There are parallels between #MeToo and disability discrimination. In both cases the abuse of a targeted minority is in many ways an effect of mainstream social behavior.
In both cases things which people _know_ happened are unhappened by habitual social pretense. You saw a respectable man swipe his hand down a woman’s crotch, but it would be in bad taste to make an issue of it.
Someone subjects the only disabled person at the party to intrusive, derogatory questions, and the group pretends that this is just friendly interest.
The person with the disability is publicly humiliated, effectively reduced to a pariah and an outcast right in front of everybody, but the attitude is that this is normal social action.
“The community” legitimizes the civil rights violation which has occurred by countenancing it. If the person who has just been abused calls the indifferent partygoers out on what they just did, she is treated as a bad sport.
It all works, for objectified women, or marginalized members of America’s largest minority,(1) because of _behavior_. Our social standards enable shabby treatment of those who don’t matter very much.
Thousands of cases of covering up what people know about, of casual social acceptance, hid from us the fact that large numbers of women were experiencing sexual assault right under our noses.
Exactly the same situation obtains with the millions who have disabilities. The difference is that it’s not a thing. There’s no #UsToo.
(1) America’s largest minority, according to the Department of Labor and the ADA:
http://www.dol.gov/odep/pubs/fact/diverse.htm
http://www.adainfo.org/sites/default/files/Leadership-Network/Modules-1-5/5a-America-largMinorityFINAL.pdf
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