Activist Haben Girma Speaks Out on COVID-19 and the Disability Community

"When organizations do the work of removing ableism, they can benefit from the talents of over one billion disabled people around the world.”

Earlier this week, Haben Girma, a human rights lawyer focused on disability justice and the first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, spoke with Bloomberg Equality about how the disability community is managing the COVID-19 pandemic. She addressed the life threatening issues many face due to ableism and a positive shift in work accessibility that is long overdue.

"There are still a lot of people in the medical field who believe disabled lives are not worth living,” she said. “We’ve seen this coming up in the pandemic where disabled people are being put last in line for medical care, or doctors are choosing not to provide medical care because they assume — wrongly, based on ableism — that disabled lives aren’t valuable."

Girma goes on to say, "Our lives are valuable. Ableism is the widespread assumption that disabled people are inferior. We have talents, we have skills. When organizations do the work of removing ableism, they can benefit from the talents of over one billion disabled people around the world.”

Girma shares one important positive impact of COVID that needs to be sustained after the pandemic ends: "Disabled people were asking for the flexibility to be able to work from home. And for a long time organizations would say no it can't be done. Well now we've seen in the pandemic it absolutely can be done. And when the pandemic is over I hope many organizations will continue to offer this flexibility to work from home and attend conferences remotely."