What if Disability Rights Were for Everyone?

In the fight between red state governors and the federal government over measures to control the pandemic, the Biden administration has deployed an unexpected weapon: disability rights law. Citing the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.), President Biden’s Department of Education launched investigations into five states that have prohibited schools from requiring masks. Already, a Federal District Court has blocked Iowa’s ban on mask requirements, citing the A.D.A. The legal reasoning is simple: by prohibiting mask mandates, these states may be pushing disabled students — who are at greater risk from Covid — out of the classroom.

When the public thinks about disability rights, they usually imagine laws that protect those with visible disabilities — wheelchair users, for instance, or people with Down syndrome. But the scope of disability law is far broader, encompassing less obvious diagnoses. Young people with diabetes, asthma or other conditions that put them at risk from Covid may not think of themselves as people with disabilities — but by legal definition they stand to benefit from disability law’s protections.

President Biden’s efforts to protect mask mandates represent only the latest effort to use disability laws to protect broad swaths of the public. In recent years, the A.D.A. has been used to challenge immigration restrictions, police brutality, mass incarceration and many other broad social problems.

The disability rights movement emerged to champion the interests of people who had been pushed to the margins of our society, seeking to rectify a long and dark legacy of disabled Americans being forced into institutions, discriminated against in the workplace, and denied access to mainstream schools. For those who experienced such horrors, the movement exists to secure the rights of a specific oppressed minority group.

But the increasingly broad reach of disability rights protections also offer a set of tools to help many who never thought of themselves as disabled and perhaps never will. Which raises a question: Can a movement born to address discrimination against a particular minority evolve into something greater — a larger push for rights for all? And what would that evolution mean for the future of disability rights advocacy?

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Eighteen months ago, the world broke. As Covid spread throughout the country, so too did the experience of disablement. Like the polio generation, students suddenly found themselves able to attend school only through the miracle of technology. Those adults who couldn’t work from home began each morning with a complex calculus of risk and worry familiar to many chronically ill people with compromised immune systems. But for those lucky enough to bring our jobs home with us, a new universe of possibilities opened up.