The ADA represents a shining promise: that never again will someone’s disability be used as an excuse to deny them full participation in their communities. As such, it is a piece of the bigger promise: of a society in which who we are is never weaponised against us.

But the ADA represents a hollow promise. It was never meant for all of us. It was always intended to protect some disabled more than others, and still other disabled not at all. And the independent living movement, which plays an enormous role in cross-disability agenda setting, has focused on the kind of “one and done” accessibility that is coded into the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) (and even then only some people’s “one and done” needs are addressed) rather than the ongoing work of negotiating the fluctuating and complex access needs of individuals, groups, and communities.

The question, then, for those of us disenfranchised within the disability community in one or more ways, as we approach ADA30, is what to do about the discrepancy between that shining promise and the tawdry refusal to take it seriously on the part of much of our leadership.

Do we continue to call on them, after decades of betrayal, to finally live up to their stated values? Or do we accept that decades of treating some community members as people who do not deserve full participation in our society is an expression of their real values, and refuse to cooperate further with them?

I do not ordinarily participate in the ADA commemorative events. I am trans, queer, and autistic. I have a low IQ score. I come from a family with an intergenerational history of substance abuse. I have been nonspeaking much of my adult life, and am partially speaking now. I am a SIBber and a psych survivor. I am under no impression that the ADA was meant for me, and if I ever had been, I have sat through enough lectures from framers to have been disabused of that heady notion. When I fought alongside the white crips who were horrified that passage of HR 620 in the last Congress might mean that they had to wait a few months for access, they did not turn around and agree that I should not have to wait for decades. I did not expect them to. They took their victory and continued to see me and my subcommunity and other subcommunities as undeserving of what is nonnegotiable for them. It was still the right thing for me to do, to fight the attack on what we have built; the right thing for them to do would have been to finally agree that what is nonnegotiable for them cannot be unimaginable for us.

I can acknowledge the effort the Eds and Judys and Justins and Evans put in; I can acknowledge their substantial achievements; I can admire and even love them as people. But I cannot ignore the relative privilege that permitted them the opportunities they used so well, and I cannot overlook that a movement they had so much influence over excluded so many from making any contribution, erased so many who did make a contribution, and continues to do so.

I believe in the promise of the ADA. I believe in the promise of justice for all marginalized groups. I believe we can get there. But I also believe it will take not just hard work and commitment, but revolutionary change within our movement (I will not presume to suggest I know what other movements need to do). So I will not mark ADA30 by celebrating the glorious history of white wheelchair users. We celebrate that glorious history every day, and too few of us peek behind the curtain.

I will, instead, celebrate the movement that Brad Lomax tried to build, the one that Bernard Carabello devoted his career to, the one Lois Curtis should have inspired, the one that incorporated Roland Johnson’s insights, the one that took seriously Mel Baggs’ ethical efforts. I will celebrate a movement in which I am neither more nor less human than the next person on the line, in which residents of no one institutional system take priority while residents of others languish, abandoned to their fates, and that therefore has the moral force to demand that the larger society remake itself in a similar way. I will celebrate ADA30 by celebrating the shining promise of a just future, and the dream of a movement that can deliver that promise to us — and then I will return to the tawdry reality and continue to try to build toward the dream by creating the movement that the Brads and Bernards and Loises and Rolands and Mels of today are working toward. And I will hope that the excellence of these activists and advocates will overcome the mediocrity of the movement they are inheriting. I have met some of these activists and advocates. There is reason to hope.

I hope that, however you choose to celebrate ADA30, it is a good celebration and that it nourishes you as you recommit to the long struggle toward a just world.