Game: Explaining Exclusion, Tolerance, Inclusion and Belonging to Fourth Graders (and the rest of us!)
How do communities move from simply including people with disabilities to giving people with disabilities a sense of belonging alongside their typical peers? Many communities have already moved away from…
