#ADA29

It’s another Disability Justice Takeover! Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

To mark the 29th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act right, Off-Kilter’s got another DJI takeover on deck! Rebecca sits down with Azza Altraifi, Valerie Novack, and Gabriela Rossner of CAP’s Disability Justice Initiative to celebrate the passage of the Raise the Wage Act — the first time Congress has voted to eliminate the subminimum wage for people with disabilities — and situate it in a broader economic agenda for people with disabilities; dig into the debate over the word “crazy”; ask the million dollar question when it comes to disability justice: how do we achieve gains for PWD within today’s ableist/capitalist/racist systems and structures while working to dismantle those very systems?… and more.

This week’s guests:

• Azza Altraifi, researcher, Disability Justice Initiative
• Valerie Novack, Portlight Fellow, Disability Justice Initiative
• Gabriela Rossner, AAPD intern, Disability Justice Initiative, and president of the Disabled Students Collective at The George Washington University

For more on this week’s topics:

• Check out Azza’s latest report on the economic security for PWD

This week’s transcript:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

sights to hit the class by the end of the day

hot from downtown into the hood where I stay

the only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t saved

I spend most of my time working, trying to bring in…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week we are marking the 29th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA as it is better known. So, we decided it’s time for [drum roll with hands on the table] another DJI, Disability Justice Initiative, takeover of Off-Kilter. So, I’m so thrilled to have back with me two of my favorite people and a new voice on this show and on one of these takeovers. I’m sitting here with Azza Altraifi, a researcher with the Disability Justice Initiative.

AZZA ALTRAIFI: Hey, good to be here.

VALLAS: I’m also with Valerie Novack, a Portlight fellow with the Disability Justice Initiative.

VALERIE NOVACK: Hello. Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: And new to Off-Kilter and to the DJI team, Gabriela Rossner, an AAPD — American Association of People with Disabilities — intern with the Disability Justice Initiative and also the president of the Disabled Students Collective at the George Washington University. Gabriella, thanks so much for joining us.

GABRIELA ROSSNER: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: And I’m so thrilled to have all of you guys here to mark this important anniversary, but frankly, just as a little bit of a heads up to our listeners, differently than probably a lot of other places are going to do it because we’re going to do a lot of real talk. So, really, really glad for you guys to take the time.

So, there’s a lot to celebrate this year, and that’s really where I’d love to kick off. This is a year, 2019, with much to celebrate when it comes to disability policy. And actually, there’s a very, very important and really historic victory that just happened within the space of the past couple of weeks. Azza, I want to start with you to help us understand why it is so historic, why it’s so important a milestone. That was the passage of something called the Raise the Wage Act: a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. But why was this such a big deal for people with disabilities?

ALTRAIFI: So, this was absolutely monumental, and it was a huge deal for really all marginalized people, but particularly for people with disabilities because the Raise the Wage Act does not only raise the wage to $15 minimum, but it also phases out the 14 C provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act. And that’s the provision that allows for people with disabilities who are working in what are “sheltered workshops,” right, often, most often, to be paid sub-minimum wages. So, legally, people with disabilities are able to be paid sometimes as low as cents every hour for the work that they do, which communicates that their labor is not as valuable as the labor of other populations. This is the first time that we have taken this major step towards finally phasing this out. And then I want to really emphasize that as is often the case, people with disabilities who are also people of color, who are also LGBTQ, who are also otherwise marginalized, are most impacted by this. And so, to see this is a major deal. This is also the longest that it’s been since the federal minimum wage has shifted. So, it is a huge deal that it’s passed the House.

VALLAS: And just to tell a little bit of the history here, it’s actually been reflected on quite a lot in the space of the past couple of weeks as this vote was being taken, because another piece of the bill also would eliminate the tipped minimum wage for restaurant workers, nail salon workers, other folks who work for tips, and would create one single, fair wage. There’s been a lot of discussion about the racist beginnings of the tipped minimum wage and the history there but a lot less discussion about the ableist beginnings of the sub-minimum wage. Talk a little bit about that and kind of how we are, in 2019, still allowing this type of policy to be on the books.

ALTRAIFI: Absolutely. And I wouldn’t even break those out, right? So, the tipped minimum wage is a holdover of slavery. And anti-blackness and white supremacy are not only intertwined with ableism, they rely on one another. And so, it’s really the same kind of justification. It’s rooted in the same mythology. Because in the case of tipped workers, it was a way to avoid paying black people what they rightfully were owed. And in the case of people with disabilities who were working, it was this justification that oh, if you’re disabled, you must not be able to work at a competitive rate and in an integrated setting. So, instead, what we’ll do is we’ll give you this sub-minimum wage, and then you’ll learn skills that might eventually help you to transition into an environment where we can actually treat you the way we do your non-disabled peers. And you can kind of see putting those right next to each other, they’re really rooted in the same things, which is that you, as a person, have less value than other people — white and able-bodied/neurotypical people — and that your labor is worth less. And therefore, we’re not going to pay you at a rate that’s commensurate to those who are doing the same work.

VALLAS: And Valerie, something that is embodied in this phase-out, if this bill becomes law — It’s passed the House, which is a huge deal to see that happen. We should note, we’re not expecting it to pass the Senate anytime soon while it’s still under Republican control, nor are we expecting this president to sign that bill into law anytime soon. But a huge deal nonetheless to see it pass the House of Representatives for the first time. We’ve got lots of applause happening here that you can’t see in the studio. But part and parcel of that would also end up being the closure of so-called sheltered workshops that really mistreat people and devalue people with disabilities and their labor.

NOVACK: Yeah. And I think a lot, like Azza mentioned, how rested on ableism that is. And I think when we look at our policy, sometimes there’s a chicken or the egg kind of question, right? Is it imitating the attitudes that we have as a culture, or is it creating those attitudes? And the other thing that you hear that was often used as a justification for these sheltered workshops is that, well, employers wouldn’t, won’t hire these people. At least they have somewhere to go. That kind of thing. And how often is this the same kind of language that we hear around people that we otherwise don’t think very highly of? I’ve heard the same kind of language used for say, homeless people, right? Well, we got to put them somewhere kind of thing. And so, all of that language that surrounds even why we created.

So, originally, and Azza mentioned this a little bit, the idea was that it would be like a training. You’d get a skill that then you could take out into the real world. And that was kind of thrown out very, very early on.

ROSSNER: Just a stat on that: only 5 percent of people have ever transitioned out of a sheltered workshop setting.

NOVACK: Yep. So, from the beginning, this was not, you know, it may have been on paper the goal but was not what was intended. And even now when we have some pushback, and rightly so on this part, a lot of the people that are worried are people whose children are now adults who have been in these sheltered workshop for a really long time. And they don’t know what’s going to happen next once this is phased out. But all of this has been steeped in this idea that this is the only environment that they can thrive, and that no one else will give them a chance. And I don’t know. It’s interesting to me when we look at the ableism that’s there, if we’ve fed that to employers by saying, “Well, we’re going to house all these people in these sheltered workshops because this is all they can do.” So, now that’s what employers are going to think. Or if that was something that employers were asking for in the first place, right? Because we see the feelgood stories all the time of, “Oh yeah, you know, I hired this person with whatever disability, and they’re the best worker I have.” Or, “They make everybody’s day,” or whatever. And then have a bunch of these same people just kind of housed all over the country in the dark, and we’re kind of not talking about it and really kind of exploiting that labor. Because even though we do — and we have the same conversation when we talk about people who do home health care — we say that it’s unskilled, therefore it’s OK that they’re being paid less. But obviously, they are contributing in a major way to the businesses they are helping. So, whether you’re considering that skilled or not, it’s a necessary job that’s being done and should be paid as such.

VALLAS: And Gabriela helpfully hopped in with that really egregious number of how many, how few people end up successfully transitioning out of a program that’s not really supposed to be forever for anyone. People might be wondering how widespread are these programs. The numbers vary somewhat widely, but it is in the hundreds of thousands at this point of people who are still in sheltered workshops. Gabriela, what are some of the other things we should know?

ROSSNER: Yeah. So, the current number of people who currently earn a sub-minimum wage, not necessarily in sheltered workshops, but the majority is a sheltered workshop setting, is 321,000 people. So, that’s a significant number of adults earning sub-minimum wage. The average sub-minimum wage, just to give more numbers to the story, is about a third of the federal minimum wage, which is already currently very low. So, that’s $2.50 an hour. As Azza mentioned, people can get paid pennies an hour. One worker surveyed was paid four cents an hour for their labor. And I think one thing, as a youth, that is particularly egregious to me is the tracking of students with disabilities into sheltered workshops.

Although the current law states that students with disabilities need to be provided with transition services to transition them into competitive, integrated employment, need to be told of all their options for how they can succeed after high school, there are currently 2,000 high school students performing labor for sub-minimum wage for large corporations. And these students are expected to work in sheltered workshops once they graduate. That, to me, is just egregious because these students are in school to learn. They deserve the same educational opportunities for everyone else. And instead, because their value has been determined to be in the cheap labor that they can produce, the other values, for example, their intellectual value, is being completely just ignored in favor of the physical value that they can provide for CEOs who make millions of dollars.

VALLAS: And I want to give a shout out to our friends at Rooted in Rights who produced a fantastic documentary not that long ago, about two years back, called Bottom Dollar. Which for anyone who wants to learn more about this issue and really hear from some of the people who themselves have been stuck in sheltered workshops when they should be out in the competitive employment world doing all kinds of things, and in some cases, have left and have gone on to be that executive director or the litigation director for major disability organizations when just not that long ago, they had been stuck in a room sorting small objects because that was what they had been viewed as being capable of. So, Bottom Dollar. We’ll have it on our nerdy syllabus page. Well worth the watch.

So, going back to you, Azza, it’s somewhat of a tension every time we, as disability advocates, mark the Americans with Disabilities Act anniversary. There’s lots to celebrate. You can really enumerate important successes and points of progress. But yet there remains this ongoing tension while you’re in a celebratory place in one part of your brain with the other part of your brain that’s reminding you that we still have a hell of a lot farther to go almost three decades after this bill became a law. And one of the things that you’ve really spent a lot of your time at the Center for American Progress and in the Disability Justice Initiative focused on is, you’ve been describing the sub-minimum wage piece of this and the Raise the Wage Act. But more broadly, developing what at an economic agenda for people with disabilities truly could look like. And you actually are just putting that big report out this week as CAP marks the — [laughs] You’re making a face while I say that! It is this week indeed. While CAP marks the 29th anniversary of the ADA. What does that economic agenda look like? Paint a picture for us.

ALTRAIFI: Absolutely. So, one thing that I’ll say about marking the anniversary of the ADA is for me, it carries two things. One, it’s this hallmark and culmination of so much important activism that comes out of the disability rights movement. And with that, a recognition that a rights-based approach leaves out those without immediate access to legal avenues for relief. And those are going to be the people who are most marginalized by these systems. And so, that is a tension that I hold and I take very seriously. And so, in thinking about what an economic agenda looks like that really advances economic security for all people with disabilities, it requires thinking about those tensions and figuring out how to advance things in a system that was ultimately not designed or built for us, and particularly those of us who are a multiply marginalized.

So, it recognizes that in this hyper-capitalistic, ableist, white supremacist system, our value is tied to our labor output. And so, some of the things that need to be put in place need to begin challenging the very ideological basis of that connection. And that means advancing housing for everyone that’s accessible and affordable. It means recognizing that everyone deserves access to health care that integrates long-term services and supports. Because everyone should have access to those things. Period point blank, right? It involves a recognition that people also who are working must be valued for their labor in a way that their peers who don’t have disabilities are.

And so, we were just talking about sub-minimum wage, and I want to name explicitly that at the core of this, is a stratification of who matters based on what their economic output is. That’s how our society is structured, and that’s deeply problematic. And at the same time, we’re seeing that sub-minimum wage basically captures who’s at the bottom and who’s at the top. And for people who end up caught at the intersection of being both disabled and black, for example, you are most likely to be impacted by this. And so, this agenda really tries to find ways to capture that population that is so frequently left out of both our discourse and conversations on this, but also for sure left out of our policies. And so, the agenda tries to kind of create a roadmap that recognizes that this is a roadmap that’s using policy levers that are supposed to be kind of pulled within a system that is inherently built and designed around this myth that you are your labor output, but also recognizes that there are immediate steps that can be taken right now that can have meaningful impact in people’s lives.

VALLAS: And Gabriela, you’ve been doing a lot of research and work with Azza and with Valerie around this anniversary, around this report. There’s a lot of policy in there and really a roadmap as Azza was describing. But there’s also a lot of really rich research telling the story about how disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty because of our broken systems and broken agenda.

ROSSNER: Yeah. OK. So, going off of what Azza said about multiply marginalized folks and us being kind of in a system that doesn’t necessarily a, value for our labor, but still creates a system of valuation based on labor, the research I’ve been doing has been partially historical. And I focused a lot on early institutionalization, particularly institutions catered specifically towards black folk, which gave me a really interesting lens to look at the labor of early disabled folks. Because what most folks don’t know is that therapy was considered labor in early institutions. So, you had primarily black institutions taking people and making them pick cotton as part of work therapy, making them do janitorial work as part of work therapy, having them staff white institutions as part of work therapy. And I think that’s the system that has just created the system we’re in now in which disabled people, particularly disabled people of color’s, labor is not seen as labor worth monetary value, but instead somehow intrinsic to their condition to be helping other folks. It is part of society. Society relies on the unpaid labor of multiply-marginalized disabled people of color to run, and it relies on not paying them to run.

VALLAS: We were talking before about sheltered workshops, and you’re talking now about institutions, which in a lot of ways, are another avenue wherein people with disabilities are actively warehoused and by the many thousands when they could very well live in the community with the right types of supports and services. That’s a huge part of what Azza’s report talks about because you really cannot separate an economic agenda from a health care and independent living agenda when it comes to people with disabilities. But a big part of this conversation also has to do with our prisons and our jails. And Valerie, that’s a lot of the work that you’ve done.

NOVACK: Yeah. And I think that both Azza and Gabriela paint this really perfect picture that sort of ends or ends up when we talk about the prison system because as great of a win as this has been with the phase-out of 14 C, it doesn’t touch the fact that people in prisons are still going to be making significantly under minimum wage for this labor that they’re being forced to do. We’ve seen, I think the most angry I’ve ever seen anybody about this was over the Paradise Fires a couple years ago and people saying, “Well, these same people couldn’t even get a job at this fire department, but they’re getting paid a dollar a day to fight these fires,” right?

VALLAS: These people being prisoners whose labor was fighting fires.

NOVACK: Right. But that wasn’t a special case circumstance, right? And they’re making significantly under. And then when we talk, you know, Azza and I were just at a panel on mental health awhile back and got, this was just actually last week, so the most recent data I think we got was saying 75 percent of inmates that were currently in the prison system either had a past mental health diagnosis or were receiving mental health services. And so, what we’re talking about when we’re talking about disabled people and their labor, this isn’t only in the sheltered workshops. It isn’t only in the institutions. And in some of these instances, phasing out 14 C is going to make sure that they can get fairly compensated for that labor, but it doesn’t touch the 75 percent of prisoners who are also people with disabilities that will continue to make sub-minimum wage.

I think it also, to call back out to Azza, I think the other thing that we don’t necessarily talk about that’s very culturally specific is how much that dollar amount means to your status. So, I think it’s not only, when we talk about how far to go, I think it’s not only do you get paid $15 an hour or your minimum wage, but even what we talk about as being good labor and what we talk about as being — I think about some of the work that people are doing in sheltered workshops, and you talk about putting bristles into toothbrushes or things like that that regardless of the dollar amount they’re getting paid, we’re automatically thinking because of the type of labor that person does, they must not be worthy of X, Y, Z, right? But everybody uses a toothbrush. Or I hope, I guess everybody uses a toothbrush.

VALLAS: Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.

NOVACK: [laughs] You know, so, really, the worth that that person has in doing that is astronomical, but that’s not the way that we look at it. And that’s a cultural shift that isn’t going to change just because they’re making more money for doing that. That we really need to talk about, when we talk about ableism, because we’re saying, “Well, they can only do that because they’re only capable of doing that. Therefore they must be down here on this hierarchy that Azza’s talking about.” But everything that somebody does, whether they do that part-time or full-time, whether they make 10 cents or $15 or $1,500, should be valued for what they’re able to contribute when they are able to contribute that. And that’s a really big lesson that we’re not going to learn and a change that we’re not going to have just by changing how much money people make. Not that that’s not an extremely important part of that conversation, but I think it’s much bigger than that. But there’s very real life consequences like health care that are also attached to work that make things like Raise the Wage so important.

VALLAS: Don’t go away. We need to take a short break. More Off-Kilter with the DJI crew coming up after this short break.

[Hip Hop music break]

Welcome back to Off-Kilter. We’ve got another Disability Justice Initiative, DJI, takeover underway because it’s the 29th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So, that’s what we’re doing. And I’m hanging out with Valerie Novack and Azza Altraifi and also Gabriela Rossner, all of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. They’ve all been in studio with me and are sticking around for this whole episode.

Azza, you were about to weigh in on what Valerie was just talking about, that intersection of our prison industrial complex with all of the ableism that is fueling it quite quietly and without nearly enough attention from the mainstream media, but also how that intersects with people not being able to be paid a fair wage and not be appropriately valued by our society. You were about to weigh in as well.

ALTRAIFI: Absolutely. And I think the thread that both Gabriela and Valerie were just speaking to is the fact that the way the prison economy functions, the exploitation that it is built on, is really the logical end of what Gabriela was talking about, right? And our presentation that Valerie alluded to about the history of the mental health care system, but also just the history of ableism and racism as tools employed by the state in order to extract labor and to do so in ways that will cost the state as little as possible, that is how we get to a prison economy that works like this. That is how we get to a carceral state like the one that we have. Because even though people who are incarcerated are not statutorily exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, courts said the relationship between prisons and the people that they incarcerate is not one of an employer to an employee, and that their labor is therefore rehabilitative. That is not very distinct from saying, “This labor that we will extract from you is therapy.” And so, this isn’t just us saying ableism and anti-blackness are connected and you can’t dismantle one without the other, it is because the state has literally embedded in all of these institutional arrangements both of those structures in order to extract cheap labor. Because the story of race and the story of repression in this country is the story of labor. And so, as we talk about this and as we talk about who is going to see their wages go up and who happens to conveniently be left out of it, we have to recognize the historical through-line that brought us to the current moment….

VALLAS: We’re just taking a brief moment to snap. A little bit of snapping happening.

ROSSNER: Yeah. Just directly echoing that point, it’s worth noting that the labor that these people are performing isn’t voluntary. We often think of labor as something that you choose to do to gain benefits. And in all the cases that we’re talking about, in sub-minimum wage sheltered workshops, in prisons, and in institutions, labor is not voluntary. Your rehabilitation counselor can punish you and deny you services if you do not go into a sheltered workshop. You can be put in solitary if you do not perform your work tasks for the day. In institutions, like, oh gosh. The things they would do to you if you did not do work therapy. So, I think it’s two parts. It’s recognizing that this labor’s not voluntary labor, and also recognizing that yeah, as Azza said, the entire system is based on extracting non-voluntary labor from folks.

VALLAS: Which is hard to also tease apart from the ongoing conversation that we’re having and debate that we’re having about work reporting requirements: the idea of taking away basic survival benefits from people as punishment for not being able to hold down a steady job with a certain number of hours per week or per month. And that actually implicates health care as well as housing and food in this administration’s playbook, with people with disabilities being many of the people who are bearing the brunt of those policies as they get rolled out, and in a lot of ways, because of the way that their value and their worth are viewed. But I didn’t mean to cut you off as you were —

ROSSNER: No, that was my second thought exactly, was that because we have this system that has valued people off the free labor that they can non-voluntarily produce, we do not recognize the basic humanity of people who cannot produce labor, who, for a variety of reasons are unable to work, who don’t want to work. We see these people as non-contributing citizens, as drains on our society rather than gains to our society. And they are excluded from basic rights like health care, excluded from government benefits like SNAP, issuing work requirements, stuff like that. And it’s interesting that we have this dichotomy of people forced into work for no benefits and people unable to work who also get no benefits.

ALTRAIFI: As long as you’re poor, right?

NOVACK: I had a teacher who used to call them ladies who lunch, right? The idea of the rich wife who is on boards for a living. I don’t find there being a problem with that. Most of our culture does not find a problem with that as long as you’re “self-sufficient,” right? If you’re not taking SNAP benefits or something like that, then it’s perfectly fine to not have a job and to dedicate your time in other ways that don’t fit into labor production in the way that we normally think of it.

VALLAS: Even if you get huge tax cuts, which are just a different form of welfare.

NOVACK: [laughing] Yes! Which is a whole other conversation. Right. But if you are a struggling family, and you want to be a stay at home mom because you realistically can’t afford health care, suddenly that’s a very different conversation than being a lady who lunches. So, I think everything Gabriela said is 100 percent true. But sometimes there are parts of our economic hierarchy that that doesn’t necessarily apply to.

We have a big thing right now with financial independence and the idea of doing extreme retirement savings so that you can retire early. And how many times have we seen that article pop up on Facebook or whatever where it’s like this 35 year old retired with 2 million in the bank! And how did they do it?

ROSSNER: Parents.

NOVACK: Yeah. And suddenly, sitting at home all day is a great thing to do if you’ve saved up $2 million to do it. But if you’re disabled and can’t do it, then suddenly, you’re a drain of resources, right? So, I think for the majority of us, that’s very much the way the world works. But then those same rules don’t apply all the way around, right?

VALLAS: So, staying with you for a minute, Valerie, another tension that is incredibly apparent throughout this conversation and throughout not just every year that the ADA anniversary is marked and is celebrated, but really, this particular year in a lot of regards — and this, Azza, is a lot of what your report really delves, so I want to bring you into this in just a minute — but that there’s another tension here, which is the question of how do we work to achieve economic gains for people with disabilities? How do we build that inclusive economic agenda that Azza and all of you we’re just outlining that doesn’t leave people with disabilities behind? But while also working to dismantle the structures and the establishments that are themselves perpetuating and reinforcing the marginalization of people with disabilities and other marginalized communities?

NOVACK: I think it’s a really, really hard balance to try to strike, and I worry that as this phase-out happens, we’re going to start to see that. And even just if we were to take away the 14 C conversation and just talk about the Raise the Wage part, what that’s going to look like when we start looking at asset limits, when we start looking at things like SNAP benefits, where we have some of these cliffs where somebody is going to be moved into a situation where yes, they are making more money — that’s fantastic because you can’t live on $7.25 an hour — but is going to push them into a place where maybe they lose some life-sustaining benefits.

And so, I think one of the big things that we have to focus on that is so baked into our culture is that the only way that you’re worthy of life-sustaining anything is if you’re working to get it. And as long as we continue to push that, then things like housing and health care and food are only a right if you have a job and if you have a job that somebody considers worthy. And because we’ve operated under that, now it’s like so many different qualifiers go into what your dollar amount is in order to access these rights. And so, we have these arbitrary lines that say, “OK. Well, now you make this much. You no longer can can receive this as a right. You got to pay for it on your own.” Now we’re going to have people that are straddling that line, and that’s going to be really, really scary for people with disabilities who are maybe at that minimum wage, maybe more so than people who make sub-minimum wage, that are right at that minimum-wage level that are suddenly going to have to worry about, well, do I lose my health care because I’m going to be able to save now? And so, this becomes a really, really complex question when everything we have set is built on exploiting people for labor. And then anything that will sustain their life or increase their quality of life can be taken away when you’re able to extract that labor for a little bit more expensive of a price, right?

VALLAS: Azza, I want to pose the same question to you in part because you alluded to this in one of your earlier answers. But the disability justice framework is distinct from the concept of disability rights, and that’s a big part of what Valerie’s getting at here with talking about the intersections between ableism and racism and capitalism. You guys have talked about this on this show before, but it’s been a minute since we’ve had a DJI takeover So, remind us about disability justice and how it’s it’s different from disability rights and why it makes something like capitalism relevant to this conversation.

ALTRAIFI: Oh, absolutely. And I’ll be really explicit. The disability justice framework is one that recognizes that because people are their labor in this system, the only way to actually achieve justice for those who cannot access equity and cannot access support through the legal mechanisms that we have today, for those people, we have to embody an anti-capitalist politic. There is no choice but to embody an anti-capitalist politic, and explicitly because the only way in which people can be valued in their full complexity and in their full humanity is to recognize that autonomy and self-sufficiency is a myth. That we are all dependent upon one another. And so, the way that we get to a place where we are both advancing people’s rights and economic security and it moving us towards justice, but do so in a way that doesn’t accidentally entrench the very systems we are trying to dismantle, it’s actually not that complicated.

What we need to do is put in place policies and advance policies that ultimately disentangle housing and food and nutrition and clean air and clean water and obviously healthcare. All of these things need to be disentangled from our perceived economic labor output. And I want to put emphasis on perceived because often, what’s actually happening is the state designating what is and is not actual labor and determining, therefore, what does and does not deserve a wage, and then taken a little bit further, what does and doesn’t deserve a living wage. Because there is nowhere in the United States today that a $7.25 wage will give you a two-bedroom house or apartment. Nowhere.

So, as we are now, where we are now, we have decided that there is an entire segment of the population that does not deserve to live, let alone to live with dignity. And the disability justice framework tells us how we embody a politic that gets us to justice. And ultimately, what I always tell people, and the way that I move through these spaces recognizing that I exist as a black disabled Muslim woman, and therefore my very existence kind of breaks down these perceptions, is that I’m not trying to appeal to the morality of folks who rely on a system that seeks to break me. What I am trying to do is transform the political landscape and the political systems so that it becomes too costly for them to continue moving in the ways that they have been. And so, that’s our charge. And when we think about what policies we can enact today and what policies we are aiming for 10, 15, and 20 years down the road, they’re the ones that make it too costly for us to continue to dehumanize people to the point where we feel that they don’t deserve housing and they don’t deserve nutrition and they don’t deserve clean air and water simply because the state has designated them to be something other than fully human.

VALLAS: Gabriela, you looked like you wanted to get in on that as well.

ROSSNER: I mean I just want to say yes to all that! [all laugh]

VALLAS: It feels right.

ROSSNER: And also add the nuance that I think the state, in some instances, is using lever output as an excuse to target the people that it doesn’t want in this country. [others snap fingers] You know, your point on how making it too costly for them to continue this current system, it’s more expensive to have private insurance than it is Medicare for all. It’s more expensive to continue having a homeless population than to put everyone in homes. Yet so-called fiscal conservatives choose the more expensive option because it is the option that denies humanity to people who they do not see as fully human.

VALLAS: I’ll offer one more side-by-side that’s particularly timely given the Trump administration’s massive regulatory attack on the food stamp program, which one in four people who receive SNAP are people with disabilities, just a little reminder. And that side-by-side that I will offer is that just not that long ago, about a year ago in fact, Trump gave more in tax cuts to the richest 1 percent in this country than….the cost of the entire SNAP program. Just going to let that sink in.

NOVACK: And that’s why I feel…. I love the way that Azza laid it out, but would maybe take issue with saying that it’s really quite simple. Because on paper it is, right? But what we’re actually dealing with is a change of mindset and culture. We’ve attached morality to work. We’ve attached worth to work. Meaning to work. And so, it’s really a cultural shift, which is something that is much harder to do than maybe just passing policy.

I remember growing up as a kid and especially coming from minority parents, this idea that your work was your dignity, and that if you couldn’t work, not that if you couldn’t work, but if you didn’t work, that that said something, that said more about you than anything that we do to people that don’t work says about our country, right? Somehow, if I chose not to work, that said more about my moral failings than the fact that we regularly vote not to feed and house people who don’t have money. And now that I’m older, I really don’t understand that. But I also know that that experience was not singular, that a lot of people are fed that exact thing: that somehow, you are bad for not doing that. But we’re not bad when we vote to not house these people.

And so, while the solution might be simple, getting people to that solution point, I think, is a really huge deal. And because there is just so much thought put into how do we continue this oppression? How do we continue to have a have and have not situation? And then the pitting of the sort of have nots against each other. As long as there’s someone further under me that I’ve done a little bit better than, then I don’t have to look up and see who’s actually holding me down.

VALLAS: Crabs in the barrel. If Patrick Cokley we’re here, he’d telling us that’s what it is.

NOVACK: And that is a tremendous feat, I think, to get to those simple policy solutions because we have given so much power over to what we think of people based off their labor output.

VALLAS: Now you’re talking about culture change, and we oh. We need to take a quick break, so don’t go away. More Off-Kilter after the break. And apparently, we’ll still be talking about culture change with the Disability Justice Initiative group.

[Hip Hop music break]

You’re listening to Off-Kilter. I’m Rebecca Vallas. And it’s another Disability Justice Initiative takeover. We’ve been talking a little bit about the need for culture change, and Azza, you were about to, or actually, no, I was about to ask you a question! That’s the true statement. I was about to go over to you to bring you in on this because something that you have been doing a ton of thinking and talking and talking to the media about is the need to rethink the word “crazy” as part of this push towards culture change. Because the language that we use, not just our policies, really does matter and ends up reinforcing the ableism and other marginalization and oppression structures that we’ve been talking about, inadvertently. And I want to bring you in to talk a little bit about that because a couple of weeks ago when I was at Netroots Nation, and you guys, actually, you were there as well Azza, I was sharing with people on radio row how Off-Kilter had decided to join a few other media platforms like Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC in banning the word “crazy.” We’ve decided to ban it from our airwaves. We don’t want to contribute to the problem. And so, when guests use that word, we’re just bleeping it out like other four letter words. But I was sharing that with people on radio row, and a number of progressives who are thoughtful, wonderful people were sort of looking back at me and asking the honest follow-up question: “OK, I get that people are saying that this word is a problem. I get that people are saying I should retire it from my lexicon. But I guess I don’t really understand.” So, for anyone who really is trying to understand and wants to know why the use of this word could be a problem, what would you say to them?

ALTRAIFI: I would tell them that language is not only important, language is political. And so, when we use terms like “crazy,” what we are talking about are things that we believe, at best, deviate from some norm, or at worst, are things that we hate, things that are repulsive or scary to us. And those are the terms that’ve been ascribed to people who live with mental illness, and particularly people who live with serious mental illness. And I say to everyone who feels like I’m just trying to police their language is usually what I hear, as someone who does live with serious mental illness, as someone who identifies as mad as a way for me to personally reclaim that, if you choose not to retire that language, you are saying that my life is not worth that adjustment. And if you choose not to retire that language, it tells me that it is easier for you to otherize people who you see as potentially dangerous, people who you see as not worthy of dignity.

And so, the term is one that I think encapsulates why, for people in our community, we still face — And I don’t like the term “stigma,” so I do not use it. Because I think it’s long past time we move from a stigma paradigm to an anti-oppression paradigm. And so, I will say explicitly, the use of the word “crazy” and how embedded it is into our cultural lexicon also speaks to the ways in which we face such entrenched oppression. It is no surprise that if people feel that way about what it means to be “crazy,” that we are so much more likely to be unemployed, to be houseless, to be incarcerated, and to be shot and killed by police, by otherizing us that way, you have ascribed to us that we are dangerous, that we are potentially violent, and that we are somehow other and not deserving of life and dignity.

NOVACK: I think when you get those questions, one thing might be to just ask them, “Go back and listen to when you use it.” And it will line up to all those things that Azza was saying. If you go back and listen to your last couple shows, when and what were you talking about when you used that as a descriptor? And then imagine that that’s what you’re saying to every person who has serious mental illness, right? Because people really think it’s benign, but they don’t necessarily conflate the two. And it’s like, what situation are you talking about when you say, “Whoa, that was crazy?” Or, “That person was crazy.” What is it that they’re doing? What were you describing? And then imagine that’s what you’re saying to everybody else who has that diagnosis of being crazy.

ALTRAIFI: And I’ll also say, honestly, once I decided I need to remove all ableist and sanist language from my vocabulary, my insult game and the language that I use to describe things got so much better!

VALLAS: Because you had to be more creative, right?

NOVACK: Yeah!

ALTRAIFI: Yeah. Like what was it, two weeks ago? Someone tweeted something really outrageous, and I was like, “You capitalism Muppet.” And that was just a thing that people liked, and I was like, would not have come up with that before because everyone else jumps to an ableist term instead. So, I challenge all of you because truly, it is going to be the best gift you give yourself.

VALLAS: Azza with the carrot, not just the stick. [all laugh] Very helpful. Yeah. You, too, could call people capitalist Muppets. Why miss out on that opportunity?

ALTRAIFI: Just credit me.

VALLAS: Just credit Azza. Azza on Twitter.

So, I want to stick with this culture change piece for really the bulk of the time that we have left because we’re also in the middle of quite a lot for the disability community as this ADA anniversary comes and moves through this week. And it’s a lot to do with a lot of the themes that we’ve been talking about, the tensions that we’ve been talking about, and some of the intersections that we’ve been talking about, particularly race. People who are listening may be aware of some of what I’m referring to here because a lot of this has been very publicly happening on Twitter and on social media, and some of it with the hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite. So, I want to take a positive approach to this chunk of the conversation by saying that — and I want you guys to share a little bit of the details of what I’m referring to so everyone has the same information to start with here — but is it fair to say that we are at a moment that feels something like a turning point between an old guard, very white, very physical disability-led leadership structure within this community that is now being forced to make some space and make way for a new generation of leaders who are a hell of a lot more diverse and are putting that disability justice rather than disability rights framework front and center? Does it feel like that’s what’s happening in this particular year with some of the drama you guys will describe?

NOVACK: I sure hope so.

VALLAS: I’m looking over at you first here, Valerie.

NOVACK: OK. I mean I sure hope so. I think sometimes, it’s a little early to tell. But I hope, especially with some of the organizations we’ve seen this kind of come out of in the last couple of weeks, are or the individuals, are people that have a history of this kind of behavior and haven’t been called on it this way before. So, to me, that is the part that I’m looking at as seeing signal of change, is that when we saw some of these same complaints happen a couple of years ago, when we’ve seen some of these abuses play out online, there was much less of a concerted effort by people, whether they were directly affected or not, in saying, “We will not stand for this,” like we’ve seen in the past week and a half. And to me, that’s a really positive sign. As we’ve seen with a lot of situations like this, whether it’s in the disability community or elsewhere though, there has to be that forward-thinking sustainability. You know, we had the sort of benefit, I think, of all of this happening within ADA week, where you had a lot of people in the community congregated together, or you knew they were going to be talking to each other soon. And so, hopefully, that momentum continues when we all disperse back into our states and the work that we do on a daily basis, and we’re maybe not all together feeding off this energy to see if those changes will be sustained. But I think seeing some of that change where we haven’t before and that demand for accountability where we haven’t before, I think, is a good sign.

VALLAS: And Azza, do you want to describe a little bit of some of what we’re referring to for anyone who hasn’t been following this?

ALTRAIFI: I can. So, about a week and a half ago now it’s been, a video surfaced of the leader of ADAPT, Bruce Darling, and also the board chair of the National Council on Independent Living that was using language that pitted the disability community against people who are immigrants. And the way that he did it was basically by saying legislators are focused so much on undocumented folks, and they’ve forgotten about disabled citizens. And for me in particular, as someone who’s the daughter of Sudanese immigrants and who’s a black Afro-Arab person, not only was I horrified by this, but to be perfectly honest, there was the sense of again, right? Like there was just this deep sigh that I did as I watched that video.

Because what I often see that comes — and I’m just going to be very frank — what I often see happens from white disabled folks who are advocating for disability rights is a framework that tells me what they’re actually pushing for is to join the ranks of those who get the full benefits of white privilege instead of them feeling like they were promised more. Like, I’m white, so I’m supposed to have more than this, and somehow I don’t have everything. And it comes from this place of deep entitlement recognizing that as a white person, you’re supposed to have it all, and I have slightly less than that, and so I’m going to actually frame my advocacy in a way where it’s anger at other people who are also advocating for justice and are trying to exist in a system that’s trying to oppress them. And so, I felt resignation, but I also feel hope because I know that those of us who are multiply marginalized, those of us who have always existed in these spaces and have seen this racism are not afraid to call it out and have been pushing for accountability. And we’ve been doing it a long time, but it seems like this is the first time folks are starting to listen.

VALLAS: I want to give a shout out to one of our friends and colleagues, Matt Cortland, Medicaid Matt as many know him on Twitter, because he was one of the people who publicized that video that you’re referring to that caused it to start to gain attention, so that there was an accountability moment that was forced. And the end of that story, as Valerie was referring to, was that that leader who you mentioned had said those horrible things and been sort of caught saying the quiet part out loud, ended up being forced to resign from his board chairmanship at NCIL and also in his role with ADAPT. No, I am wrong on that front, and Gabriela is correcting me! He has not stepped down from his ADAPT role and is still in that role. That’s a really important thing to get right here.

But Gabriela you were noting, as you’ve been following the story closely as well, as you all have, that there was actually a statement that was going to be read on the dais at the conference that was sort of what kicked all of this off.

ROSSNER: Yeah. So, a group of primarily black, indigenous, and people of color met yesterday at the conference, staged a direct action during the awards presentation, and again staged a direct action today, just a couple of minutes ago — you can probably find it on Twitter — at the closing plenary for the conference. So, that action, I think ,as Valerie said, could be a sign of good things to come. The fact that an action occurred, the fact that the action was met with positive reactions from some is a sign that perhaps tides are shifting. But there’s also the fact that we were heckled by white people during this action. White people accused us of being divisive, of setting the disability community back, of undermining disability rights. And I think I would definitely agree with what Azza says that white folk, especially white people with acquired disabilities and especially white men with acquired disabilities, feel as though they have been robbed of their entitled privileges in this world and see their quest for disability rights as their quest for the rights that they are entitled to as white men.

VALLAS: So, a really different feel of an ADA week than maybe a lot of other weeks where it’s been somewhat sanitized, or only the public-facing parts have been visible, and all of the divides and fractures within the community have maybe not been as much on display as they have been this year, but for good reason and in ways that, I think, give all of us hope for the future.

So, in the last minute or so that we have, I want to close out on a positive note. I want to close out on a note of resilience because this has been a lot of heavy stuff in a very heavy week, particularly for you guys who have been at every ADA-related event for the past however long, right? Because that’s how ADA weeks go, as we all know in this space. But so, I want to close with just a quick lightning round inspired by a friend and colleague of all of us, Mia Ives-Rublee who’s currently a consultant with the Ford Foundation but is involved with the disability caucus of the Women’s March and a whole range of other different amazing, progressive spaces. She has been lately inspiring a lot of us to tweet using the hashtag #JoyInResistance to try to find the joy where we can, particularly in weeks like this one. So, what is it that all of you guys are doing to find joy in resistance this moment? And I want to start with you, Valerie, and we’ll go around.

NOVACK: Oh, you shouldn’t because my thing is never joy for anybody. But I’m really excited to go home and run. So, [chuckles] I’m training for a marathon right now, so I have a lot of running to do. So, Azza’s giving me very dirty looks but, I’m excited for that.

ALTRAIFI: I am. The only time you’ll see me running is if I’m running away from something.

VALLAS: [laughs]

NOVACK: But afterwards, I probably have ice cream and chips, so.

ALTRAIFI: And I support Valerie. She’s awesome. I just can’t relate.

VALLAS: Gabriela, what are you doing to find joy in resistance if it’s not running either when you’re being chased or not?

ROSSNER: I will be chased, and I will still not run. I will walk away. [all laugh] Walk away from the running bear.

VALLAS: Actually, you’re not supposed to run from bears anyway, so keep that in mind.

ROSSNER: I will make my posture large. I will raise my hands and be loud.

VALLAS: Good, good. Much better.

NOVACK: And bear spray.

ROSSNER: And bear spray. My joy in resistance this week is, I discovered that the hospital cafeteria on my campus sells $4.99 pints of Ben and Jerry’s.

VALLAS: Yes!

ROSSNER: Which is the cheapest pint of Ben and Jerry’s I have found anywhere. And I am going to go home and eat one.

VALLAS: And a useful PSA for many people, I am sure. And Azza, you’re going to get the last word.

ALTRAIFI: My joy is sleeping early today. I have been operating on an average of two hours a night, so this is going to be my night to sleep a full eight hours. I have it in my calendar. I’m ready. It’s going to be amazing. I’m very excited. And I will also say that joy is not only important as we are trying to build resilience, but joy is subversive, so.

VALLAS: Great note to end on. And Will agrees. Will agrees. You got a nice little solidarity show there. Thank you so much to all of you for taking the time to mark the ADA anniversary with Off-Kilter, to come back for another DJI takeover. These are some of my favorite episodes that we ever do. And there’ll be a lot on our nerdy syllabus page that people can go dig in to, to learn lots more about all the things we’ve been talking about, including Azza’s brand new report on an economic agenda for people with disabilities.

I’ve been speaking with Azza Altraifi. She is a researcher with the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, Valerie Novack, a Portlight fellow also with DJI, and Gabriela Rossner making her Off-Kilter debut, an intern with AAPD’s program that is why we get to have her here at the Center for American Progress this summer, as well as President of the Disabled Students Collective at the George Washington University. Thank you so much to all of you, and I can’t wait for the next one already.

ALL: Thank you.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart and David Ballard. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow, and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back

I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪