Over at Waging Nonviolence, BCRW collaborator and speaker Ynestra King writes about the arrests of protestors at Gracie Mansion earlier this month. Sponsored by Occupy’s Disability Caucus, activists gathered to protest the Bloomberg administration’s opposition to making NYC taxis more wheelchair-accessible.
Initially, non-disabled protestors were targeted for arrest while disabled activists, who were the principal organizers of the event, were ignored, in part because the city lacked wheelchair accessible vehicles with which to arrest the protestors. As King writes,
The city could commandeer their vehicles to take us to jail at a moment’s notice, but no ordinary citizen using a wheelchair can arrange for transportation within the city on such short notice. Most New Yorkers do not have cars, so we must rely on publicly available transport. This is especially challenging for wheelchair users because the subway is almost entirely inaccessible and we cannot get a taxi, whether we are trying to take a child to school in the rain, or need to go to the hospital or simply wish to be part of the restless spontaneity that is New York. Mayor Bloomberg apparently does not think we have a right to this mobility, and does not recognize our right and our desire to live as ordinary New Yorkers.