World Down Syndrome Day 2024
Happy World Down Syndrome Day! Our daughter Penny is 18, and we join thousands of other people around the globe who want to raise awareness about Down syndrome today. First,…
Disability and Suffering Are Not the Same
Disability and suffering are not the same. I was so disappointed to read John McWhorter's misunderstanding of disability in the NYT. He wrote: "To say that someone “has” a disability…
Photo of the cover graphic of the Atlantic
How “The Ones We Sent Away” Connects to Our Present Moment
Because we have a daughter with Down syndrome, I hear lots of stories about family members with Down syndrome and other intellectual disabilities. Sometimes I hear the stories of siblings…
Ableism at the County Fair
Last week, I received an email from Amber, who has three kids, including Cal*, her son with a rare genetic difference. Amber is also my unbelievably talented and faithful social…
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…
