Washington, D.C., August 23 – The 2020 Democratic National Convention took place over the course of this week, and several speakers with disabilities were featured over the first-of-its-kind virtual event. By doing so, the event helped to normalize disability, showing individuals with a variety of disabilities speaking about topics from gun violence to healthcare – issues of importance to all people in America. This is a massive change in politics as people with disabilities are starting to be seen and heard.
Indeed, after the 2012 DNC and RNC political conventions, The New York Times created a tool where people could put in a word to see how many times that word appeared from the convention stages during these major events. People with disabilities had been missing from both the stage and the conversation as the tool showed that the word was not even mentioned once per 25,000 words from the Republican convention and was mentioned .03 times per 25,000 times at the 2012 Democratic convention.
The 2020 DNC convention, in contrast, featured both conversations about disability as well as speakers with disabilities.
