The disabled community warned about the juridical trajectory of banning masks in public as we witnessed the escalating anti-mask movement and rush back to “normal” phenomenon. This type of targeted legislation enacted to exclude disabled people from public spaces has a long and sordid history in the United States. “Ugly laws” were edicts that strictly prohibited disabled people from public spaces. 1 In the late 19th century, Denver, Colorado specifically made it a crime for a “deformed person” to expose themselves to public view.2 The parallelization of the Ugly Laws and the mask ban in Nassau County are strikingly similar.
Now that New York passed its first public mask ban, the disabled community has to grapple with the new reality of what it looks like to protect ourselves. This means one of three things, risk being in a public space under the threat of jail, a fine or, exposure to viruses that could further disable us. What are we supposed to do, self segregate? Carry around a medical card with our aliments for the entire world to see, to be immediately sequestered at the whims of the state calvary? How will that play out in communities that are already over-policed and targeted? We are giving the state infantry the unbridled authority to medically regulate who can wear a mask in public.
“Mask bans send the message that it is a crime to be disabled.” – Alice Wong3
The recent mask ban did not derive from the white supremacist Unite the Right rally held in Charlottesville, the Far-Right Infilatratiors during the Black Lives Matter protests, nor the recent unpermitted Patriot Front march in Nashville this July. Rather, they strategically coincide with the Pro-Palestinian movement. The New York Civil Liberties Union stated that “Nassau County’s mask ban is a dangerous misuse of the law to score political points and target protestors. Barring people who speak out from protecting themselves and their identities puts their health and well-being in danger, particularly people with disabilities, people of color, and those with unpopular views.”4
Make no mistake, the banning of masks is not about public safety. It is about political silence and the forced disappearance of disabled people from the public sector.
- https://amsj.blog/2024/06/16/dying-from-disability-race-disability-and-law-by-bre-madsen/ ↩︎
- Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ↩︎
- https://www.teenvogue.com/story/mask-bans-disabled-people-protest ↩︎
- https://www.nyclu.org/press-release/nyclu-condemns-nassau-county-mask-ban ↩︎
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