Zoe Brennan-Krohn
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Zoe Brennan-Krohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Thanks. It's great to be here. I'm Zoe Brennan-Krohn. I'm the director of the Disability Rights Program at the ACLU, and I love a chocolate muffin.
All the way through.
I'm the underdog now. I'm going to try to win this podcast.
Yeah, so I became a lawyer to do public interest work to be helpful in some way. And the focus of my career has been on disability rights work. I'm a person with a disability myself. I have a lot of family members with disabilities, including family members and loved ones who rely on Medicaid. And I think that disability is often
sidelined and not seen as the really core civil rights and civil liberties issue it is. And that's part of why I really love doing this work at the ACLU to really integrate disability rights into the world of civil rights and civil liberties where it belongs.
I don't have it. I was just thinking the same thing. And yeah. The Bone Collector.
Yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think in terms of the history, the fact that it is so recent that disability rights has been enshrined in law is quite striking. There was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And then the ADA was actually signed by George Bush. It was a bipartisan bill.
And I think that's also in this moment in time, quite remarkable that the ADA is and the Rehabilitation Act are unique frameworks within civil rights laws because they're not just about equality. They're not just saying you can't exclude people with disabilities. They're also saying you have to take steps to include people with disabilities.
They're more like equity than equality, saying you have to build a ramp. You have to make reasonable accommodations. People kind of know that phrase. But what that really means is just saying, oh, we treat everyone equally actually isn't always enough in the disability space. And I think that's just really interesting. And there's so much potential there.
uh let's we can start there zoe i think the most basic thing that i want people to know about disability is that it is very widespread somewhere around a quarter of the country are in the us are people with disabilities and that it's a broad umbrella term.
So disability encompasses both in the law and in the community, we consider people with disabilities to be people with a really wide range of disabilities. People who have mobility disabilities, who might use wheelchairs, people who have
Sensory disabilities, who are blind, who are deaf, people with psychiatric disabilities or mental illnesses, people with developmental disabilities, people with chronic illnesses. There's a lot of people who may not think of themselves as people with disabilities, but would be protected under disability rights laws. And also age-related disabilities. And this is a huge issue.
part of our population that, again, doesn't always sort of self-identify as part of our community, but disability is a fluid identity. It can happen to you if you're not already disabled. And not only it can happen to you, you hope it happens to you in that if you die having never had a disability, chances are you had a very short life.
You hope that you live long enough to age into the kind of disabilities that come with living a long life. And so I think it's very often viewed as this very other thing and this very tragic thing. And there are things that are difficult about living with a disability. And a lot of those are difficult because of how society sets up care, and we're going to talk about all of that.
Some of them are difficult intrinsic to the disability. Having a disability isn't all like puppies and rainbows necessarily. That's true. That's part of life too. But that it's just part of the neutral, natural, inevitable fabric of society. And in terms of language, I think people get very anxious talking about disability because they don't want to say the wrong thing.
And I think it very much comes from a good place. I think the most basic sort of tips I'd share about language are that disability is not a bad word. That is a neutral thing to say. And it's actually a better thing to say than euphemisms, which is sometimes what people try to do to not say disability, to say, well, you're... specially abled or you're handy capable. These are terms I've heard.
People don't like those. Disabled people do not like this sort of like pretending it's something it's not. You have a disability. And by using these euphemisms, it's actually sort of entrenching that like, this is bad. So we have to use this funny euphemism. It's just, you have a disability.
And there's some difference in the community between whether you say like a person with a disability or a disabled person, or like person with autism or on an autistic person and sort of My rule of thumb is that when I'm talking generally, like here, I would kind of use those terms interchangeably. Person first, person with a disability, or disability first, disabled person.
If you're talking about a specific individual, it's good to use the terms that they prefer, as you started with, Kamau. So if they say, I'm an autistic person, definitely don't tell them, oh, no, no, you're a person with autism. Yeah.
Exactly. It has happened. Try to assume that people know what works for them. And also, you know, I think when you, as a general matter, if you ask questions, if you come from a place of curiosity and respect, people want to meet you where they are. We want to have more people in our world talking about our issues.
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