The events of recent years should have made clear by now that few topics lie closer to the core of today’s pressing issues related to social injustice and inequality than disability.
That reality should have been clear after a pandemic in which 75-95% of Covid-19-related deaths occurred in persons with disabilities, disproportionately indigent, Black and Brown individuals with disabilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and State Departments of Health.
It should have been clear after the events of last year in New York—after the New York City Mayor’s November 2022 authorization for “removal of a person who appears to be mentally ill and displays an inability to meet basic needs, even when no dangerous act has been observed,” prompting disability advocates and scholars to observe that “[t]he Ugly Laws have returned.”
It should have been clear after the New York State Senate and Assembly in May 2022 vastly expanded forced psychiatric treatment and involuntary commitment of indigent, Black and Brown persons with mental disabilities over the strong objections of disability, civil rights and homeless advocates.
It should have been clear after a year in which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the New York State Senate and the Department of Health worked to weaken the Institutions for Mental Disease (IMD) rule, a provision in Medicaid strongly supported by disability and civil rights advocates and a critical bulwark against warehousing and institutionalization of persons with mental disabilities in psychiatric asylums.
It should have been clear to all New Yorkers by now that New York State laws still permit electroshock torture and authorize civil death through guardianships and conservatorships, involuntary sterilization, disenfranchisement, and termination of parental rights on the grounds of disability. It should have been clear in the ways that Black and Brown students and students with disabilities continue to be surveilled through reporting, threat assessments and red flag laws, while these students and their communities are rarely included.
But it probably isn’t. Readers may be learning much of this now for the very first time in part because persons with disabilities remain a tremendously marginalized and invisible population. Despite making up over 30% of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census, persons with disabilities were included as only 3% of Biden appointees, and none in positions of leadership, according to the White House. They are included today as only 1.8% (8/435) of U.S. Representatives; 0.2% (16/7,386) of state legislators; only a handful of 1,770 federal judges; less than 2% of corporate board members at nonprofits; 0.9% of lawyers; and 3.1% of physicians. It isn’t clear because that same disability invisibility extends to our educational system and the academy.
Which leads me to ask: Vassar has programs in Africana Studies; Asian Studies; Jewish Studies; Latin American and Latinx Studies; Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies. It has departments in Chinese and Japanese; French and Francophone Studies; German Studies; Greek and Roman Studies; Hispanic Studies; Italian; and Russian Studies. Where is Vassar’s Disability Studies program?
I do not know. An email I received from President Elizabeth Bradley stated on May 28, 2021, that Vassar was “in fact working on a proposal for a Disabilities Studies curriculum.”
I have not heard anything since. But I was disappointed to receive instead an email from President Bradley on Feb. 7, 2023, announcing the launch of a “Vassar Inclusive History initiative” that made no mention at all of disability, let alone of Vassar’s role in the eugenics movement. Vassar’s “Inclusive History” initiative almost certainly will not include the following excerpts from the tremendously insightful PBS American Experience documentary “The Eugenics Crusade,” which was released in 2018:
ARCHIVAL: [Margaret Sanger] We believe that married people who have transmissible diseases should not have children. No couple who has the disease of feeblemindedness or insanity or epilepsy should have children. Babies should not be brought into the world when the father’s income is obviously inadequate to provide for its food, clothing, or shelter.
NARRATOR: On August 5th, 1926, a crowd gathered at Vassar College to hear a lecture given by Margaret Sanger, the controversial founder of the American Birth Control League. Sanger’s reputation preceeded her. In her dozen years as a crusader for contraception and family planning, she’d been denounced, jeered, and jailed repeatedly. Now, she’d undertaken a cross-country speaking tour intended to bolster her cause by linking it to eugenics.
THOMAS C. LEONARD, HISTORIAN: Margaret Sanger was laser beam focused on promoting birth control, which she saw as a liberatory agent for women. It was a hard push, reproductive rights, contraception. Her embrace of the eugenicists was a way of getting some influential and powerful allies behind her cause.
NARRATOR: “The Question of race betterment,” Sanger told the Vassar audience, “is one of immediate concern and I am glad to say that … the Government has already taken certain steps to control the quality of our population through the drastic immigration laws…. But while we close our gates to the so-called ‘undesirables’ from other countries, we make no attempt to discourage or cut down the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home.”
Eugenics would eventually lead to the involuntary sterilization of thousands of individuals with disabilities, and to the ruling in Matter of Nilsson, 471 N.Y.S.2d 439 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1983) making New York one of 31 states plus Washington, D.C. that still have laws authorizing forced sterilization of disabled people, according to a report from the National Women’s Law Center.
But the cause of eugenics and so many other social inequities imposed on disabled individuals, often by “experts” in medicine or health, can only be summed as the devaluation of disability perspectives, priorities and lived experiences. That is one reason why states as diverse as West Virginia, California, New Jersey, Oregon, Nevada and Pennsylvania now mandate disability-inclusive curricula in K-12 public schools. Perhaps such legislation in New York extending to postsecondary education may be required before colleges and universities including Vassar College acquiesce, finally include individuals with disabilities and come to recognize that they are agentic beings worth learning about. Or perhaps Vassar could live up to its promise of inclusion and finally create a Disability Studies program this year.
Nicholas D. Lawson, M.D., J.D., Class of 2005, Georgetown Law Scholar, Immediate-Past Commissioner, American Bar Association Commission on Disability Rights