Show me the Disability Money!

How the heck do we accelerate disability change for the better?

We’re not the first one who faced this problem

You need to check out the compelling documentary Boss: The Black Experience in Business. It shares totally fascinating story of how black businesses worked as a parallel economy in the United States during the pre-civil-rights era and then going into the civil rights era and going forward.

Interesting history, but what was amazing was how these businesses were a major engine in the civil rights movement:

1. African-American businesses underwrote the civil rights movement.
2. African-American, marketing agencies sold mainstream ,white US businesses on the opportunity from African-American customers as a large, valuable audience
3. The steady presence and growth of African American media from the very beginning of the civil rights movement with The Crisis – the journal of the NAACP all the way up through Ebony and BET to Bridgerton and beyond.

The Economic Engine of the Civil Rights Movement

One thing that jumped out at me that I’ve never heard before and totally makes sense was how black businesses underwrote the civil rights movement.

Someone had the fund Martin Luther King Jr. and all the other civil rights leaders and workers. House them and transport them and pay their bail and give them places to speak and publish their stories in newspapers to get the words out.

It didn’t just happen.

We don’t see or hear about these African-American businesses because in some sense they were a victim of their own success. The economic integration of the mass market in the US starting in the 1950s and 60s put many of these African-American businesses at a substantial disadvantage and they disappeared.

First, sell mainstream business, then sell everyone else

Mainstream white businesses were sold on the power and potential of the African-American audience by African-American marketing firms.

These Mainstream white businesses didn’t fund the civil rights movement, but they worked to change laws that made it harder for them to market to African-Americans. Let’s not pretend the motivations were purely selfish, but the outcomes for African-Americans were good.

Building connection, community, and power

How African-American media connected African-Americans together and to their allies and thunders during the early days of the civil rights movement or before the what we would call the classic civil rights movement there were also parallel, newspapers and other media outlets that marketed primarily to African-Americans. They provided a sense of connection and community beyond immediate local community and then later Ebony and BET connected African-Americans across the US and beyond. They also established African-American culture as an integral part of global culture.

Lessons for Disability Change?

Are there lessons we can learn? 

Are there things we can do today to accelerate change for the disability community?

The problems certainly are familiar. 

Disabled voices are not heard in our politics in public discourse. 

Disability programs are the last funded and first cut (and not just in the US).

Disability Not-for-Profits are at the funding whims of capricious governments, and wealthy donors who are happy to move onto the next thing.

How do we strengthen connection within the various disability communities and across the different disability communities?

How do we build more resilient funding for disability rights and disability justice programs?

How do we? change the culture related to disability itself until we normalize disability as a ordinary routine part of our culture, where accessibility is the default state of how things operate?

Not a optional-value-added-feature that someone may or may not get around to implementing at some point?

A Disability Economy Flywheel

Working the Disability Economy as a priority seems to be a fly wheel that once we get started can grow and compound modest investments today that can pay off immediately, but serve as a foundation for bigger and bigger change in the future.

It’s been done before.