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More than five years ago I was approached by the first director of a proposed “Berkeley Free Folk Festival” and asked to recommend potential workshop spaces for the event, which I was happy to do. I explained the necessity of using fully accessible locations, since the event was to be partially funded by public money, to a self-appointed director whose initial response was, “People in wheelchairs don’t play the guitar.” 

Her response was typical. Most people think that if you can shoehorn a wheelchair into a space, whether by means of a rickety ramp or by hauling the chair up a flight of stairs manually, that you’ve covered your Americans With Disabilities Act bases and can slap a little wheelchair stick figure on the poster and be done with it. Most people think all disabled people use wheelchairs. Most people think if someone who does use a wheelchair attends an event, then that event must an accessible event because, after all, someone in a wheelchair was there. 

I opened my newspaper this week and found to my disappointment that several of the Arts Festival events are being held in theater spaces which I know to be completely inaccessible. The Arts Festival receives public money and, of course, would like to receive more. The Berkeley Free Folk Festival was held for the last four years in an inaccessible venue, and when last year that venue’s governing board refused to host this year’s festival because of accessibility issues, the director moved the event— to another inaccessible venue. 

I’ve tried contacting members of the City Council, the City Manager, the Commission on Disabilities, the Arts Commission, the festival directors. I’ve done copious research on alternative, fully accessible locations, which become more numerous every year thanks to the hard-working people who make continuous efforts to bring existing venues into compliance. It would cost nothing to relocate events to places which the whole of the Berkeley community could attend together safely, as is required by both California and federal law.  

But somehow, despite Berkeley’s professed philosophy of inclusion and anti-discrimination, the systematic discrimination against the disabled continues. Those who raise the moral issue on the basis of justice, or the practical issue of hoping the city would have an interest in avoiding lawsuits, are dismissed or discredited as cranks, or worse, as anti-arts. Somehow in this strange and wonderful city with so many Ph.D.’s and so much higher consciousness, the equal rights of taxpayers with disabilities are considered too superficial to matter. Somehow in Berkeley, perhaps due to a political myopia which is its own serious disability, you can’t get there from here. 

Carol Denney is a Berkeley resident.