Hi,my name is Joseph Scamardo and I am an assistant professor of philosophy
and associate Director of the Institute in Public Affairs
at San Diego State University
I specialized in philosophy of disability and bioethics.
I also identify as disabled, I have a spinal cord injury as well as a rare kind of dwarfism
So you get two for the price of one with me
So, my first memory of discrimination was, well, it's hard to say.
I have lots of memories as far as the experience of stigma
or bigotry, mostly around my dwarfism
and so, you know I have lots of early memories
around that with children staring and laughing and that sort of thing
from a very young age.
Then as far as sort of a more systematic discrimination that sort of excluded me from something
that I wanted to do,
I had a pretty good experience as a child,
mostly because my parents really did a lot to make sure that I was included
I can remember being in boy scouts and cub scouts when I was a kid
and my father, really doing a lot with me
to ensure that the inclusion of my disability--
You know going on camping trips with me
and sort of acting as a personal attendant
kinda thing to make sure that I was able
to go and participate,
and that sort of thing.
And so the first real experience
of exclusion that I can remember
happened when it was time
to go to high school.
I had gone to the public schools in my town
in my town up until the 8th grade
and then when it came to high school,
I was supposed to go to the same
private religiously oriented school
that my older siblings went to
and I took the entrance exam and
even got a small scholarship to go and everything,
but it didn't have an elevator,
and so I used a motorized scooter
to get around, and it was
going to be impossible for me to
attend that school, because there was no
elevator. Now this was actually
after the passage of the ADA,
but because it was
a religiously oriented school,
it was exempt from the requirements
of the ADA.
And so, I didn't have any leverage with
that law.
To be able to get them
to make accommodations for me
so I ended up going to the public school
in my town, which actually, personally,
I was pretty happy about anyway,
because that's where all my friends
were going.
But it still sort of clued me into the fact that
not everything is accessible,
not everything is designed for me and that
this was going to be something
I was gonna have to figure out throughout
my life.
As far as
remembering the ADA and its ()
and that sort of thing,
I was pretty young when it was passed,
I was sometimes referred to as part of the
ADA generation, which means that
I grew up with the ADA mostly,
I was born in 1982,
so I was 8 or 9 years old when the ADA
passed,
and so I didn't really have
any kind of recollection of, "Aha!"
That's--Of the moment that it passed.
And the recall of where I was at the time
or anything like this,
but I do remember my father explaining
it to me, around the time of my
start of high school.
When I experienced this with that
private catholic school, and having that
sort of systematic discrimination experience.