Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…As a matter of actual evidence, you have to show you have the disability, right? Well, it depends on what we’re talking about. I’m not someone who believes that one’s rights should necessarily turn on one’s individual claim to an exemption from some scheme. When I talk about disability rights, a couple of things to say. One is that we should respect political processes that protect disability rights, and right now, we don’t fully. That’s not necessarily a matter of presenting oneself as disabled. A business having to make a reasonable accommodation helps anyone, regardless of who needs the accommodation, regardless of what their particular legal designation might be. There’s also another point, which is that when we’re talking about disability rights, there’s genuine injustice that I think many of us recognize as injustice, that people who are less able are less able to thrive. It’s not just a matter of a legal technicality that we think that these people should have rights. It’s that we think they should have rights, so there shouldn’t be legal formalisms that get in the way of that. And that’s my objection. Say an autistic person says, “Well, I hate fluorescent lighting. You need to change the lighting in the workplace.” The employer comes back and says, “Well, at least I need to know you’re autistic. Where is your diagnosis?” That seems like a pattern we might expect, whether we like it or not. It’s not some accommodation that simply helps everyone. The lighting is one way or another. Could that be a right that has partial recognition?…

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