equality is what motivated Laura and me to participate in the San Francisco action. We and 20 other members of NDSU from across the country traveled there to make a statement against exclusion and segregation. Yet that is exactly what we experienced, and from our own people.

Recently, someone posted this question to the Justice For All listserv: “Where were the NDSU representatives and people from California at the ADAPT action?”

We were there, we are here, but perhaps you can't see us because you are patrolling the boundaries so carefully, ensuring that your own piece of the pie (or elevator or parking space, as the case may be) is not threatened.

When we perpetuate discrimination within the movement — and we surely do — our efforts to combat segregation and exclusion in the wider world will remain limited and hollow.

Let us, as a community, get down to and understand the root causes of the low rate of participation in our movement. I believe we will uncover a disability rights movement, a system, that does not lend itself to the needs of many. We must devise a means by which to change that system.

If you don’t believe that the disability rights movement is unwelcoming and hypocritical, then talk to a disabled person from a non-Western culture, or to someone with a cognitive disability, or to a psychiatric survivor, or an atheist or a queer disabled person, or to one of us who is non-white, or dirt poor.

Since its founding, the disability rights movement has served as a strong voice for radical, revolutionary change. It cannot remain a force for change so long as it refuses to evaluate and adapt itself. When the strategies we use exclude or single out our brothers and sisters, allow participation by only those who can afford it, and rely on a tactic of secrecy when secrecy creates an access barrier for our brothers and sisters with cognitive and other disabilities, then our movement has become the very thing we joined up to fight.

We hope this statement will not be viewed as an effort to create internal division. Instead, our purpose with this statement is to challenge all of us — NDSU included — to take the disability rights movement to a higher level of inclusivity and equality, to recognize and celebrate, in the words of Cal Montgomery, “the many different fabrics out of which the disability cloth is made." All participants in the movement must be valued within it. Our movement must welcome them home.