Documenting Stories of Prejudice: the Discrimination Diaries

Courtesy of: http://www.itsourstory.com

It's hard to underscore the importance of the personal testimonies of the Discrimination Diaries that lead to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Just hearing statistics and third-person references about being disabled isn't the same thing as hearing what living with a disability is like, directly from someone living it.

April 1988, Justin Dart, then Chair of the Congressional Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of People with Disabilities, began traveling the country (at his own expense) to hold public hearings to gather evidence to support the need for broad anti-discrimination protections. The documents and audio recordings became the collective Discrimination Diaries. Thousands of people attended the forums to document the injustice and discrimination they faced due to their disability. There were sixty-three conferences, one in every state, including the territory of Guam. 

Civil Rights protections for disabled people was a vital purpose of the ADA. When drafting the ADA, authors asked the disability community to testify about how they faced discrimination in all areas of daily life. People testified about physical barriers to access they encountered and societal prejudices and biases.

All of the diary entries became collective evidence of the discrimination that disabled people encounter. It helped inform the ADA's final drafts, which helped policymakers and legislators understand two critical facts. 1) That a disability-rights law was right and necessary to give equal protection to citizens with disabilities; and 2) That the disability community was an important, politically potent, and unified constituency, whose votes those members of Congress would have to earn.

The ADA could have taken much longer to pass had it not been for the pride and courage of thousands of disabled people coming forward to tell their stories. Dart's dedication to the cause is something for which we should all be thankful. I believe he understood his privileged status as a wealthy man yet felt the shun of discrimination from life in a wheelchair. He used the resources he had from the experience of one aspect of his life to advocate for the equality of another part of his life. Not many people have the ability or empathy to be such a leader.

Often, people just want to tell their story and their experiences to be valued. They don't want their stories forgotten or their struggles to be for nothing. Many times they want to make the world a better place. They want to make a difference. These desires are all true for disabled people too. Dart knew this truth and thus leveraged the Discrimination Diaries' power to change the course of history for the entire disability community.

A website that contains 10,000 pages of testimonies is here.