Every month, we are handed a calendar of Disability Awareness observances. February alone asks us to hold space for Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion Month, Low Vision Awareness Month, Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness Day on February 2, Rare Disease Day at the end of the month, and Eating Disorder Awareness Week.
On paper, that looks like progress.
In practice, it exposes a truth we rarely say out loud.
Awareness without redistribution of power is not progress. It is branding.
Yes, there is a disability hierarchy. And it is one we must name and dismantle.
Disability hierarchies show up when some impairments are treated as more legitimate than others. When visibility determines credibility. When pain is ranked. When productivity becomes the measure of worth. When proximity to normal decides whose needs are believed and whose are questioned, delayed, or denied.
That hierarchy did not come from our community. It was imposed by systems built for convenience, capitalism, and control. By institutions that prefer neat categories over complex human realities. By policies that reward compliance and punish difference.
A Strike Against Equity
I have sat in rooms where my expertise was welcomed until my access needs entered the conversation. I have watched credibility evaporate the moment accommodations were named. That is the hierarchy at work. Quiet. Efficient. Familiar.
Disability is not a competition.
There is no gold standard of suffering.
No tiered system of worthiness for accommodations, dignity, or respect.
And yet, we see it everywhere.
In healthcare, where chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, rare diseases, eating disorders, and mental health disabilities are dismissed, minimized, or psychologized into irrelevance.
In employment, where non-apparent disabilities are doubted, fluctuating conditions are punished, and accommodations are framed as special treatment rather than civil rights.
In housing and education, where access is conditional and patience is thin.
In public discourse, where people with disabilities are talked about but rarely trusted to lead.
Even within our own communities, we have been pushed into silos. Pitted against one another. Forced to argue whose disability is harder, more severe, or more deserving. That fragmentation is not accidental. It is strategic. Divide the community, and equity becomes easier to deny.
Division Within the Community
The hierarchy does not stop at government agencies or corporate workplaces. It exists inside our own disability institutions as well.
Independent Living Centers (ILCs) are disability-led by design. They were created, governed, and operated by people with disabilities to advance self-determination and community integration, grounded in the belief that people with disabilities are the experts on our own lives. Federal law requires that at least 51 percent of ILC boards and staff be people with disabilities, ensuring these organizations remain rooted in lived experience rather than charity or clinical control.
That is precisely why it matters when hierarchy shows up inside them.
ILCs are legally mandated to serve people with significant disabilities in a cross-disability manner, meaning no one impairment should be prioritized over another. In theory, this principle is foundational to the independent living movement. In practice, many ILCs fall short of that promise. Hierarchy shows up in who receives attention, whose needs are centered, and which disabilities are treated as more fundable, more visible, or more urgent.
I challenge readers to look closely at Independent Living Centers in their own states and ask hard questions about who is being served and who is being sidelined.
The same hierarchy appears in employment practices within these organizations. Wage disparities for workers with disabilities are often attributed to historical underfunding of ILCs. Underfunding is real. But it is dismissive to stop the analysis there.
Look at the wage gaps between senior leadership and frontline staff. Look at who absorbs financial precarity and who is insulated from it. Too often, organizations replicate the same top-heavy structures they claim to resist, while failing to collectively advocate for the funding reforms they know are necessary.
Independent Living Centers were created to empower people with disabilities to live self-directed, integrated lives through peer-driven support, advocacy, and skills building rooted in choice, control, and full community participation. Living up to that mission requires confronting hierarchy wherever it appears, including within our own institutions.
Disability hierarchy survives because it is useful. It allows institutions to appear inclusive while maintaining control over who is believed, who is funded, and who is quietly deemed expendable.
Let me be clear. Equity is not about who has it worse. It is about ensuring no one is left behind.
This becomes painfully obvious when we talk about work.
Consequences in Work and Life
Workers with disabilities do not just quit jobs. We are pushed out by the status quo.
Low pay hits harder when healthcare, medications, assistive technology, and personal care are nonnegotiable expenses.
Poor organizational leadership shows up as disbelief, retaliation for requesting accommodations, or treating access as a favor instead of a right.
Micromanagement becomes surveillance when flexibility is denied.
A lack of work-life balance ignores fluctuating health, energy, and care needs.
If you have ever decided whose access request was reasonable and whose was inconvenient, you have participated in the hierarchy.
When workplaces are inaccessible, inflexible, and dismissive of lived experience, leaving is not a failure of commitment. It is an act of self-preservation.
If employers want retention, especially of workers with disabilities, we need fair pay, real accommodations, psychological safety, trust, and leadership that understands equity is not optional. It is foundational.
Some may doubt the hierarchy exists, but we saw its consequences laid bare during the pandemic.
When ventilators were scarce, the lives of people with disabilities were openly debated.
When care was rationed, eugenic logic resurfaced without apology.
Our community watched the world decide out loud which lives were worth saving.
Disability hierarchy is not theoretical.
It was lethal.
And yes, let us talk numbers, since systems love statistics when they are convenient.
More than one in four adults in the United States lives with a disability. Globally, over 1.3 billion people, nearly one in six, are people with disabilities. We are the largest and fastest growing minority in the world.
I know that makes ableists uncomfortable.
Good.
People with disabilities have been living with the consequences of that comfort for generations.
Dismantling the Hierarchy
The hierarchy of disability is real, and it is harming us. If we are serious about liberation, we must confront it head on.
Dismantling the hierarchy requires more than awareness. It requires leadership with disabilities in policy, healthcare, employment, and media. It requires funding decisions grounded in lived experience. It requires institutions willing to give up control, not just issue statements.
Our diversity is not the problem.
The systems that refuse to adapt are.
Until we dismantle the hierarchy, until all people with disabilities are treated as equally valuable, awareness months will remain symbolic gestures instead of engines for change.
And symbolism has never kept us alive.
Marcus Johnson is co-leader of the Civics League for Disability Rights, an independent, volunteer-led group of New Yorkers with disabilities who advocate for themselves, their community, and systemic change in healthcare and access for people with physical disabilities. To learn more, email civicsleague@gmail.com.
Opinions expressed are solely those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Able News at The Viscardi Center and/or The Viscardi Center.