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Honoring Women with Disabilities During Women’s History Month

Cristina Sanz

Fans of the hit A&E docu-series Born this Way know Cristina Sanz as a lovable, fun and family-oriented dancer and romantic. In 2016, Sanz became the first Hispanic woman with a disability as part of an ensemble cast to be on an Emmy award-winning show. In 2018, she shattered stigmas by getting married to her longtime fiancé Angel Callahan.

The two already had been dating for five years before the show premiered. Their desire to live an independent life together – and get married – was a consistent plot line throughout the show. The first season ended with their engagement; the fourth season finale was an hour-long episode featuring the wedding between these two individuals with developmental disabilities.

“I wanted to show everyone that you can have a disability and get married,” Sanz told People magazine.

Her wedding, moving out on her own and working at two jobs, are things her parents never imagined as Cristina was growing up.

“I will not wake up waiting for my daughter to come back from a date like my mother did for me,” her mother, Beatriz Sanz, said she used to think. But, Sanz was the first of her siblings to get married. [continue reading…]

Honoring Women with Disabilities During Women’s History Month

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo, a Mexican woman who had multiple disabilities including polio as a child and spinal and pelvis damage from a car accident, became a world-renowned self-portrait painter. She has since served as a role model for generations of artists, people with disabilities and bisexual women.

At the age of six, Kahlo was bedridden with polio. The polio virus caused damage to her right leg and foot. She was left with a limp. Her father thought that playing soccer, wrestling and swimming would help her recover.

As a teenager, she was in a car accident. A steel handrail was impaled into her hip and came out the other side. Her spine and pelvis were damaged significantly. While in recovery, she began to paint. [continue reading…]

Honoring Women with Disabilities During Women’s History Month

Selena Gomez

Three years ago, pop star and actress Selena Gomez strutted onto Ellen DeGeneres stage wearing a black floor-length dress and heels. Her hair was slicked back and wavy. Her face held a look of intention. She sat with both a stiff back and smile and told Ellen and the world what it is like to live with Lupus.

“It is an autoimmune disease; I will have it forever and you just have to take care of yourself,” Gomez told Ellen and the audience. “I can relate to people.”

Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack itself, unable to differentiate between its own healthy tissue and invaders. According to the Lupus Foundation of America, 1.5 million people have Lupus in America and five million have it worldwide. [continue reading…]

Honoring Women with Disabilities During Women’s History Month

Haben Girma

Haben Girma has been advocating for herself since she attended elementary school in Oakland, California. She became the first Deafblind person to graduate from law school when she earned her degree from Harvard Law School in 2013. She is a civil rights attorney who advocates for disability rights, a public speaker who travels the country changing people’s perceptions of the disability community in the media and has been featured in Forbes “30 Under 30” and on NBC and NPR.

In 1983, five years before Girma was born, her mother Saba Gebreyesus fled Eritrea, a city in Africa with approximately six million people, taking two weeks to walk to Sudan and sleeping in trees “surrounded by hungry hyenas.” But she was determined to give Girma the opportunities her son wasn’t given; he also was born deafblind. [continue reading…]

Honoring Women with Disabilities During Women’s History Month

Barbara Corcoran

Barbara Corcoran is an American business woman who started a real estate brokerage business, The Corcoran Group, at the age of 23. Famous for her TV personality on ABC’s Shark Tank as an entrepreneur and judge, she credits her determination and drive to her childhood diagnosis of dyslexia.

“When you cannot pronounce the other words that other kids are reading readily and the kids are laughing at you or are shouting the wrong letter to you, or the wrong syllable to you, it’s as painful as a child that I have never gotten over it. Honest to God, I’m sure of that. And so, when I got out of school, I really decided that I’m going to prove once and for all that I am not stupid,” she said in an interview with Spectrum News NY1. [continue reading…]

• Even as the rest of the disability community experienced job gains in 2017, African Americans with disabilities are being left behind in the workforce.
• Out of the 50 states, African Americans with disabilities only saw job gains in 22 states while they lost jobs in 28 states.
• Texans with disabilities experience the biggest jobs gains for African Americans with disabilities of any state, with more than 8,000 entering the workforce.

Washington, D.C., Feb. 28 – New statistics released this month show that African Americans with disabilities are being left behind even as more and more people with disabilities enter the workforce. The Disability Statistics Compendium, released by Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire, shows that the employment rate for African Americans with disabilities stands at 28.6 percent. The Compendium also shows that geography has an impact on employment outcomes for African Americans with disabilities.

The newly published 2018 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium compiles data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Compendium is intended to equip policymakers, self-advocates and other groups with clear statistics on the state of disability in America today.

Out of more than three million working-age African Americans with disabilities, barely 934,589 have jobs. This data also shows the serious gaps that remain between disabled and non-disabled African Americans. According to the Compendium, while 28.6 percent of U.S. African-American civilians with disabilities ages 18-64 living in the community had a job, compared to 73.7 percent of blacks without disabilities.  [continue reading…]

Rockville, Maryland, Feb. 28 – When Quasimodo, nicknamed “Quasi the great,” a German Shepherd, was discovered as a stray in Kentucky, he was scheduled to be euthanized because he has short spine syndrome. Fortunately a family decided to give him a second-hand home. He is described as a dog who does normal dog things but has a certain need for accommodations to help him do daily activities. Quasimodo represents one of just 15 dogs worldwide living with short-spine syndrome. He quickly became an internet sensation because of his disability, gaining more than 50,000 followers on Facebook. Who would have guessed that a dog having a disability could receive so much positivity? I didn’t, because I never do and here’s why.

It is a sunny day on August 17, 2015, and I am moving into President’s Hall, the dorm I chose for my freshmen year of college at The University of Toledo. I am excited as any entering freshmen student should be on the journey to a higher education. The day started early, at 8:00 a.m. because I wanted to move in as soon as possible. I was eager to meet everyone on campus. At the time I was an extrovert because my high school years were great. I had a great summer after high school graduation, and I wanted to continue having a great experience at the start of my college career. That dream was cut short.

As I was moving in, with the help of my family and the residential advisors for my dorm, I hear a loud shout, “HE DOESN’T HAVE A NECK!” In that moment, I stop in front of President’s Hall and I turn around. I see a car driving by with a person sticking their torso out the car window. That person’s comment was directed toward me because I was born with a congenital condition called Klippel-Feil syndrome. The medical definition of Klippel-Feil syndrome is “a musculoskeletal condition characterized by the fusion of at least two vertebrae of the neck. Common symptoms include a short neck, low hairline at the back of the head, and restricted mobility of the upper spine.” The common definition that society uses, including the person in the car, is “no neck.” [continue reading…]

African Americans have had a long history of hardships in the United States. Brought to the Americas as slaves, many African Americans built a nation with their blood, sweat and tears. Contributing to music, art, sports, military and more, black and people of color still do not get the credit or respect that they deserve. With Black History Month getting more and more attention today, the one intersection that is rarely mentioned during this month is Black people with disabilities.

As a black woman with a disability, I want to see all aspects of me represented – and this includes in Hollywood. Sometimes I feel that Black Hollywood events are not welcoming of black people with disabilities. By not actively promoting that black, disabled actors to play character roles of a disabled person, Hollywood continues to give an inaccurate representation of Black people with disabilities and takes away jobs from black actors with real disabilities. [continue reading…]

Washington, D.C., Feb. 27 – “What’s a leg got to do with it?” This is the question Donna Walton poses to her audience in speeches regarding her experience as a woman with a disability. As an amputee, Walton has experienced her fair share of people mistaking her disability for a weakness that supposedly makes her less of a woman. She works to reject that misconception and answers the question she poses to her audience: “Not a thing.” Walton has dedicated her life to reshaping the perception of what a disability looks like and stressing that a disability is not a person’s sole defining trait.

As we celebrate Black History Month, which takes place every February, it is important to recognize the contributions made and the important presence of African Americans to the United States, including the more than 5.6 million African Americans living with a disability in the U.S., 3.4 million of which are working-age African Americans with disabilities. [continue reading…]