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"Erkulwater, Jennifer L"
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How the Nation’s Largest Minority Became White: Race Politics and the Disability Rights Movement, 1970–1980
Scholars point out a tension between racial justice and disability rights activism. Although racial minorities are more likely to become disabled than whites, both disability activism and the historiography of disability politics tend to focus on the experience and achievements of whites. This article examines how disability rights activists of the 1970s sought to build a united movement of all people with disabilities and explains why these efforts were unable to overcome cleavages predicated on race. Activists drew from New Left ideas of community and self-help as well as the New Right rhetoric of market freedoms to articulate a vision of liberation for people with disabilities. Though they yearned for racial solidarity, in practice, activists could not overcome institutions that separated antipoverty and racial politics from disability policy, nor could they figure out how to incorporate minority voices in an identity-based movement forged around disability rather than color.
Journal Article
Constructive Welfare: The Social Security Act, the Blind, and the Origins of Political Identity among People with Disabilities, 1935–1950
In contemporary America, identifying as a person with a disability is one of the many ways in which people acknowledge, even celebrate, who they are. Yet several decades ago, few persons with disabilities saw their condition as an identity to be embraced, let alone to serve as the basis for affinity and collective mobilization. The transformation of disability from unmitigated tragedy to a collective and politicized identity emerged in national politics, not in the 1960s or 1970s, as is commonly thought, but in the 1940s. During those years, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) set out to galvanize the nation's blind men and women, most of them poor and unemployed, to demand the economic security and opportunity enjoyed by sighted Americans. This aspiration for equal citizenship led the NFB into protracted contests with the Social Security Administration (SSA) over aid to the poor and sharpened the organization's resolve to represent the nation's civilian blind. Long before disability rights activists declared “nothing about us, without us,” the NFB insisted that only the blind, not sighted social workers or experts in blindness, were entitled to speak on behalf of the blind. Pioneering an organizing strategy and a critique of American liberalism later embraced by activists of the Left, the NFB rose to become one of the most effective civil rights and antipoverty organizations of its time. Today, however, its story has been largely forgotten.
Journal Article
The forgotten safety net: The expansion of Supplemental Security Income
This dissertation examines the growth that occurred in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program between 1983 and 1996. SSI is a program that pays cash benefits to approximately 6 million disabled adults and children living in poverty. Since it was enacted in 1972, SSI has grown into a major source of income support for the mentally disabled and the families of disabled children. By the mid-1990s, SSI had become the most expensive cash benefit program for the poor. In 1996, Congress scaled back spending for the program by tightening eligibility for children, addicts, and legal immigrants. Nevertheless, the cuts made in SSI fell far short of the spending reductions that congressional conservatives had hoped to realize. The expansion and resilience of SSI pose a challenge to standard accounts about the strength of programs for the poor. Conventional works of political science assert that means-tested programs will be weak and unpopular, subject to continuous political attack and budget cuts. SSI, however, demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case. This dissertation explores the origins of the expansion and resilience of SSI. The research is a case study of two components of SSI, its programs for mentally disabled adults and disabled children. I argue that the expansionary pressure that fueled growth had many sources. Program expansion was rooted in: (1) the design of SSI, (2) the efforts of the advocacy community that coalesced around the program in the early 1980s, (3) federal court rulings overturning restrictive provisions of the program and compelling the Social Security Administration (SSA) to adopt a looser interpretation of disability, (4) internal advocates within the SSA who built upon these rulings to expand Social Security disability further, and (5) the inability of Republican presidents and congressional conservatives to overturn program liberalization. Using the example of SSI, the dissertation argues that there is far more room for expansion in programs for the poor than the literature on the American welfare state currently acknowledges.
Dissertation
