People of color have been missing in the disability rights movement – looking through history may help explain why

Jennifer Erkulwater is a professor of political science at the University of Richmond. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of poverty, Social Security and disability rights. Below are highlights from an interview with The Conversation. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

What is your research focused on?

Erkulwater: My current work involves trying to understand why people of color seem to be missing in debates about disability rights.

People of color, especially African Americans, are more likely to report medical impairments than whites, and yet popular media tends to showcase largely white people with disabilities. It’s an absence that’s been critiqued on social media with the hashtag #DisabilityTooWhite.

I think about this from a political angle. The history of the U.S. disability rights movement is almost exclusively a history of white people. Political debates about disability rarely focus on the distinctive ways that people of color experience disability. I’ve tried to understand that silence. My work has looked largely at the role that public policy, namely the Social Security Act, has played in defining disability as white, as well as the strategies of disability organizations to create a coherent social movement of people with disabilities.

What would people find surprising about your work?

Erkulwater: It’s not that the absence of people of color among people with disabilities was surprising because I kind of knew that just studying the politics of poverty. People of color and people with disabilities are much more likely to experience spells of poverty, rely on income support and struggle with unemployment than the general population. But I also knew political debates about access and employment for people with disabilities tend to center on the needs and experiences of whites. I wanted to figure out why that was the case.

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