Bring it on! Disabled people don't need positive discrimination
I found it rather depressing to read comments from some disability charities, criticising Scope for not reserving the post of chief executive for a disabled candidate. One, Mary Colley, the voluntary coordinator of learning difficulties charity Danda, went so far as to suggest that: "It would be difficult for a non-disabled chief executive to understand the needs of disabled people"
Surely, we have moved beyond the apartheid model, where it is held that the needs of disabled people can only be understood by other disabled people? Because taken to its logical conclusion, we would be saying that only a wheelchair user can understand other wheelchair users, only a blind person can relate to other blind people, etc ad infinitum. Society would then be broken up into lots of little, introspective groups of individuals who only want to communicate with other people just like them.
Now that the DDA makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate against a job candidate on the basis of an impairment, isn't it right that all the many talented applicants who happen also to be disabled, compete in a fair way with those who happen not to be?
Amarjit Raju, chief executive of Disability Direct, accuses Scope of traditionally having "a tokenistic approach to employing disabled people", but I suspect that anybody appointed to a position that they knew to have been specially reserved for a disabled person would feel very much "token". I applaud Alice Maynard, Scope's chair, for saying that their "priority is to find the right person for the job, and that person may or may not be disabled." The organisation wants to create an alliance between disabled and non-disabled people, and I suspect that most of us would endorse that as the sort of society we would like to live in, where our experiences as carers, friends, parents and colleagues are just as valid in enhancing quality of life and opportunity.
The truth is that every single one of us has faced some form of discrimination in our lives; each time we are rejected for a friendship, a sports team, a flatshare or a job, we experience the negative emotions associated with not being the chosen one. It is simply a part of life which we have to learn to deal with. Hopefully, it teaches us the valuable human quality of empathy, because that is what enables one person to understand the difficulties faced by another - not happening to share the same impairment.
Labels: Alice Maynard, Amarjit Raju, Danda, dda, disability, Disability Direct, disabled, Mary Colley, non-disabled, positive discrimination, reserved post, Scope

