As many of you may already know, today is the 20^th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); one of the few good things Papa Bush ever did. The ADA essentially built on protections granted on the federal level through the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, extending those protections to the private sector. Here in California, the Unruh Civil Rights Act (passed in 1959, before the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964; sometimes the states get ahead of the federal government…) and the Disabled Persons Act (passed in 1968), both of which preceded federal legislation, also provide legal equality and protections for the disabled. The state and “internal” federal laws (the Rehab Act’s sections, especially 503 and 504, applied to agencies and institutions receiving federal funding, but did not apply to the private sector at all) dovetailed with the ADA’s broader reach to cover just about all of the possibilities in our society, both private and public.

Of course, there were and are glaring exceptions, especially where closed captioning was concerned. Quite a few organizations and groups, from Caption Action (and now Caption Action II) to the NAD are working hard to remedy this. But in general, the ADA theoretically promised that legally discrimination was not permitted, and that equal access to housing, employment, and other vital aspects of life is to be guaranteed.

The reality has been far from perfect. The ADA has been put to the test over the years, and the first few years were uncertain, especially as the first cases wound their way through the courts. Even now, cases continue to be filed, and the decisions handed down by the judges shaped the ADA, either broadening, or more often, narrowing the scope of the law.

What was promised in theory, and what is on the books in legal language, hasn’t translated into true equality for disabled people, including the deaf. One area I get frustrated with is employment. Yes, theoretically we are supposed to have equal access for consideration when applying for jobs, we are supposed to be provided interpreting services at all steps in the employment process, and in the jobs thereafter (assuming we get hired!), and we are supposed to have equal opportunities for job mobility, instead of hitting the famous glass ceiling.

But the reality is, things are far from ideal. Unemployment/underemployment continues to be high in our community, and those that do get hired often don’t advance. Employers balk at providing interpreters, or try to find ways to squirm out of having to interview people. Even when the hiring manager or actual on-site manager is receptive, their supervisor or the company senior management decline the opportunity to interview/hire us.

Today, there are many articles and retrospectives on the ADA. But some are more blunt than others. In an opinion piece for CNN (worth reading in its entirety), Joni Eareckson Tada noted that

The U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor reported that in 2004, plaintiffs lost 97 percent of ADA employment discrimination claims that went to trial. “People who are not hired or are fired because an employer mistakenly believes they cannot perform the job — or because the employer does not want ‘people like that’ in the workplace — have been denied protection from employment discrimination due to these court decisions,” the committee’s report stated.

97%. That means that virtually all employment discrimination claims were denied. How are we supposed to make inroads when even the courtroom decisions are against us?

Part of the problem is that you can write as much legislation as you want, you can finesse the wording to your liking, you can penalize employers to the max, but you can’t change human behavior. You can, but it will take a lot of work and effort. Eareckson Tada notes this in her essay, and I agree. It often will come down to the personal background, experiences, and attitudes of the actual managers, employees, and human resources staff in each individual business, whether independently owned or a corporate franchise.

This becomes a problem, because for every certain number of great potential workers who are out there, there are a smaller but more vital number of people who are bad workers, terrible representatives of the community. The difficulty is that far too many people out there are still prone to stereotypes, and one bad experience often translates into a refusal to consider hiring another deaf person (or another blind person, another person in a wheelchair, another person with CP, mental retardation, a medical condition such as diabetes, etc., etc.). It doesn’t help that in retail or other corporate businesses where turnover is high and pay is low, too many people with limited intelligence and imagination can’t wrap their minds around alternatives that would permit the deaf person (or blind, wheelchair-bound, CP, etc., etc.) to be employed.

I’ve discussed the issue of employment before, in a personal rant (sad to say, my opinion at the time could’ve been written today, and is still 100% true; nothing has changed since I originally posted it), and the challenge I posted is still the same: employers will end up paying for us, one way or another; either they will hire us and pay our salaries, with the result that we are productive, tax-paying citizens, or they will pay their share of the fund that provides assistance: SSI, SSDI, SDI, and other forms of welfare.

There’s other flaws in the ADA, yes, and other areas where improvements need to be made (I’m still seeing a few hotels and motels that have non-captioned TVs (yes, some places still have sets that are more than 17 years old!), or do not have “ADA kits), but employment is a big one (and worthy of a post of its own).

Let’s hope the next media-worthy “significant” anniversary, the 25^th, brings us real reason to cheer. As a friend noted earlier today, “Happy Birthday, ADA. Someday you will be taken seriously.”

One of my pet peeves about driving is people who use the phone while driving. It irritates me, not just because they drive slower, they don’t move when the light turns green, and they don’t do anything except stare straight ahead. It’s because they’re not paying attention. Not paying attention is a factor in many auto accidents.

We deaf people don’t have a problem with phones in general- what we have a problem with is texting while driving. A lot of people I know are guilty of this; even the best drivers have admitted they’ve done it, often telling me they just check or send at red lights (I admit to having done the same in the past…).

Recently someone shared a New York Times interactive game with me, and it was rather eye-opening. Go ahead and try it, then come back and tell me how you did.

So, hearing or deaf, next time you’re out on the road, don’t text and drive. Don’t get on the phone and drive. And for god’s sake, PAY ATTENTION.

What’s lost in this story, this blame-game endgame as the story winds down, is Sherrod’s original speech. Some people are starting to examine this, and I think it’s worth a second look also. As Sherrod said,

it was revealed to me that, y’all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white

Later in the speech, she reiterates this point:

Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. They could be black. They could be white. They could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people …

God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people – it’s about poor people.

We have gotten so wrapped up in black vs. white, in identity politics, that we’re overlooking her main point: race isn’t the dividing issue, it’s class, or if you prefer, economics.

The story of this country is often told as a story of race, a story of unequality—which it is. But there’s another equally compelling story, one that doesn’t get told as often, the story of the wealthy vs. the rest of us. Those who first came to this country from England weren’t the poor; they were those who had enough money to be able to pay passage, to be able to provide for themselves. The first ships were paid for by investors and holding companies, and owners of land patents granted by the crown to the gentry and lesser nobility. This was the pretext for the first explorations and settlements, from the religious dissenters and separatists who colonized New England (many were what we’d identify as middle class) to the entrepreneurs (again, those who had money) who first established footholds in the mid-Atlantic colonies. The fact that these settlers wanted and desired assistance in the form of labor led to the first slaves, in 1619. This is also true for the earlier Europeans who first ventured into what is now the Americas: the Spanish came, as we’ve been taught, for “Glory, God, and Gold.” Wealth and the pursuit of the same form a full one-third of this trinity. To acquire glory and gold required labor, which quickly came in the form of slaves—first the native populations, then forcibly exported Africans.

Power and slavery came to these shores, hand-in-hand. We’ve learned and absorbed the history and narrative about slavery, but we haven’t really examined the other half of the equation. The story Sherrod was telling wasn’t really new; it’s a story as old as this nation. It’s just a tale that hasn’t been heard often enough.

The conflict between the haves and have-nots is an age-old one, but too often those in power fear the potential for such a conflict (from time to time in history, the poor and lower classes have a disconcerting habit of trying to assert themselves and level the playing field, you know), that the few at the top often try to distract the population at large with other events.

A good example of this can be seen in literature: one of my favorite books is To Kill a Mockingbird, which is celebrating its 50^th anniversary this year. In the book, Mayella Ewell and her family are at the bottom, considered “poor white trash” by the rest of Maycomb. Economically, politically, and in some ways, socially, the Ewells actually had far more in common with Tom Robinson and his neighbors than they did with the Finches, the Radleys, Mrs. Dubose, or Miss Maudie Atkinson. Even though the dividing line in the book was race, class was always an underlying factor. Everyone fit into a pecking order, from the oldest families at the top down through the Cunninghams to the Ewells. On the other side, you had the black community, with its own social divisions. The “poor white trash” once served as slaves alongside blacks, then they were above blacks, and today they’re in the same economic boat as many blacks.

The early days of this nation saw blacks and whites serving together as indentured servants and slaves, but over time, indentured servitude was removed, whites were increasingly segregated from blacks, and race became the bright line, the dividing point that those in power decided to use in order to not only clearly define who was a slave and who was not, but to keep blacks and whites from making common cause based on their economic status. As long as there was someone else and something else to look down on, to sneer at, to hate, that shiny trinket distracted the poor whites just enough from doing something about their own miseries. Divide and conquer is an ancient tactic in warfare, and it has been no different in America when it came to race and class.

The same tactics are being used today: instead of examining why jobs have vanished and real wages are suffering and continue to be stagnant over the last 30-40 years, people point to the “illegals” and loudly cry out that everyone would just be a-okay if we sent those “illegals” back where they came from, so they would “stop taking our jobs.” Funny, but this was a common concern in the antebellum years in this country: black slaves and freedmen were cheap labor, cheap enough that the Republican Party was founded partly on the premise of “free labor” [no competition with those slave workers!]. Lincoln certainly wanted to free the slaves, sure, but he also thought, like many others, that they should be repatriated to Africa [”My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land." - Abraham Lincoln, Peoria, Illinois, October 1854]

We are so concerned with the “other”: the blacks, the women, the gays, Latinos, Asians, the “illegals”, we don’t stop to think about why they’re here, or why they’re protesting, why they want equality: sure, blacks wanted to be free, they wanted to end segregation, but they also wanted to achieve economic equality and mobility. Martin Luther King understood this; this was why, at the end of his life, he was in Memphis, preparing to march on behalf of the sanitation workers. He understood that it was not just enough to be able to ride the same buses and order food in restaurants next to whites, but it was also important to be able to afford that bus ticket and be able to buy that meal.

Women understood this: it’s why the ERA was in part about achieving economic parity, and why Lilly Ledbetter and the Fair Pay Act are so important. Other “minority” groups aren’t just fighting for recognition and social equality—they’re also trying to broaden economic mobility as well.

This is what Shirley Sherrod realized that day, decades ago, when she was considering what to do about the Spooners and their quest to save their farm. Growing up in the South in the days prior to and during the Civil Rights era, she lived in a world where the poorest whites, the Ewells and Cunninghams and Spooners, were always just above, just a little bit better than the Robinsons and Millers and Sherrods, even though they might be at the same economic level, in the same economically depressed environment.

Instead, she came to the realization that it’s “really about those who have versus those who don’t…” It’s not just about race, it’s about those at the top versus everyone else.

Skin is just a color, a differential on the surface. The nice black family in suburbia has much more in common with their white neighbors next door than they do with the unemployed black family in the urban ghetto. If Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X all lived today rather than 40-50 years ago, King would have more in common with and aspire to be more like Kennedy than he would Malcolm X, a ex-con from a troubled childhood spent in foster homes.

What happened this week has been transmitted and manipulated by Breitbart, Fox News, the White House, and the Corporate Media as a story about racism and race.  Sherrod stands almost alone trying to point out that we in this nation are slowly transcending race, and the real story is one of power, of economic inequality. Sherrod wants the conversation to be about poverty, about wealth, and how to change the imbalance. For all his “blackness” [and as much as Breitbart, the "Birthers" and others on the right-wing fringe want to make this about Obama's race and background], Obama doesn’t really have a whole lot in common with Sherrod. As she pointed out, the President is “not someone who has experienced some of the things I’ve experienced.” I imagine that while Sherrod would love to have a conversation with Obama about race, she probably would also want to steer the discussion in the direction of economic issues- because that is where she sees the real divisions in this country. She feels this is worth discussing, and it’s the reason why she shared her story with the NAACP months ago. It’s a conversation worth having.

The latest political story dominating the news the last couple of days has been the smearing of Shirley Sherrod, the United States Department of Agriculture director of Rural Development in Georgia who was forced to resign from her job thanks to a heavily edited video of a speech she gave to an NAACP gathering in March. The video was released by Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing political operative, and was intended to highlight apparent reverse racism on the part of Sherrod and the NAACP. Sherrod was fired by USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack at the urging of the White House (if not directly by Obama, definitely with his knowledge through his staff)). It turned out the full, unedited video was not so much about racism as it was about overcoming individual and societal bias.

Enough has been said about this unjust firing in the Corporate Media, online media, and in independent blogs and news sites that I’m not going to do a full dissection of all the issues here. You can do that yourself, with Google and some extra time to spare. Instead, I’m going to quickly point out what I see as a couple of glaring flaws, then concentrate on what I think we should take away from this sorry, sordid incident. While my thoughts on the overall situation are relatively brief, my analysis of what we should learn from this are rather long, so I’m splitting this into two parts.

First, I’m disgusted by the Obama administration’s willingness to credulously trust information from the Internet without fully investigating first, and their equal willingness to throw their own employees under the bus, all because of shrill voices from the right. If Obama is willing to give credence to extreme right-wingers and their attacks and fantasies, it validates what they say. Unfortunately, a lot of what they have to say is built on innuendoes, half-truths, outright lies, and fantasies. Most of them are bullies, and the Obama administration’s apparent capitulation is pathetic, to say the least.

The second flaw is the Corporate Media’s insistence on continuing to treat Breitbart as an equal. He is not an equal, he has violated journalistic and social ethics, and should be ostracized and consigned to oblivion. He knowingly passed on false material and lied about Sherrod. Even if he did not himself edit the tape, his “source” and whoever edited and passed on the tape is not entitled to anonymity. Breitbart purposely ruined an innocent person’s career and expects to continue to receive deference and attention. I’m appalled he’s apparently getting a pass from most quarters, and it is not only a dark blot on his own integrity, but now the Corporate Media’s integrity as well. The fact that no one, except a handful of bloggers, independent journalists, and Shirley Sherrod herself, intends to try to hold Breitbart to task. Instead, most of the Corporate Media and their conservative colleagues only plan to point fingers at Obama and the NAACP, and not at the original source of this falsehood (Fox News shouldn’t get off scot-free here, either, but it’s pretty obvious to everyone with half a brain and a spine that Fox is the propaganda organ of the Republican Party– this is just par for the course for them, sad to say).  For a pointed take on this, check David Frum’s comments on the kid gloves treatment of Breitbart (and I love Frum’s comparison of what the media did to Dan Rather and their current slap on the wrist for Breitbart. Don’t you just love double standards?).

As of now, Obama has talked to Sherrod, but instead of being a big boy and taking responsibility, he’s blaming Vilsack, saying Vilsack “jumped the gun.” I call b.s. Vilsack may be a sorry sack and a coward, but someone, President Obama, someone told him to axe Sherrod. That someone most likely checked with the top dog first, and you just happen to be the top of the heap at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This reflects poorly on you, so instead of playing the blame game and pointing and shouting, “he did it, he did it” like a five year old, try taking a page from Harry Truman: “The Buck Stops Here.” Look at JFK after the Bay of Pigs– he assumed responsibility for that mess (although he did try to dodge it at first). We used to have leaders in the White House, now we just have a bunch of junior high schoolers. You can play the blame game all you want, but the way I see it, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

What’s lost in all of this finger-pointing endgame is Sherrod’s original point. I’ll come back to that soon.