My name is haben girma, im a disability rights advocate, lawyer, speaker and author. My book is called haben the deafblind woman who conquered harvard law. I am deafblind. Ive limited vision and hearing and i grew up in a cited and hearing world. I was born and raised in california, and i am still living in california. I am talking to you from my living room. I dont actually work here. I work at my desk and thats where i sat down to write my book. My deafblind this is not the thing that made life difficult. It was able listen that made life difficult. Ableism is the belief that disabled people are inferior compared to nondisabled people. Its not true. We are not inferior, but evil navalism keeps moving throughout our society and saying disabled people dont matter, therefore, dont make services accessible, dont provide medical care and all kinds of unfair biases. When i was younger i wasnt sure what to do. Do i just accept inferior service . But over time i learn to advocate. I started to demand inclusion and i learned about the americans with disabilities act which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. The ada prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities. I learned about when i was in college, and my book shares this process why discover advocacy, turned into a career and learned to advocate for people with disabilities. If you could take away one message from the book, its the concept of ableism. Ableism is the belief that disabled people are inferior to nondisabled people. My book teaches people to identify ableism, and join us in working to fight ableism. I am an advocate, so i looked back into my life and asked myself what are the lessons from my life that could help people advance opportunities for disaed people around the United States and around the world. I picked stories for my life that teach people about ableism. Ableism intersects with sexism, racism. It pops up in small conversations in the kitchen when youre making pb j. So i wanted to show people all the different ways ableism hurts us so people can learn to identify it and work to remove it from our society. My parents are from eritrea and ethiopia. In parts of this country people believe that disability is a curse on the family. It was really, really difficult to deal with that kind of oppression within ones culture. My parents had to learn to resist that idea. They had to learn to define disability for ourselves. Disability is not a burden on the family. Disability i an opportunity for innovation. So we had to come up with our own definition of what disability means. When i was growing up i would try to tell my parts i cant cook, i cant do chores. You cant ask a blind kid to do chores or cook. They were not buying it. They still insisted that i cook and do chores. On the one hand, as a kid i was frustrated. But on the other as an adult i am grateful they ensured i was getting those life skills. There are lots of parents of disabled kids who tell the kids, dont do chores. Dont cook. Its dangerous point those kids grow into adults who never develop important independence and life skills. Thats frustrating. Parents need to help their kids explore their environment and develop important life skills like how to take care of one home. Society is built for nondisabled people, and that forces disabled people to come up with solutions, everything from cooking in the kitchen to solving international challenges. One of the things i had to learn to solve is how do you communicate when most people rely on vision and hearing to communicate . I tapped into my strengths. One of my strengths is my sense of touch. I use it more than most people. Tapping into intelligence is something ive cultivated for a long time. It helps me partner dancing. It helps me rockclimbing, and all kinds of situations. When i am walking im feeling the different textures to my feet walking from pavement to carpet to hardwood floors. So its something ive developed. When looking at ways to communicate with people, i immediately tapped into it. So i was looking at technologies, touchbased solutions. In 2010 a new piece of technology came out that supported bluetooth and braille. I will hold it up. Im holding up a little device with braille on the bottom, and i run my fingers over the dots to feel the letters. When i connect this to an external keyboard, people can type on the keyboard and i can read in braille. Most people dont know braille, dont know sign language. But most people can type, especially millennials. So i found that communication became much, much easier when i tapped into one of my strengths, my sense of touch. My theory is terrible. My vision is terrible. My sense of touch is excellent, so i tap into that and way more opportunities came up for me. Disabled people do this all the time. When we increase disability at your school, more innovations come in, more solutions to problems. So it benefits all of us. It benefits all of us to increase hiring and diversity in our team. Traditional philosophy texts exclude a lot of thinkers and knowledge that exists in the world. There is a bias towards white male philosophers. Excluding a lot of the wisdom developed by black, people of color, women, and disabled people who exist across this different minority group. So we need to rebuild our libraries to include more diverse thinkers and philosophers. Because the traditional text that has been throughout western history exclude a lot of critical voices. Why am i passionate about social justice . Because i want to stay alive. I want answers and opportunities that are available to nondisabled people. Disabled, black and brown people are at greater risk of police violence. About a third to half are killed by police are disabled people. A lot of individuals in power, police officers, tsa agents walk into situations assuming one can hear, move in certain ways, and that is terrifying and leads to many deaths. Knowing all these injustices exist moved me to advocate for change, to be a social justice advocate. In my book i talk about the situation in college where all i wanted was to eat. I wanted access to food, and the food information was only available in a digital format. As a blind student i couldnt read the menu, and asked the cafeteria, please provide the menu in braille or post it online or email it to me. I have technology that allows me to access websites and email. The cafeteria manager told me, we are very busy. We have over 1000 students. We dont have time to do special things for students with special needs. Just to be clear, Everyone Needs to eat. Theres this myth that are two kinds of people, dependent and independent. Everyone is interdependent. Many of you like drinking coffee. Very few grow your own coffee beans. You depend on other people to grow your beans, your food, build your computers. Thats okay as long as we are honest about the fact that we are all interdependent. The cafeteria manager didnt understand this, so for several months i just tolerated the lack of access to food. I was a vegetarian back then. How do you know which station is serving vegetarian food when you cant read the menu . It was frustrating. As a deafblind student i would go to a station at random, get food, find a table, try the food, and discover an unpleasant surprise. What was i to do . Maybe disabled students should just accept inferior service. Maybe that was just going to be my life due to inferior services for ever and ever. I talked to friends, advocates, and they reminded me my choice. Its our choice to accept unfairness or advocate for justice. I went back to the manager and explained, the americans with disability act prohibits discrimination against disability. If you dont provide access to the menus, im going to take legal action. I had no idea how to do that. I was 19. I couldnt afford a lawyer. Now i know there are nonprofit Legal Centers that help students with disabilities, but back then i didnt know that. All i knew is had to try, i had to do something. The next day the manager apologized and promised to make the menus accessible. He actually did. He started emailing the menus. Life became delicious. The next year a new blind student came to the college, and he had immediate access to the menus. That taught me when i advocate it helps everyone who comes after me. That experience in college inspired me to go to law school. I went to harvard law. Harvard said they never had a deafblind student before. I told them i had never been to Harvard Law School before. We didnt know what all the solutions would be, but we had an interactive process to find the solutions and make it work. Now i work as an advocate for disabled people. I know theres injustice, and i know theres a weight of injustice. All of us have a choice to accept unfairness, to tolerate it, or advocate for justice. My book, haben the deafblind woman who conquered harvard law helps people identify all the injustices against disabled people. Maybe not all of them but a lot of them. And encourages people to join us in fighting to end injustice against disabled people. A lot of people dont know about access for the disabled. There are tools like the web content accessibility guidelines. Some people say they dont know about them. They give them the opportunity to learn about them. If they have education and still refuse to make their services accessible, then theres the ada. Then there are consequences. People have had 30 years to learn this. There are no me excuses. Research is important to all advocates. Strong advocates research what theyre talking about. Books help you gain a deepe understanding of the topic. When youre facing a difficult situation, thats exactly when you need to be an advocate for justice. It you have the energy, yes, advocate for change. I do understand sometimes those of us who advocate all the time experience advocacy fatigue, and we need to take a break, recharge. At that point it really helps when you have a community. To step in for you come help continue the advocacy, who can eer for you and empathize and help you recharge. Community is a really big part of advocacy. So two things. One, there is a lot of injustice against disabled people. If you can turn that off and pretend it doesnt exist and stop thinking about it, thats a privilege. Its a privilege to not think about disability issues. Libraries around the country have the opportunity to increase access for disabled patrons. Tax, books are critical texts and expanding opportunities. Make sure digital services, library websites, digital books our accessible to blind readers and readers with pretreating disability like dyslexia and learning disabilities. Increase access to braille text as well. The National Library service for the blind has been a huge part of my life. Growing up i would get so many books from nls, harry potter books. I got those from the library of congress. The library of congress braille and talking book program is one of the few programs in the country where blind people can get physical hardcover braille books. Books i could actually hold and feel. This is precious and rare, but it is really, really hard for blind people to get our hands on braille books. So for most of my life when i got a physical braille book, it was through the library of congress. We also have computer braille, refreshable braille such as on devices like this. And when a digital book is compatible with screen reader, blind people can read it on their braille computer. We also can access braille books digitally. We do need to increase access to Braille Computers. They are expensive. There are some programs, Government Programs and nonprofits that provide Braille Computers to blind individuals. But its really difficult to get access to them. Weeknights this week we feature booktv programs as as a preview of whats available at the weekend on cspan2. Tonight we focus on science. Seven ways big corporations ruin your life and how to take back control, hes interviewed by David Longman and attend former appellate judge and George Mason University lawprofessor Douglas Ginsburg and his book voices of our republic examines the constitution through the eyes of judges, legal scholars and historians. Watch tv on cspan2 this weekend and be sure to watch indepth live sunday, september 6 at noon eastern with our guest author and chair of africanamerican studies at Princeton University betty law junior. With joe biden as president elect, look to cspan for live coverage of the election process cspan your unfiltered view of politics. Good evening everyone. Welcome to the bookstore in scottsdalearizona. Im Barbara Chatham and my cohost is the Pulitzer Prize winning and distinguished Foreign Correspondent and columnist for the washington post, and im happy to say my friend jimoagland good to see you. Im just delighted you could join us. Our author this evening is mark salter and the book is, we