Decarcerating Disability by Liat Ben-Moshe

Author:Liat Ben-Moshe [Ben-Moshe, Liat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC029000 Social Science / People With Disabilities, SOC030000 Social Science / Penology, SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9781517904432
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2020-05-19T07:00:00+00:00

I quote this at length to demonstrate and then unpack prevailing wisdom and policy at that time. A few things are of note here regarding race-ability in the construction of and resistance to NIMBY. First, the embedded assumption is that integration should be sought based on analogy to, but not intersection with, racial desegregation. Second, it is implied that housing desegregation based on race was successful and was achieved—an assumption that has no merit. Although the Fair Housing Act was indeed passed, through the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the attitudes around racial segregation did not necessarily change with its introduction. Acts of intimidation and violence continued throughout the twentieth century. In the late 1970s, several counties in New York State saw varied turbulence after black families moved into predominantly white blocks or neighborhoods. In one instance, a house was torched in Long Island and a cross was burned in the front yard. In 1982, protests arose and firebombing occurred after three African American residents moved into a predominantly white apartment building in Boston. Patterns of racial segregation in housing, in cities like Chicago and Detroit, actually worsened during the 1970s and 1980s to create segregated neighborhoods that exist to this day.54 The Southern Poverty Law Center documented 130 cases of resistance to moving in by residents of color in 1989 alone.55

The analogy to “group home ghettos” also makes it appear as if race-based discrimination at that time, the mid-1980s, was now unthinkable due to laws and housing policies, while discrimination in the disability arena was an open field. And although it is true that housing discrimination based on disability is still pervasive, even after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, so is racial housing segregation. My point is not to encourage this oppression Olympics—which group is more oppressed?—but to point to ways analogies create obstacles to coalition building around issues like housing discrimination and NIMBY.

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