All of society benefits when workplaces include people with a range of disabilities.
In last night’s first and only debate between Pennsylvania Senate candidates John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz, Fetterman’s speech was often halting, his thoughts were occasionally incomplete, and the words and phrases he used didn’t always fit their context.
In May, Fetterman survived a stroke caused by a blockage in one of the arteries in his brain, his campaign has said. It has left him with what he calls auditory processing issues (commonly known as an auditory processing disorder) — that is, problems with the brain’s work of processing speech. As a result, Fetterman sounds very different compared to how he sounded before May — and very different from what pundits and many members of the public expect from political campaigners.
Ever since, his campaign has been dogged by questions about what his disability means for his capacity to serve in the Senate — questions loaded with biased assumptions about disabilities, and misunderstandings about how a stroke impacts cognitive capacity.
Two weeks ago, in his first televised interview since the stroke, Fetterman used live captioning technology for assistance. When Fetterman’s interviewer, NBC correspondent Dasha Burns, made pointed observations about his need to read her questions in order to understand them, it touched off an avalanche of questions and bad takes.
Among the swirling questions are ones about whether Fetterman’s stroke has caused cognitive changes that render him unfit to serve in the Senate. On their face, these are not unreasonable — although in both the NBC interview and in a podcast interview recorded October 10 with New York magazine’s Kara Swisher, herself a stroke survivor, Fetterman’s thinking and expression appeared to be intact.
But the questions become ugly when they ask if someone who requires accommodations similar to the ones Fetterman used can do the job of governing. Questions like this conflate the use of language-assistive devices with intellectual delays. More broadly — and especially when they’re weaponized politically, as they have been by the campaign of political rival Mehmet Oz — these questions conflate disability with weakness of character and mind.
Take a look at legislative bodies in the US and you’ll see that many of our elected officials use assistive technology, from glasses to wheelchairs to hearing aids and beyond. So do nearly two-thirds of our working public. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, requires employers to make these kinds of accommodations so people with disabilities can complete their job functions.
The ADA acknowledged that excluding people with disabilities did them a disservice by preventing them from contributing to and fully participating in the world around them. But it also helped uncover another important truth: that the whole of society makes meaningful gains when workplaces of all kinds include people with a range of disabilities.
If Fetterman wins his race, the accommodations he may use as a senator are ones that could also meaningfully benefit his colleagues without disabilities. Furthermore, say advocates, his mere presence in a high-stakes campaign as a political figure acknowledging and working through a disability can move the needle — not only on what the public imagines when it conceives of elected officials, but also on what legislators imagine they can do for us. Disability accommodations benefit everyone
Several stroke rehabilitation experts told me it’s impossible to assess from afar whether Fetterman will be able to successfully complete the functions of being a US senator. However, they noted that language processing differences and speech changes like the ones Fetterman demonstrated in the NBC interview — for example, he mispronounced “empathetic,” recognized his error, and corrected himself — signify he may have a type of language disorder that’s not uncommon after a stroke and which does not indicate changes in reasoning ability.
When people have a stroke, “that does not mean they can’t think through and rationalize and objectively analyze every question,” said Swathi Kiran, a neurorehabilitation professor and speech language pathologist at Boston University.
