Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body

by Rebekah Taussig

If you want to be genuinely, actively, real-deal “kind” to disabled people, invite disabled voices into your organizations, businesses, and programs. Allow disabled people to perform in more roles than the grateful recipient of generous philanthropists. Recruit disabled engineers and dancers and office administrators and comedians and lawyers and speakers and teachers to participate in your world, and do your best to make that world accessible to them. And if we insist on using the “kindness” word to describe this kind of inclusion, we have to recognize that inclusive “kindness” isn’t just a favor extended to disabled people; including disabled people is a kindness for all of us. Because listening to voices that are typically silenced brings to the table nuance, endurance, creativity, beauty, innovation, and power.

Give us a seat at the table.