Movements to Move the Marginalized from the Margins
Below is a speech from Silent Rhythms’ Executive Director, Kerry Thompson spoken on October 13th at the Disability & Intersectionality Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Who am I? If you ask people in Massachusetts, they will tell you that I am the Deafblind dancer who teaches people with disabilities how to dance and the Executive Director for Silent Rhythms, Inc. – a nonprofit to promote inclusion in the arts and to use the arts to promote inclusion in society.
Ask people at the United Nations, in Europe or in the developing world, who is Kerry Thompson? They will tell you that’s the DeafBlind human rights advocate who works for Disability Rights Fund, an international funder to advance human rights for people with disabilities in the developing world.
These two identities – a dancer and a global human rights advocate seem to have nothing in common though in both worlds I am known for being a person with Deafblindness and in both worlds, people with disabilities are marginalized and people with Deafblindness are considered to be the most marginalized of the marginalized.
These two very different worlds converged together when I learned that access to the arts is both a disability rights issue and a human rights issue.
In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990 making access to the arts a disability and civil rights issue. But the concept of access to the arts was declared long before the ADA.
Exactly 70 years ago this year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was created at the end of World War II to serve as a global guideline to what is meant by human rights and for whom. The declaration was a roadmap for how to achieve peace while protecting the dignity of all people.
And yes, the arts was included in this peace declaration. Article 27 says that Everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts.
“Everyone” is the single most important word in that statement. However, many countries including the US seem to be confused what “everyone” means. Some believed that because a person has a disability that they were not a human being therefore human rights did not apply to them.
To address that ignorance, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) was entered into force in 2008. The CRPD states that people with disabilities should enjoy their human rights on an equal basis as people without disabilities. Once again, the topic of access to the arts came up in a human rights document. Article 30 of the CRPD says that people with disabilities should be able to participate in cultural life, recreation, and sports.
With everything that people with disabilities have to fight for – education, healthcare, and employment – we do not advocate for inclusion in the arts. Most people do not realize that access to the arts is our right and its access is mandated by law.
Both here in the United States and overseas, I have seen people with disabilities advocating for their rights. Sometimes we are heard, sometimes we are not. Sometimes policies are crafted, laws are passed, accommodations are created yet society is still slow to change. How do we get society to care about people with disabilities?
I actually learned the answer to that question before I even knew I would need to ask the question. Back in 2008 when I first began working in human rights, I had also just started Silent Rhythms to teach people who were Deaf how to dance. I was drawing on my own struggles as a Deaf person trying to learn how to salsa dance. Everyone asks me, how did you get started in dance?
A hearing friend asked me to join her for a salsa lesson and I fell in love with the dance. Despite how much I loved the dance, learning it as someone who could not hear was a huge challenge especially with the communication barriers.
I wanted to create a more accessible experience to dance for the disability community so they would not have to struggle the way I had. At the same I began teaching, I was also losing my eyesight. I was born Deaf, I learned when I was 10 years old that I was going blind albeit slowly due to Usher’s Syndrome. Through all that darkness, dancing was my catharsis, a way to stay connected. Dancing gave me the freedom of movement while the simple act of walking outside was becoming a challenge.
As my identity changed from being Deaf to that of being Deafblind, my view of the world changed. I began to experience a new level of isolation and marginalization I had not experienced before.
Remember that question – how do we get society to care about disability? Over the years, the answer came to me. Movements. A movement can consist of people rallying together to fight for something they believe in.
Movement can also mean how one uses their body to create a dance. That’s how I put the two together for Silent Rhythms whose original mission was about promoting access to the arts but now the mission was about promoting inclusion in society through the arts – a movement to move the marginalized from the margins.
Since 2008, I have taught more than 5,000 people with disabilities how to dance. At the same time, I was also teaching people without disabilities how to dance with us, communicate with us, how to become part of our community and for us to be a part of their community. I may have taught 5,000 people with disabilities how to dance but I have also taught countless more people without disabilities awareness.
That is how my worlds of human rights and the arts came together to be a Movement to Move the Marginalized from the Margins.
Kerry Thompson is the Executive Director of Silent Rhythms Dance, which has provided access to the arts and accessible dance instruction to more than 5,000 people with disabilities. She also works for the Disability Rights Fund to advance the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the developing world. In 2014, she was awarded the German Marshall Fund’s Marshall Memorial Fellowship becoming the first woman with a disability to be awarded this prestigious fellowship. She was a 2016-2016 White House Fellowship National Finailsit. She is the co-author for Human Rights and Adolescence (2014. University of Pennsylvania Press). She completed a Master’s degree in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University with a focus on international law and human rights.
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