The Intersections of Disability
Building Stronger Social Movements
Before We Start:
The Founders of Disability Justice
Disability Justice was founded as a direct response to the erasure of disabled people who "lived at the intersecting injunctions of oppression" within the more known and politically accepted Disability Rights movement.
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In response to this, in 2005, disabled activists of color, originally queer women of color incubated in progressive and radical movements that did not
systematically address ableism – namely, myself and Mia Mingus, soon to be joined by Leroy Moore, Stacey Milbern, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret – began discussing a “second wave” of disability rights and ultimately launched a framework we called Disability Justice. - Patty Berne, Disability Justice: A Working Draft from Sins Invalid Blog (emphasis my own)
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Today, the scholarship around Disability Justice is growing within the academy along with an increased awareness of the alarming presence of ableism within our society at large, however, there is also a tendency to keep our movement work siloed overall.
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This siloing nature is in direct opposition to the foundations of the Disability Justice movement, which is best outlined in Disability Justice: A Working Draft.
At the closing of the article, Berne leaves us with the following:
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This is Disability Justice, an honoring of the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform. Disability Justice is a vision and practice of a yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great-grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which everybody and mind is known as beautiful.
There have always been efforts to limit the turnout of Black, Brown, and Indigenous voters in the United States, and the disenfranchisement of the BIPOC vote continues today.
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For disabled BIPOC voters, the various restrictions in addition to any barriers they face depending on their disability make the process to vote even more difficult to access.
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From the battle to restore voting rights to felons, moves end voter ID laws for everyone - including Trans folks, and overall increase participation among marginalized communities, in addition to ensuring disabled people can vote, there is much work to still be done.
Voter Disenfranchisement
By The Numbers:
Disability By Race/Ethnicity
Indigenous - 16% Black - 11%
White - 9% Hispanic - 7%
Asian - 4%
“Disability Rates among Working-Age Adults Are Shaped by Race, Place, and Education” Brookings (2018)
Racial Justice
It was in the fall of 2012 when I entered the organizing world. I entered the United Council of UW Students during my second year at UW-Parkside,
and the people who recruited me ended up being some of the most impactful relationships of the next two years of my life.
As a Student Vote Organizer, I was paid to help get students at my school registered to vote for the upcoming election.
While political engagement and voting was an important part of my white-centric upbringing, it was at Parkside, where the racial diversity of the student body was much more mixed than anywhere I had ever been prior, that I was able to recognize firsthand the disparities between voter access.
While voting was something that was not only easy, fun, and accessible for me, it was socially expected of me to participate - because of my whiteness.
Why is no one discussing Freddie Gray's disabilities? Historically, disabled persons have had a higher risk for ineffective interactions with law enforcement personnel... In Freddie Gray's case, racial discrimination is compounded by disability discrimination and when we ignore this fact, any solution to the problem of police bias and brutality will be incomplete.
-Zosia Zaks
Violence and Control
Violence against BIPOC communities, especially Black and Indigenous people, has been part of the American story since colonization.
It is still witnessed today in many forms, including police brutality and the inescapable presence of rape; violence, "care", and control often go hand in hand within our society.
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Police brutality has become a focal point in American politics, especially in the summer of 2020 with the uprisings, protests, and acts of resistance we saw nationwide. We also witnessed the deployment of our national guard and unsanctioned civilians with military-grade weapons patrolling the streets, often clashing with the constitutionally protected protesters calling for the end of police being able to murder Black people without repercussion.
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These clashes led to the kidnapping of civilians, the creation of many bail-funds, and civilians sharing tips from the protestors in Hong Kong who have been able to hold the line and resist China increasing hold on their democracy.
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When the military arrived in the streets with police riot ready, they deployed their weapons against unarmed civilians and journalists. Rubber bullets were improperly deployed, and in some cases causing permanent blindness to both reporters and civilians.
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The United States government has time and again shown its citizens that it will utilize whatever force is necessary to keep its people docile and accepting of our conditions, regardless of how unjust they may be; and while this is under President Trump, where all normalcy has gone out the window, this is just another tie in a long history of our government using violence to control people, especially BIPOC communities. ​
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Police Partially Blinded Eight People On The Same Day of Protests After George Floyd's Death
Washington Post, 2020
Body Autonomy
While forced sterilization has been used for centuries on BIPOC people with a uterus, we also have gynecology as a medical field due to the assault that was repetitively enacted upon three women, Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy, whom we often fail to discuss in the realm of disability.
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But as the NPR podcast Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The
Mothers of Modern Gynecology details, these women were all disabled with the modern sense due to the fistulas that Marion Sims was trying to 'cure'.
These women were property. These women could not consent. These women also had value to the slaveholders for production and reproduction - how much work they could do in the field, how many enslaved children they could produce. And by having these fistulas, they could not continue with childbirth and also have difficulty working.
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It's also through Sims stories that we can recognize earlier instances of medical disregard for BIPOC mothers and people generally, as the surgeries where he perfected his practice were performed without any anesthesia, as it was believed then that Black people did not experience pain in the same way; this belief still exists today.
Labor Inequality
The pay gap between people of color and white folks has been well researched and documented in various studies, it's known that there are gaps within racial groups based on gender, sexuality, and ability as well.
What begins to connect these pay inequities outside of the obvious, is the role of the New Deal and the National Labor Relations Act.
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During the New Deal Era, the statutory exclusion of agricultural and domestic employees was well-understood as a race-neutral proxy for excluding blacks from statutory benefits and protections made available to most whites. Remarkably, despite these racist origins, an agricultural and domestic worker exclusion remains on the books today, entirely unaltered after seventy-five years...Contemporary domestic workers also endure low wages and sometimes brutal working conditions, along with harassment, and psychological and sexual abuse... - The Echoes of Slavery: Recognizing the Racist Origins of the Agricultural and Domestic Worker Exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act, Juan F. Perea
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Remembering Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey: The Mothers of Moderns Gynecology
Hidden Brain, NPR