The model came from disabled activists in Britain. In 1976, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation separated "impairment," a condition of the body, from "disability," the exclusion society imposes. Scholar Mike Oliver named it the social model in the early 1980s.
In the US, the same ideas powered the disability rights movement. In 1977, disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for nearly four weeks to force enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, with support from the Black Panther Party, which brought food. The Americans with Disabilities Act followed in 1990. In 2022, more than 1 in 4 US adults reported a disability, according to the CDC.
Disability justice activists, many of them disabled people of color, have built on the social model. They point out that racism and poverty also disable people, through polluted neighborhoods, police violence and lack of health care.