You are SO Brave: Disability Studies vs. Disability Justice at #SF41
“You are SO BRAVE” is a statement most disabled people are used to hearing. Able-bodied and able-minded people frequently infantilize our experiences and lives for their own inspiration fetishes. But you might be shocked to hear these words coming from the mouths of disabled people at a conference surrounding disability studies and scholarly work, what is seen by many, especially the attendees, as a vital part of the disability justice movement.
Last September, I went to pick up flyers for the conference “Keywords and Key Questions” from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender Studies at Columbia. As a disability justice activist, I was excited to hear about the conference, as disability rights advocacy has been taking a new turn on campus this year, with the production of V-Day’s show Respect(Ability), the formation of various student groups, and the sponsoring of Invisible Disabilities Awareness Week by Student Life. My excitement quickly diminished, however, seeing the list of speakers and realizing that there were two panelists of color, Sayantani DasGupta and Michael Ralph, out of 25 speakers. As a member and organizer at FIERCE, I have met countless queer and trans disabled people of color: Kay Ulanday Barrett, Mark Travis Rivera, and more.
The reality is that disability work, just like anti-racist work, just like the LGBTQIA+ movement, and just like feminist politics, many times fails to be intersectional. White supremacy has permeated movements so deeply that when people in those communities who also hold other marginalized identities, specifically people of color, speak out about the lack of intersectionality, they are patronized and patted on the head. Instead of incorporating the ideas of intersectional justice into the disability movement, academic scholars are too focused on defending their work and their fields.
Despite the fact that I saw few panelists of color on the posters, I decided to give the conference a chance. As a member of the Social Justice House who had started a project to confront the issue of disability injustice at Columbia, I was curious to see what the faculty of this university was doing to support disability rights on campus. Perhaps they would address the issue of so few academics of color in disability studies. Perhaps these academics were still allies of people of color and would create conversation around issues that exclusively impact us. Perhaps there would still be a large audience of color who would ask questions to specifically lead panelists in the direction of race and disability. Unfortunately, none of this was the case. The conference was no more than a circle of primarily white disability scholars blowing their own horns.
This work is not about you, white disability scholars, this is about us: the disabled people in your community who are not given a voice, not given representation, not allowed access to your spaces because: face it, academics is inaccessible. Yes. Your version of disability justice is INACCESSIBLE.
When over seventy percent of college graduates are white, your space becomes inaccessible to people of color, particularly Black people. People of color whose races impact how and if their disabilities are diagnosed, whose races impact their interactions with the police and criminal (in)justice system, whose races impact every aspect of their lives and experiences because we do not live one-dimensional lives. Disabled people of color are three-dimensional experiences. We cannot separate our brownness or Blackness from our disabilities any more than we can separate our spines from our backs. And yes, we do have spines. We are unafraid. We are unafraid to confront you if your disability work is not intersectional.
And we do not want to hear patronizing compliments on how speaking out is SO brave. People of color are not meek, we are not compliant, we are not silent. We are warriors who have been roaring for centuries and you have just begun to notice. We deserve a movement that is built around obtaining justice for all disabled people, not just disabled people who are cisgender, heterosexual/romantic, and white.
Our communities are building a movement for justice and healing that hold our queer, trans, low or no-income folks of color at the center. We are building for those of us whose disabilities impact our sexualities and intimacies. For rape survivors with PTSD who have the right to choose if they have sex and who they do or do not have sex with. For women of color with cerebral palsy. For those of us with chronic pain and social phobias who cannot leave our homes to spend time with our loved ones. We work for those of us who are trans, like me, who do not have access to medical transitioning because hormone replacement therapy can create complications for our pre-existing conditions. For transmasculine folks whose masculinities are denied because masculinity and disability are seen to be in conflict with each other. Disability is connoted with dependence and weakness whereas masculinity is associated with power and autonomy. For trans femme sex workers with AIDS who do not have access to treatment. We fight for those of us who are low or no-income who cannot afford the long and expensive process to become diagnosed and, without the ticket to ride that a diagnosis provides, are barred from disability services, benefits, or disability-specific healthcare. We are still equally as disabled because the medical-industrial complex does not have the right to tell us our pain and experiences are invalid. Disabled people with invisible disabilities, such as borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, autism, autoimmune disorders, and chronic pain, who are told their illnesses are not real because they do not present visibly, whose doctors refuse to diagnose them. Folks with invisible disabilities in unstable housing conditions who cannot disclose that they have disabilities because of the likelihood of being evicted. Disabled young people who are tracked and sidelined in special education, institutionalized in detention centers or psychiatric hospitals, or sedated with drugs. Or disabled young people who do not have the option of pursuing a diagnosis or treatment because of stigma within their families. Disabled people like me who did not see a single representation of themself in that room.
Fortunately, a few months later, the Scholar and Feminist Conference: Sustainabilities hosted a panel organized by our very own Che Gossett titled “Disability and Healing Justice: Making Our Lives Sustainable and Our Movements Livable.” This was the panel I had longed to see in October. Panelists Geleni Fontaine and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reawakened my faith in the disability justice movement. Geleni Fontaine is an anti-violence, self-defense instructor creating a movement for women, survivors, and disabled folks through their work at the Center for Anti-Violence Education, as an RN, as a holistic healer, and as an acupuncturist. Leah Lakshmi, a mixed-race Romani, Irish, and Sri Lankan writer, is an incest and intimate personal violence survivor who self-identifies as “crazy, chronically ill, and disabled.” She attended NYU where she did HIV/AIDS work, but at 21 moved to Toronto because of her healthcare access needs. She was part of a “movement culture of entering movements to save our own lives,” and did work for Sins Invalid, an organization for disabled performance artists to create space for discussion on respectability and desirability politics.
Like many other movements, the disability justice movement begins in Black liberation and Black studies and these scholars did not fail to touch upon that. Disability studies in this country begins with runaway slaves being diagnosed with drapetomania (“the disease causing [slaves] to run away”). The creator of the term “disability justice,” Leroy Moore, was a Black disabled man. Harriet Tubman was disabled with a traumatic brain injury and went on to save thousands of slaves. Our stories of disability are rooted in intersections of race, gender, class, religion, culture, and queerness. Disabled people are either seen as broken machines or as having perfectly-working bodies with broken minds. But disabled people are people with a culture, with history, with communities, and with organizations. Disabled people are resilient, and able-bodied people have a lot to learn from us. Our existence is resistance. Even we disabled people have a lot to learn from each other about solidarity because we all have different experiences. We are not a monolith.
Geleni and Leah touched on healing justice in the disability movement, quoting Cara Page: “If our movements themselves aren’t healing, there is no point to them.”
Pushing against the system means that power is shared. We must work to make systems accessible. The panelists shared their hopes for the future. A future where disabled people are believed, a future where disabled people are valuable, not a liability, and a future with a medical system that recognizes that we are intersectional beings. We must build communities of care and healing. We must make disability movements intersectional and accessible. We must create movements to save ourselves. http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaimy-na-kartu.html http://www.tb-credit.ru/zaim-bez-otkaza.html