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.