Disability Is Different

In the 21st century United States, most forms of identity have become bound up in an ongoing polarization that started in the realm of electoral politics but has spread out into almost all aspects of society. Identities that already carried a political meaning; race, gender, sexual orientation, became more rigid as groups that historically did not have the clout to make their demands heard got it, and historically dominant groups responded negatively to having to listen. At the same time, identities that hadn't carried that same weight started to gain it; most notably the shift of college-educated white people into the liberal bloc. But, one type of identity has managed to avoid being bound up in that polarization; disability remains, somehow, independent of other identities.

The reason why seems obvious when you write it out; ability changes over time. Unlike race, gender or sexual orientation, it is possible, even likely, that you can be born able and become disabled later in life. This fact about ability; that it is fluid, explains why it has so far not become polarized like those inborn identities. Being able to change over time makes it easier for ability to cut across other identities. By its nature, disability knows no bounds of race or gender or religion or income or sexual orientation or any other category of people. Disabled people are a heterogenous group, both in the number of other identities that disability cuts across and in the diversity of different conditions that make up the disabled community.

No one condition makes up a majority of disabled people, and this diversity has made it difficult to create a single pan-disabled identity that encompasses a wide range of different impairments. Instead, for most of the history of the disabled community, activism around disability has focused on specific impairments; movements for the blind, for the Deaf, for disabled veterans, for the parents of children with developmental delays. It wasn't until the late-80s, when the push for extending civil rights protections to disabled people got underway, that all these disparate communities started working together in a sustained way, and the connections that were built during that push stuck around after.

That push resulted in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. By that time, the great partisan sorting was well underway, but the ADA cut across partisan lines; passed overwhelmingly by a Democratic congress, but with bipartisan support in both chambers and signed into law by a Republican president. Even as a pan-disabled movement grew up in that area, one that modeled itself on the black civil rights movement and the women's movement and all the other identity movements of the late-20th century, achieving civil-rights protections happened without the polarization that those other identity movements invited.