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The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30
HPOD Executive Director Michael Stein says people with disabilities still face "malign neglect"
This updated take on the classic blue-and-white ADA wheelchair accessible icon designed by the Accessible Icon Project depicts the user leaning forward dynamically and actively self-propelling the chair's wheels forward.
Yesterday, USA Today recognized the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Signed on July 26, 1990, by President George H.W. Bush, the ADA guarantees equal protection for people with a wide range of disabilities, from mental health issues to physical challenges. It was modeled after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, providing equal access to government services, schools, buildings, private employers and commercial facilities.
"We are in a much better place in 2020 than we were in 1990. Dramatically better," said Michael Ashley Stein, co-founder and executive director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD) and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. "Other than rare instances of overt animus, most of the discrimination we see towards people with disabilities in this country tends to be from what we call 'malign neglect,'" Professor Stein added. "It's not that we're trying to exclude them from opportunity, it's that we didn't even bother to consider them eligible or worthy of opportunities." The ADA, like other civil rights laws, Professor Stein explained, "puts the burden on the oppressed to make changes," requiring an endless fight to protect those rights.
As Professor Stein described in an interview for the Harvard Gazette, the effects on the attitudes of people with disabilities has arguably been one of the ADA's most notable legacies:
To me, the gold star on the ADA, and this is continually shown to be the case through periodic studies from the National Council on Disability, is that the biggest impact of the legislation is that Americans with and without disabilities actually expect the disabled to be part of the world. That’s turned everything upside down, for the better.
The ADA has been invoked repeatedly during the pandemic to protect people with disabilities, especially people with intellectual disabilities. Early on, Alabama created a rationing system for ventilators used to treat people severely ill with COVID-19. Those with intellectual disabilities weren't eligible to be put on a ventilator, according to the state's rules. The federal Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Civil Rights declared that a violation of the ADA, and the state revised its prioritization list. Alabama was one of many states whose crisis standards of care developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic discriminated against people with disabilities, as documented by Professor Stein, HPOD Senior Associate Ari Ne'eman, and colleagues in a study to be published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.
This is one of countless examples of how the ADA has given people with intellectual disabilities a powerful advocacy tool to advocate for their rights rights to work, to parent, to vote, and to learn on an equal basis with others. To celebrate the ADA's 30th birthday, representatives of Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, with the support of HPOD and the Institute for Community Inclusion at the University of Massachusetts Boston, produced a video recognizing the ADA's impact.