Closets are for brooms; not Disabled People
It would be unimaginable to have a group of straight people running Stonewall and sitting in meetings asking: “Now how do we help these LGBT people?” It would be equally unimaginable to have a group of white people running the Black Panthers and sitting in meetings asking “now how do we help these black people” or for males running a women’s group and sitting in meetings asking “how do we help these women”.
So how could it be possible and acceptable for nondisabled people to run disabled People’s organisations? You might argue “yes but you don’t know who is and who isn’t a disabled person in the disabled People’s organisation” and you would be right; how can we know?
Those of us who have obvious impairments are easily identifiable as disabled people. However, unlike the organisations mentioned above, where the status of the staff is unequivocal, or would be eventually disclosed, the staff of a disabled People’s organisation can hide, or not disclose their impairment, so their status remains unknown, ambiguous, protected and inaccessible.
It’s not very easy to discover the truth either. It’s not like you can say to someone “are you hiding an impairment” or “are you a real disabled person”. What if they said “might be; might not” or “I’d rather not say” or “it’s got nothing to do with you!” So, we’re left in a kind of limbo, wondering whether our organisations are run by people like us; who can understand what it’s like facing prejudice and discrimination on a daily basis, or run by nondisabled people.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that a person does not have to disclose impairment to employers and I can totally understand why someone would hide their impairment from the general public –in order to avoid being subjected to prejudice and discrimination. I can also understand that a person might deny their impairment to themselves as a way of defence mechanism, “I’m not one of them” kind of thing.
But I find it difficult to understand why someone would want to hide their impairment from other disabled people and pretend to be a nondisabled person in an organisation of disabled people. I was once astonished when a trustee of the organisation I working for confided in me that she had a visual impairment, which she’d hidden from everyone in the organisation for years. Surely, we need people who are out there, are proud to be disabled people not people who are ashamed and hiding in the closet.
You could argue that we need nondisabled allies, with the necessary skills or knowledge, to help us, in the same way that the woman’s movement needed male allies and the black movement needed white people as allies to help further the cause. I agree but surely if this is the case then the non-disabled professionals within an organisation of disabled people should recognise disabled people’s right to self-control and they should prioritise training for disabled people to do the jobs that nondisabled people are doing and gracefully step aside rather than gaining status, forging a career and making a living off our backs.
I think a good measurement of how far an organisation is user led is to ascertain how many of the paid staff are disabled people compared to the proportion of Disabled People employed generally. In January 2016, the UK employment rate among working age disabled people was 46.5%, compared to 84% of non-disabled people.
One would expect that there would be a higher percentage of Disabled People employed within a User-led Organisation, especially an organisation who claim to be a “Disability Confident leader” and “Mindful Employer” which means they “…work hard to employ and support disabled people” within the organisation…”.
The problem is that we have no idea about how many of the paid staff at the organisation identify as disabled people because it’s not publicised. The organisation has no qualms about publicising the fact that 75% of their trustees are disabled people because they need to demonstrate they meet the exacting criteria of the Department Health regarding its user led status. We also know that over 60% of their volunteers identify as disabled people. However, there is no mention of how many, or what percentage, of their paid staff are disabled people.
So, I think it would be reassuring for Disabled People to know how many of the salaried staff, employed by their organisation, identify themselves as disabled people and should be publicised, as a matter of transparency and accountability. Or in other words; Demonstrate the organisation’s integrity by proving that their “Disability Confident” and “Mindful Employer” status is more than just words and an active commitment to action within the organisation
