Minority Ethnic Communities and Disability

Abstract

As we have seen, policies focused on individual rather than environmental change can exacerbate, rather than obviate, inequalities. I have said that British policy has been based on the medical model of disability, but, more than this, it has also been founded on essentially white and Western understandings of medicine. So, in attempting to identify policy impacts on disabled people from ethnic minority communities in Britain, an author is immediately faced with a number of difficulties. First, although some qualitative material is available, there have been few studies from which to draw conclusions of a more quantitative and universal kind. Such data are so scarce that proponents of the social model of disability have been criticised for failing to analyse the impacts of policy on disabled people from ethnic minority communities (Hill, 1992; Begum et al., 1994). Academic study in this area remains, then, underdeveloped.