The Greatest Lies Ever Told Series.

Lie Number One:

‘Equal opportunity equates equality.’

This belief may be the most venomous of all the lies I’ve ever encountered. The misperception is that when disadvantaged people and the privileged shoehorn into the same spaces, the latter’s glitter automatically rubs off them. Nothing could be farther from the truth, especially for the community of Persons with Disabilities. Let me put it into context; you work at an ‘inclusive’ organisation that sets up a policy that is intentional about hiring Persons with Disabilities. It caters to all rightful accommodations, and the company makes its quota and reports back to its shareholders and stakeholders with staggeringly superb results on all the accommodations made. There are only two problems;

Problem One: “Accommodations are not acceptance.”

Accommodations are arrangements or compromises made for a person to feel comfortable. That’s it. While they are significantly necessary to get you through the door, they bear no meaning to how people connect beyond superficial connections. When you take a flight, the air hostesses will do everything under the sun to ‘accommodate’ you. It doesn’t mean they remember your name the minute you disembarked from your flight. Neither does it mean that they recall that you preferred cashews or peanuts. It’s courtesy at best. Realistically, it’s what they have to do to get paid. You cannot legislate a genuine smile. No policy guarantees acceptance, only ‘accommodations.’ Not even in the reverse. Think South Africa during the apartheid? Despite the Afrikaans legislating that blacks and whites should not intermarry, several blacks and whites fell in love but pretended to be strangers on the street in the presence of police. Our hearts are notorious for disobedience, and neither are they subject to policy. Accommodations yield from policies, but acceptance is a matter of conscience and psychology.

There’s no shortcut in this. You may legislate to hire every single category of a person with a disability in your institution. That’s uber wonderful! Please understand my position. We should employ Persons with Disabilities. My divergence is the mantra that it is a destination. Instead, it is a transit stop. Does employing a Person With a Disability also grant you the capacity to legislate for Non-disabled employees and those with disabilities to invite each other for lunch over the weekend too? You may build a ramp at your premises that aid a wheelchair user to access your premises. Will you also legislate that the Non-disabled people within your offices do not stare uncomfortably at the wheelchair user too? You may legislate for Non-disabled people not to stare at the wheelchair user; does that award you the capability of legislating their inner thoughts and secret beliefs too? Accommodation gets you into the door, which is focal for economic inclusion. It does not, however, guarantee a meaningful or lasting impact on social inclusion. It does not secure the door to a heart.

Problem number two: “Acceptance is supremacist.”

You weren’t expecting that plot twist, were you? Yes, acceptance is supremacist. Who are Non-Disabled people to ‘accept’ Persons with Disabilities? Seriously, who elevated you to that pedestal? We are not here to ‘accept’ Persons with Disabilities. What do Non-Disabled people think this is? A teenage high school movie? Where you finally ‘accept’ the outsider to sit on the ‘cool kids’ table in the cafeteria. Opening doors? Who on earth gave you the key? You stole it, didn’t you? Momentarily, you open the door slightly. A few people squeeze through, and then you clap for yourselves and pat yourself on the back? Acceptance is supremacist. You are not here to ‘accept’ anybody but respect them. That’s it. Who cares if you accept Persons with Disabilities or not? Respect them enough to build a ramp. You build a ramp for the same reason you build a door at six feet and not one foot because you respect that, sensibly, most walking people are at an average height of six feet. Regardless of whether you ‘accept’ them or not is immaterial.

Picture you and Prince William attending the same university, therefore enjoying an ‘equal opportunity,’ does that mean on your graduation day, you’ll magically be equal, and people will bow to you and call you ‘Your Royal Highness.’ Take it from me, even if you surpassed Prince William in grades, shortlisted for the most high-paying job in the land, you’ll not be ‘equal’ to him in the sense of how he’s widely perceived. Yes, it may be grand that you attained a Ph.D., and he didn’t, and it’s your fundamental right to an education. But, it’ll never open the doors for you that Prince William moonwalks into. Your shared opportunities can never make you equal.

If two people thought you were a dog. One threw stones at you, and another cuddled you and took you home. Your problem is not the person who stoned you; your biggest problem is that both think you’re a dog. Your opportunities may change your bank balance, but they’ll never truly change what people think about your core being. I have the strongest feeling that I’ve narrowed down what will make Non-Disabled people wake up. In my future public lectures, I’ll dedicate my life’s work to sharing precisely what. I’ve come up with a litmus test that anyone can experiment. One that’s right within our atmosphere; it’ll dumbfound how it lurked and stared you in the face all along.

That aside, I leave you with this for now. Don’t forget that Rosa Parks had the ‘equal opportunity’ to sit on the bus with the whites. Did it translate that she enjoyed the full ‘equal’ rights of sitting wherever she pleased on the bus? From here on, in every ‘bus’ that you seemingly ‘accept’ or ‘accommodate’ Persons With Disabilities, think critically and sincerely about if the seat offered is at the front or back of the bus. Is it enough to ride the same bus without equal freedom of choosing your preferred seat?