So you've made it here and you probably are saying - okay, so what does this all mean? or even what can we do?

While I may not have a 5-step plan to ending white supremacy culture, I can offer my own assessment on how we build better, more sustainable, and stronger social movements so we can work for collective liberation.

Throughout the site, I have demonstrated the deeply complex and unrecognized ties between movements and issues. What I have also sought to demonstrate was that within each issue and each movement, there is always a disability angle that must be considered. There is no way we will be able to sustain our work post-2020, when an increasing amount of COVID-19 survivors will become disabled due to long term complications, if we do not begin to consider how we bring disabled people into leadership and membership roles within all of our organizing spaces. And to do that is going to take work.

The brilliance of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha helps to outline what this takes in both her collection of essays,

Care Work: Dreaming of Disability Justice and at the 2018 Disability Intersectionality Summit where she read from her text directly.

Solutions

Disability Justice is just as difficult as Lakshmi Piepzna-Samasarasinha suggests, and putting it into practice will be difficult work as there are incredible stigmas, social barriers, cultural and organizing differences, as well as historic harm to address between our movements for us to reach a point where we could fully move forward.

While researching for this project, I read Charlene Carruthers Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Towards the end of Unapologetic, Carruthers references Lakshmi Piepzna-Samasarasinha and healing justice work, which is a necessary component to organizing; and while Carruthers throughout the text occasionally references disability as an intersectional access, she fails to bring in Disability Justice as an organizing practice.

To be fair, there is a remarkable amount of similarity between Disability Justice and the "Black Queer Feminist Lens" which Carruthers claims is foundational to her work with BYP100. Both want to center folks with multiple marginalized identities, they both want to center the collective needs and work with compassion under the practices of healing and transformative justice, and they both look to some/multiple forms of BIPOC ancestral knowledge; even as far as both citing the work of Harriet Tubman as a source of ancestral knowledge. In reality, these organizing practices are not far off except for one critical way - the axis of disability. BQF lens fails to connect the roots of ableism within its own movement spaces and it shows.

Reactionary organizing, while not typically called that, happens far too often in all able body led movement spaces. As soon as a political or social issue hits, non-profits and community groups alike are drafting a response. Quickly, there is a protest happening and because social media keeps us hyper-connected, it's hard to escape the constant pressure of feeling a sense of urgency in this day and age. However, it's this reactionary organizing that leads to the exclusion of the crip skills and wisdom that Disability Justice offers us.

Disabled people are not as capable to attend last minute direct response actions, and the experience of them can be so toling on many of our bodies that even if we could feasibly make it, we know we actually could never; and this is where the need for Disability Justice becomes blaring clear.

The reference both Carruthers and Lakshmi Piepzna-Samasarasinha make to Harriet Tubman is what I think should be a focal point, as it's Tubman's disability that makes it possible for her to free so many enslaved people through the underground railroad. It was through Tubman being deemed 'crazy' that allowed her to free so many - she was just thought to be 'talking to herself' when she was really recruiting (Care Work, 253). Harriet Tubman had narcolepsy from a childhood injury, and when she began helping liberate enslaved people she would fall asleep on the journey due to this condition; the comrades knew better than to leave her behind - she was the guide. So they had no choice but to move on, as Alison Kafer describes, crip time'. Even though the sense of urgency must have felt extraordinary, the punishment for escaping and getting caught could be the end of life itself, they waited until she was able to resume the journey.

This is the ancestral wisdom, the liberatory practice, we must build our movements on, as it's been proven to work.

We need to stop being caught up at the speed of abled-bodied capitalism for that way of being, where productivity must be high for the most extraction of profit from your labor; it's the type of being that is visible in most workplaces, which also traces back into indentured servitude and slave labor. We need to move on crip time, we need to center our most disabled and marginalized community, especially the Disabled BIPOC members, and address their needs.

From there is where we can begin to see truly revolutionary political change.

Our movements, as they currently operate, function far too frequently at a burnout pace and it must stop. The spaces where we seek to build for liberation should also offer respite, care, and community - even if you have zero to offer that day because you are incredibly sick and you are just needing a ride to the pharmacy and grocery store, you should know who in that community is there to help support you and who can help you with any given need. This builds directly into what Lakshmi Piepzna-Samasarasinha describes as Care Webs.

I believe that in liberating and healing our communities from interpersonal and organizational harm, we will be required to become more vulnerable with our truths. It is going to take a ton of authentic storytelling of our own personal experience, in combination with more approachable means of educating people about our intersecting issues and movement spaces, for individuals, organizations, and communities to begin to fully recognize how our liberation is deeply intertwined. Within the Disability Justice community, this kind of storytelling and connecting of issues and movements is already happening. From the cultural work of Sins Invalid, The Disability Invisibility Project led by Alice Wong through StoryCorps, and the personal blog from Mia Mingus, Leaving Evidence, disabled people are doing the work of telling our stories, what we need is to have able-bodied organizers and movement spaces uplift our voices and bring us into leadership roles, where we set the agendas and the pace we work at.

We must leave evidence. Evidence that we were here, that we existed, that we survived and loved and ached. Evidence of the wholeness we never felt and the immense sense of fullness we gave to each other. Evidence of who we were, who we thought we were, who we never should have been. Evidence for each other that there are other ways to live--past survival; past isolation. - The mission of Mia Mingus Blog Leaving Evidence:

I tried to practice that within this project, sharing how my personal experiences fit into the political, and I hope that it offers more insight into how these siloed off issues need to be brought together for coalition building; as many people live at various points of intersection, even if it's not readily apparent.

The more we normalize the openness of sharing our experiences, the easier we will be able to connect.

My final thoughts on the liberation of our movements is that we need to remember the concept of Queer Futurity, a theoretical concept by José Munoz, which describes the process of working for queer liberation as always trying to reach for something more. In essence, we should expect that we will never really be done.

As social structures and whole nations change, what "liberation" looks like will ultimately change as well, and we should be okay with this.

"Queerness is an aspiration toward the future. To be queer is to imagine better possible futures."

- (Cruising Utopia, Introduction).

I think this message of Queerness is one all of our movements can adapt and utilize, as we must not only be working for our current situation but planning for the future as well, which will always include aging bodies and limited ability.

I hold this all as my truths and centering Disability Justice through radical love is the way I am moving forward to build better spaces for community, connection, and healing.

I hope you will join me.

-Sara Kragness