After a contentious race, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman will be representing his home state in the U.S. Senate.
While many pundits have noted his deep working-class bona fides, a rarity in Democratic circles, one of the most unexpectedly authentic elements of his blue-collar appeal was his unwillingness to hide his recovery from a recent stroke from the public eye. Not only was that transparency laudable and instructive, but it also hit home: Like many people he’s represented over the years, he felt he had no choice but to show up and get the job done.
Working class and wage workers are often hardest hit when they have or are diagnosed with a disabling condition, and with inadequate access to health care, pain management, supportive devices, or meaningful accommodations, they quickly lose any opportunity to advance. Before COVID hit, this population was also disproportionately concentrated in what researchers call the “disability belt” in the U.S.—the Southeast, Midwest, and Appalachian regions. Within the working-age population, the disability rate among people with only a high school diploma is three times higher (12%) than among those with a bachelor’s degree (4%), but that gap is far higher in many Rust Belt towns like Scranton and Pittsburgh, Pa., according to this report from Brookings Institute.
Race plays an enormous factor in all of this, wherever people fit in an org chart, in part by amplifying already existing equity disparities and biased assumptions. Black and Asian people with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed than their white or Latinx counterparts, and Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people with disabilities are more likely to be living in poverty.
Long COVID is only going to exacerbate all these already grim statistics.
As Jasmine E. Harris, a law and inequality legal scholar with expertise in disability law, argues, if we ignore disability in the national “reckoning” on race, then we will have completely missed the boat. “Race and disability have a complicated but interconnected history,” she writes in this must-read essay. “Yet discussions of our most salient socio-political issues such as police violence, prison abolition, healthcare, poverty, and education continue to treat race and disability as distinct, largely biologically based distinctions justifying differential treatment in law and policy.”
That means, in part, that employers must not only think through accommodations for employees of color with disabilities, but they must also think through the unique pain points these employees face in the quest to “bring their full selves” to work. A Black parent of an autistic teen who knows their gentle boy is more likely to be mistaken as a threat by police. An Asian American high performer who is statistically less likely to seek treatment for their depression than their white peers. These are just two examples hiding in plain sight, and it is going to take empathetic inclusion professionals to find the myriad ways the diverse populations they serve intersect with a biased and discriminatory world.
And then, let them grow.
Mia Ives-Rublee, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the think tank Center for American Progress, recalls the frustrating slog to find her first job out of college, despite being a top student in a highly competitive program. “Every time I disclosed that I had a disability, I knew that employers were calculating whether they could deal with somebody with a disability within their location,” she tells the Guardian. “What’s so frustrating for the disability community is that so many people use our likeness and our stories to be inspiration porn. But when we are asking to be perceived as competent and take higher positions, non-disabled people are like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s not what we meant!’”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ashley Sylla.
