Right now many people are examining their culture—their workplace, their classroom, their creative writing workshop, their boardroom, their police force, their government entity, or their nonprofit—in order to make it more diverse, inclusive, and equitable. This is good. This is important. This is necessary.
In the last month I’ve talked—unpaid—to three literary organisations about some of their barriers to DEI as I see it. I spent time and energy I don’t really have, and don’t begrudge it, because—it’s worth repeating—it’s good, important, necessary work.
That is, I didn’t begrudge the time, effort and energy until I began to get the earnest (and to some degree self-congratulatory) follow-up emails from the organisations. They explain at length just how, after lengthy, expensive, weighty consultation, they’re going to go about improving their DEI efforts with regard to race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Great! Wonderful! All those things matter to me; they matter a great deal; I agree with every single category on the list. But every time—EVERY FUCKING TIME—one extremely important factor is missing from the list of traditionally marginalised people: disability.
Disabled writers matter. Disabled voices matter. Crip voices are the most—not one of the most, but the absolute MOST—ignored, devalued, and unheard on the fucking planet. (Read my Op-Ed in the New York Times.)* Disabled students (and teachers) are still—in 20-fucking-21—not able to properly attend many writing workshops, bookstores, classes, conferences, and festivals. We are shut out. Not only are we not offered places, we aren’t offered grants, we aren’t offered scholarships, we aren’t offered accommodations, and our applications aren’t offered the courtesy of being read by disabled readers. AND EVEN WHEN WE TALK OURSELVES BLUE IN THE FACE TO WELL-PAID DIVERSITY CONSULTANTS OUR POINTS OF VIEW ARE NOT FUCKING DEEMED WORTHY OF EVEN BEING LISTED IN THE SUMMARY DOCUMENTS.
So I’m done. You want my opinion on anything that’s not my own work? Pay me my weight in gold and expect to get an earful. Or better yet just fuck off into the sun.
*We’re also the demographic most abused at home; the most murdered by caregivers; the most badly paid; the most discriminated against by employers; the most laughed at in public; the poorest; the most refused transport on buses, trains, and planes; the least educated; and the most killed by law enforcement. We are 25% of the fucking population. This post isn’t a game of My Oppression is Worse Than Yours but I want to be super fucking clear that a) we’re not talking about one or two minor examples of discrimination here, and b) it doesn’t affect just a handful of people. ETA: Yes, there are data. No, I’m not going to do the unpaid work of providing them to you. Find them yourself.
Nicola Griffith 
Thank You!!
This! It’s so depressing to see diversity so often conflated with ethnicity alone, or (significantly less frequently) ethnicity and LGBT+. And anything else so infrequently it’s lost in the weeds. I went through 100 diversity essays by various people within publishing at the height of interest in We Need Diverse Books, tallying them for which areas of diversity were mentioned and the fall-off in number vs number of diversity types mentioned was pretty much exponential. It’s also been my observation that a lot of diversity advocates are resistant to being told they’re excluding disabled people, because their self-image is built around ‘I would never discriminate’ and so accepting they are excluding people means asking themself some harsh questions.
The refusal to listen extends onto the page as well, I’ve had a prominent SFF author insist to me, in defence of cure narratives, that _all_ disabled people want to be cured, right after I’d explained that many disabled people, _including me_, aren’t actually interested in a cure, and that groups such as the neurodiverse and the Deaf may in fact find the idea insulting. We don’t just need to tell people to ‘do the research’, but to have them actually listen to what that research is telling them!
And the gatekeeping starts right down at the entry into local level fandom/industry groups. Two or three years back a UK based SFF writer was praising a London-based monthly get together as a good place to make contacts and get your face known. So I asked about wheelchair access, only to be told “there’s a lift to the top of the building, but the bar where it’s held is then up two flights of stairs”
@DaveG: There’s a great reading series in New York that’s held in a basement bar with no elevator. I’ve never been able to either read there or attend as part of the audience. For years organisers refused to change it because, well, it’s such a wonderful atmosphere! Exclusive in all the worst ways.
@robertreynolds66: You’re welcome.
What a coincidence! I just wondered “with all the recent LGBT+ stories around, what about other minorities?”. I didn’t think about disability, so thank you for opening my mind for it!
What I just read in this very instant was Meg Elison’s story “The Pill”, treating the sociocultural demonization of obesity. Now, I hope for a SF story handling disability. Could you please channel your rage into creativity?
“Exclusive in all the worst ways.” I can’t remember where I heard it but it’s always stuck with me….Exclusive means somebody is excluded.
Sorry you have to deal with this.
Completely justified. Discrimination against disability infuriates me on a continuing basis.
thank you from this old (just turned70), lesbian, autistic/neurodiverse, caucasian woman. i think i have received more discrimination for my autism in the lesbian community that for my sexuality in the heterosexual community. i receive best acceptance of both autism and sexuality from my friends from non-english-speaking backgrounds – eg vietnamese, phillipino, chinese, russian.
Thank you! I feel like Cassandra myself sometimes, telling truth and then people wanting more evidence: Look it up! I say.
It doesn’t surprise me that “diversity officers” can’t think out of their boxes. I’m sure there’s a portion of their population who actually care about improving the lives of their employees but I’m sure that the percentage of those is less than 50%. As for the organizations they represent, perhaps 1% care about their employees. If they’re a public company, none of them care about their employees more than they care about their stock price.
In general, people suck. Back in the 80s, people used to talk about “one issue” voters – the only thing this person cares about is “family values” (in many ways, I don’t miss the 80s), or they’re pro 1 thing or anti 1 thing – whatever the 1 thing was they cared about, that’s what determined their vote. Then you get the fragmentation of the groups too – JK Rowling is considered pro “LG” (not sure about “B”) but definitely anti “T”. The huminist organizations proved they were extremely anti-feminist, sexist, etc…. It just never ends.
I obviously don’t have any answers. I’m not sure how we get people to care (or pretend to care) more about people with disabilities. Awareness is the obvious first point – which I know you’ve been working on. If it helps, it at least worked for me – I followed you on FB because of Hild – had no idea about, well any details of your personal life. Prior me wasn’t anti-disabled person, I didn’t go around mocking people in wheelchairs or anything like that, but the depth of the problem is not something I was aware of. I didn’t know about your NY Times op-ed until now – just read it. I’m going to share to my FB friends – I know some will appreciate it. I think there’s a good chance you touched many people with it.
Take care of yourself – recharge your batteries. You’re an excellent champion for this cause.
@Andreas: There’s an increasing number of SFF works with disabled characters. Take a look at my list of fiction that passes the Fries test, look up special issues of magazines such as Uncanny (Disabled Writers Destroy SF and Disabled Writers Destroy Fantasy) and anthologies such as Accessing the Future
Thanks for boosting the signal
Thanks for your tip!
I get you, although it works a bit differently here. Since the 1990s, any organization with a federal contract has had to account for their hirings, etc., in what are known as the “four federally-mandated categories”: women, “visible minorities”, Indigenous people, and people with disabilities. As a result, it’s been almost impossible to get my university to consider sexual orientation and gender identity as EDI categories they should care about (although there are signs of change now that we have a gay President). And, despite being one of the four FMCs, disability is a real issue on campus. I keep having to remind people to turn on closed captioning in Zoom meetings, for example. But the other issue is making demands on faculty to accommodate without providing assistance to do so. For example, I was told, despite having a class of 10 students, none of whom were hearing-impaired, that I had to close caption every video clip— but no help or advice in how to do so was offered. I ended up putting clips on YouTube to use their CC service and promptly discovered that their closed captioning of Scottish accents produced pure gobbledygook. Yet real disabilities (not my imaginary deaf students) get SFA in the way of useful help. I had a student with a severe stammer who simply refused to go near the disability services because he had such negative experiences with them. I didn’t find accommodation difficult; I simply threw Word up on the screen and gave him the wireless keyboard so he could type his comments for everyone to read. He was happy with that and so was the rest of the class. Yet disability services wanted him to have accommodations he neither wanted nor needed, like extra time on written exams, none of which helped with the actual problem of allowing him to have a voice in the discussion. It’s infuriating.
I get so very tired of DEI professionals thinking about slices of pie: if group x gets n attention, then there’s correspondingly -n for group y. It’s bullshit. We need to grow the fucking pie
Not all that long ago I attended a DEI training session with an icebreaker activity that relied entirely on participants’ ability to see and recognize individual letters from product logos. Any participants with blindness or impaired vision were unable to take part in this activity. The entire training session was a waste of time, but starting out by reminding me that I was different and excluded certainly didn’t help.
A few years ago, RWA was held in Denver. The company I worked for at the time decided to host a party for their writers and agents, and someone from the office in Seattle booked a bar for the party. I asked if anyone had done an on-site visit. No, nobody had done an on-site visit. I asked if they had asked the venue about accessibility. They assured me that someone had asked. Fast forward to May of that year. I arrive on-site two hours before the event was to begin to discover…the fucking party was in the basement of a building so old it was deemed a local landmark so wasn’t required to have an elevator. I flipped the fuck out. Asked the person who had booked the place ifs/he remembered that one of our authors was in a wheelchair, and another was blind and had mobility issues? We had to carry these authors up and down the stairs and it was humiliating for them. I’m still livid just thinking about it.
A dozen years ago I resigned from the board of a literary nonprofit for almost exactly this reason: they wanted to hold the gala awards afterparty at a 5th floor walkup. ‘We can carry you,’ they said. I said, ‘Why don’t you just fucking catapult me through the fucking window?’ And left.
Thanks for writing this, it really resonated with me. I have been in the same situation, and found myself with that internal “ick” feeling that comes from having just realized that I’ve enabled oppression. Personally, I think I’m done with DEI. I really enjoyed this article: https://spectrejournal.com/fuck-mindfulness-workshops/