Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series exploring ableism and the rhetoric that sustains it.
I’m standing in the basement of Cal Poly Humboldt’s Founders Hall looking out the window at the rain while I wait for my ride home from work. Next to me is a student who is using crutches to get around. After a few minutes of silence, she asks who I’m waiting for. I tell her my wife is coming to get me, that I’m done for the day (save all the outlines that need grading) and then I ask her the same thing.
She tells me what I expected: She is waiting for the shuttle from the Campus Disability Resources Center (CDRC) to take her to her next class. Using crutches on the walkways to and from Founders Hall isn’t simply difficult, it is treacherous. Your options are limited to extremely steep drives, flights of stairs or a meandering zig-zag footpath. The path is very nice on clear days, but on days like today, when it not only hasn’t stopped raining but will not stop raining, finding a direct route is important. Thank goodness there’s a shuttle.
She tells me she broke her foot over break, and that she was frustrated because, while the shuttle service is helpful, getting approval to use it “took forever.” She said when she applied for authorization to book the rides, she was told she would have to wait two weeks. “I was lucky I had my mom to advocate on my behalf,” she said. “It’s like they didn’t see it as urgent at all.”
This puts me in a difficult position. On the one hand, I know people who work in the CDRC and I know they care a lot about their jobs and try hard to do the best they can with the resources available. On the other hand, I know the institution responsible for funding and staffing the CDRC is — and has been — aware of this problem (“A Segregated Campus,” Sept. 5, 2024).
Another student I met sued the university. This was a few years back. She got a settlement and was told to never return to a California State University campus. So far as I know, none of the major issues that lead to her lawsuit have changed. There are still no accessible bathrooms in numerous buildings, and often no fire escape equipment or evacuation information for wheelchair users. “In case of fire, use stairs,” the signs say. All of this is known at my school but apparently there is never anything we can do. “It’s too bad,” is a perennial refrain.
I too learned how difficult it is to get accommodation for mobility-related issues. For years I worked in a building that has no elevator and no ramp, yet still houses a department at my school. I was required to navigate 28 stairs every time I wanted to print or get office supplies or go to the trophy case for the debate team I coached. When I requested a printer in the basement, I was given something like the one I have at home. It was left sitting, uninstalled, on the chair students sit in when they come to my office. It didn’t staple; it frequently would not connect to my office computer. I spent several hours over several weeks booking meetings to troubleshoot and eventually asked for an office in an accessible place that would let me use a departmental printer like all my peers. That request took nearly two years to go through, and I climbed stairs (hundreds probably) the whole time. Falling was a frequent concern. There were several “close calls.”
I have a vivid memory from growing up. I’m maybe 9 or 10, I’ve just had surgery on my knee (one of more than a dozen I had as a kid on joints throughout my body) and I am using crutches coming down the stairs at my friend’s house after playing with all the other kids in his bedroom. The parents are in the kitchen and as I turn on the staircase, the rubber bumper at the end of my crutch sticks on the railing. The momentum I’d accumulated moving forward pressed me into the armrest of the crutch, which suddenly felt more like a pole vault. I spun, toppled, hit a wooden barrier going along the wall, then the stairs, and I slid all the way to the bottom. I remember being scared, then experiencing blunt pain as the stairs impacted my body, followed by shooting jabs through the wounds of my healing scars. I felt bandages getting suddenly wet. I also remember a wave of shame as everyone rushed to see what happened. “Aaron fell down the stairs!” “Why was he on the stairs with crutches!?”
I once interviewed a rhetorician named James Cherney and he distinguished between disability rhetoric (the ways we speak about disability and the consequences of the terms we use) and ableist rhetoric (the way we create and maintain ableist space, which is the focus of his studies). By and large, he said society is aware of — and for the most part willing to criticize — the slurs we use to target disabled people. The richest man in the world (owner of one of the largest and most influential social media platforms on the planet) is currently working for the White House and calling people the “R word” when they disagree with him, but I think Cherney is mostly right. When I tell folks to say “wheelchair user” instead of “person in a wheelchair,” they tend to get thoughtful and most say they will try to remember to do so. The problem, Cherney says, is that there is much less willingness to interrogate ableist rhetoric. We collectively walk right by it.
Stairs are one example he takes up in his book. They are ubiquitous in America’s institutions for learning and power, and yet we all know that many of us never will be able to navigate stairs and most of the rest of us will have times in our lives when we find doing so dangerous. There are alternatives. Elevators are everywhere, while the ramp is one of the most ancient tools for engineering. The problem is rather than make the structural changes necessary to combat ableism, we convince ourselves “there is nothing we can do,” or “it’s too expensive” or “there aren’t that many disabled people here anyway.” The last apologetic is especially common, self-fulfilling and totally ignorant to the fact that there are no able-bodied people — only temporarily able-bodied people.
Ableism is living and working in spaces that are not accessible in silence. Ableism is hearing year after year, decade after decade, that wheelchair users, crutches users and people with mobility impairments are not simply struggling but risking injury to participate and saying, “We are working on this” as opposed to, “This is an emergency.”
Ableism doesn’t “just” affect disabled people. People who want to attend but cannot get in are silenced, limiting what is possible in any discussion. The strain and risks created by ableism are shared by everyone, often attributed to clumsiness or poor health. Saying “our doors are open to everyone” but not working to provide access to those doors comes off as dismissive. We’ll never know who simply goes elsewhere or what expertise they take with them when they see plain as day that they are not included. We all face these problems when we struggle in historically ableist spaces. That is, unless we decide to fix them.
Aaron Donaldson has been a collegiate educator and speech and debate coach for more than 20 years. He has lectured in the Department of Communication at Cal Poly Humboldt since 2015 and lives in Arcata with his family and two filthy dogs.
This article appears in ‘Fire Teaches Us Many Lessons’.