1:48
\"This is not a me thing, this is an us thing,\" Okanlami said surrounded by colleagues, family and friends. \"The fact that they were able to orchestrate this somehow amidst all of the other things they've been doing -- through COVID, through family deaths, through injury, through sickness -- so the emotion is about every single person here and those that aren't here, those at Michigan, those at other institutions and in other country, those on other continents with and without disabilities that have supported us to get to where we are.\"
He added, \"It is beyond words.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/DRo-surprised_1666272635263_hpEmbed_16x9_384.jpg\")
He also thanked the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation, saying their support has reached \"not just our program but individuals with spinal cord injuries from all over the place.\"
\"'Disabusing disability' was a trademark that I coined a couple years ago to try to demonstrate that disability doesn't mean inability,\" he said. \"Until I started to move life on the other side of the stethoscope with my spinal cord injury I did not realize how ableist our world was, how inaccessible the world was and how I was unintentionally complicit to this world and met all these people with disabilities that have been doing amazing things.\"
He called disability \"a fabric in the world of diversity that makes us all have our unique contributions we can make -- instead of being limited based on what we cannot, we need to be given the access to show what we can.\"
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