No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. - book reviews

Joseph C. Shapiro, No Pity: People With Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993), 372 pp., hardcover, $25.00.

Disability cuts across class lines. Everyone feels the force of the disabled community's reference to those outside the group as TABs, which stands for Temporarily Able-Bodied. Joseph Shapiro quite properly emphasizes the role of Bush advisors Evan Kemp, Jr., and Justin Dart, Jr., both wheelchair bound, in pressing George Bush to sign the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the fact that conservative politicians like Bush and Orrin Hatch have relatives and friends with disabilities, which make them sensitive to these issues. Shapiro himself is a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, not a publication noted for exposing social ills, and wrote this book while on an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship.

Yet this is a matter of special concern to those who want radical change in our social system. The at least 35,000,000 disabled Americans are disproportionately poor. Indeed, one of the swift and sure ways to get poor and stay poor in this country is to have a disability which requires the attention of doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and nursing homes, not to mention the private and public bureaucracies which thrive as part of the extraordinarily profitable American health-care industry. The poor suffer the majority of war injuries, job injuries, and disabilities due to malnutrition, polluted environments, and neglect. They have less access to technological and medical advances, which insures that the proportion of disabled in our population is certain to rise.

Shapiro recognizes the kinship between the current struggles of the disabled and the black civil rights movement of the 1960s. It is a movement that is difficult to bring into focus, since disabilities are diverse in degree and kind. He recounts the struggle of Gallaudet College students to reject the patronage of their governing board and get a deaf president, the remarkable achievements of Community Services for Autistic Children and Adults (CSAAC) in getting jobs for its members in Maryland, the broad movement for the ADA, the current struggle to replace warehousing in institutions with home attendant care and independent living, the efforts of the disabled to control their own medical technology, and the struggle to replace pity with understanding and charity with guaranteed rights. He includes an interesting short account of disability in America and a useful bibliography. He obviously hopes this book will change American perceptions about the disabled, and my hopes are with him.

This is going to be an uphill and unramped fight. Denver officials have placed a plaque at the site of the 1978 protest where nineteen wheelchair occupants blocked two buses to demand accessibility, yet this is not nearly so well known as Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus in 1955 or the resistance of the patrons of Stonewall in 1969. In one of a long series of civil disobedience actions by ADAPT--formerly American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, now American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today--seventy-five of us were brutally and spectacularly jailed in Orlando, Florida, yet this magazine was one of the very few to give national publicity to the incident. Last October ADAPT won promises from Bill Clinton after we blocked and occupied his San Francisco campaign office. Neither this nor the fact that we could not similarly occupy Bush headquarters because it was inaccessible to wheelchairs was widely reported.

When ADAPT leader Wade Blank asked for coverage from the Washington Post for a 1990 demonstration, he was told that "disability rights is not an issue ." Wade Blank died heroically trying to save his son Lincoln from drowning in February, 1993. ADAPT's April, 1993, Washington demonstration was dedicated to them. This time the Post did cover the memorial service which featured longtime supporters like Representative Pat Schroeder. The Postalso covered our parade to the White House where we reached through the bars and planted crosses to memorialize the thousands who have died unnecessarily in high-profit nursing homes, our meeting with Donna Shalala, the arrest of 115 of us while trying to meet with congressional leaders in the Capitol the next day, and our blockade of the headquarters of the American Health Care Association, the nursing home lobby, the day after that.

Yet national coverage was again minimal. Last year Dan Quayle's council was allowed to get away with delaying enforcement of ADA with the enthusiastic support of the Wall Street Journal, and this year the efforts of the principal consumers of health care to take control of their own destinies is distorted or largely ignored. Private insurance companies, medical craft guilds, pharmaceutical cartels, and nursing homes bloated with Medicaid money are all heavy campaign contributors and have a great deal of influence with the media. Stories as dramatic as the civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 are being underreported and partially suppressed. Perhaps a wide circulation of Shapiro's book will get them the attention they deserve.

J. Quinn Brisben, a free-lance writer, was the Socialist Party USA 1992 presidential candidate. His account of an ADAPT demonstration in Orlando, Florida, appeared in Monthly Review, February, 1992.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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