Before I go somewhere new, somebody makes a phone call.
I know I’m always welcome. The call is to find out whether there’s a step at the front door, and if there is, how many, how big, and whether the ramp they keep describing as “around back” is an actual ramp or a sheet of plywood somebody’s cousin laid down in 2011. Or, if there even is a ramp at all.
I once called and sent a friend inside a new coffee shop with a step to ask if they had a ramp. After I made a video calling them out for not having one, people on social media called me evil, petty, a douchebag, and said I should go somewhere else.
Thirty-six years into the Americans with Disabilities Act, here’s the most useful thing I know about access. Access has almost nothing to do with how anybody feels about me.
People think it does. They use the word the way they’d use “hospitality.” We’re a very accessible workplace and everyone here is so accommodating. What they mean is that they’re nice, and if I showed up with a problem, they’d want to help.
I believe them because they’re usually telling the truth about themselves.
And then I get to the door and there’s a huge step.
The step doesn’t know they’re nice. It has no opinion about me at all. Somebody drew it on a piece of paper before I was born, a contractor poured it, an inspector signed off, and now it’s a fact sitting in concrete. Every good intention in that building is standing on the other side of it, waving.
Access is a series of decisions made in advance by people who never met me and never will. The architect, the city, the guy who set the budget, the person who chose which bathroom to renovate and which one to leave alone. They all decided whether I’d get in the room years before anyone knew there was going to be a me.
The building doesn’t know my name, so it doesn’t like me or dislike me. It has a step or it doesn’t.
Once you see it that way, the ADA stops being an abstraction and turns into one of the more clear-eyed things this country ever passed. The law was written to understood that goodwill runs out.
Goodwill is real and shouldn't go unnoticed. It’s also unreliable, unevenly distributed, and impossible to schedule. It depends on whether the manager on duty is having a good day, the person at the desk finds you sympathetic, or you’re the kind of disabled person people enjoy helping. I can tell you from experience that’s a category with a strict dress code and office hours.
Nice people are wonderful, but you can’t build a life on being liked. If my ability to attend a meeting, use a bathroom, vote, get an education, or hold a job depends on somebody deciding I’m worth the trouble that morning, then what I’ve got is a lucky streak. Lucky streaks always end.
So, the law did something unglamorous and enormous. It moved access out of the category of kindness and into the category of requirement. It made the step a problem whether or not anyone in the building is a good person. It made the answer to “can he get in” something you have to answer with a ramp instead of an apology or a free coffee.
Rights work when you’re not in the room. That’s their entire advantage over kindness. A right keeps operating on days nobody’s thinking about you and in buildings that go up after you’re dead.
Thirty-six years in, that idea has accomplished a lot. It built the curb cuts every stroller and rolling suitcase in America now depend on, the captions half the country watches TV with, and the ramp I use to get into my own life. Most of it’s invisible to the people it serves, which is the highest compliment infrastructure can get.
It’s also far from finished. I still get walked past a beautiful front entrance and around the side, past the dumpsters, to a door that needs a staff member with a key, and I’m still expected to be gracious about it, because somebody went to some trouble.
But the single thing I watch for the most, more than any individual step, is discretion coming back.
Access that depends on enforcement can go unenforced and if it depends on funding, it can get defunded at any time. When that happens, nobody announces that your rights are gone. The law sits on the books looking exactly the same. What changes is that getting in starts depending on goodwill again.
I’ve lived both versions. I know what it feels like to roll into a building that was built with me in mind, and I know the humiliation of sitting outside one, talking to a manager, and being told very warmly that they’d love to have me.
So here’s my ask on this anniversary.
Don’t thank a disabled person today (give us money). Go look at a door that you walk through without thinking about it, at work, your gym, your kid’s school, or your polling place. Ask yourself whether I could get through it. Then ask who decided that, when, and whether anybody’s checked since.
That’s the anniversary. A door, the decision behind it, and whether anyone’s looked at it lately.
Maybe rights are just temporary privileges.
I write this newsletter twice a week, on disability, healthcare, and the machinery underneath both. It’s free to read because paid subscribers keep it that way for everyone else.
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Solidarity forever.
-Steve
Excellent piece and very approachable - a requirement for when you are teaching!
An amazing piece. Thank you for all the writing you do! 👏