Defining the Problem:
Disabled people are navigating a time of emboldened and escalating hostility and outright politicized attacks. This is particularly true for Black, brown, indigenous and people of color, migrants, low income / poor whites, and queer, trans people.
We are clear that our bodily autonomy and indeed our very lives are under a direct, coordinated and orchestrated attack. This is not a new experience for marginalized disabled trans people, as we have long experienced the consequences of having bodies and minds that are categorized as inherently inferior, defective and incompetent – of being a people who are deemed the useless eaters, the burdensome and the disposable. Under the dictates of this ideology, we are pre-determined, often in utero or early childhood, to be unworthy and unfit for self- determination or dignity, and absolutely undeserving of autonomy in any part of our lives.
Yet racialized ableism doesn’t stop here, it stretches further, casting us as people who are not just morally corrupt, but innately criminal, volatile and dangerous.
An uncomfortable but necessary truth to address is that disabled people are experienced as physically and intellectually repugnant to able-bodied people.
This is further entrenched by separation and segregation practices such as warehousing disabled people in group homes, institutions, special education and sheltered workspaces.
Ableism is one of many supremacy systems that weaponizes this revulsion with vigor, and until an acknowledgement and reckoning of this disturbing truth happens disabled people will continue to be deemed sub-human. This is particularly true of disabled trans and queer people.
Ableism intersects with transphobia and powerful ways — transgender people are often labeled “sick” “mad”, “ill”, or “freaks” because of their gender identity. This is a deliberate use of ableism, well known for its success in determining who is worthy and who is disposable. To be trans and disabled means that we are under greater scrutiny than disabled cis people or able-bodied trans people. We are infantilized, fetishized or both.
We are rooted to the knowledge that the vast majority of disabled communities who we wish to be accountable and to be in service of; live in carceral systems where the access to knowledge about gender identities that are not cisgendered are limited at best and non-existent often.
As trans and NBY disabled people the many expansive and gorgeous parts that make us who we are never fully welcomed. More often the complexity of our lives and experiences are used to dilute our rights to agency, dignity and autonomy rather than acknowledge, celebrate and welcome the needed expertise we bring to resistance.
Our lives and tactical insider organizing have always existed and succeed under significant state control. Yet still our struggles and expertise are unnoticed by abolition, racial, reproductive and queer and trans movements, even though disabled people have always been at the forefront of these same movements for justice. In these times it is not just the existence of rampant ableism intersecting with anti-Black racism and misogyny that threaten the well-being, dignity, freedom and self-determination of disabled people, but the complacency of able bodied – led movements to adequately include us; as the leaders, the strategists and tacticians you are missing.
Defining the strategy
Disabled people deserve to live our lives with dignity, respect, autonomy and self-determination. There can be no credible justice and liberation for all people, that does not center the same for disabled, Deaf and ill communities. To achieve this, able bodied led movements need to find, build with and follow the lead of marginalized disabled people both within and outside of our movement spaces. We need our able-bodied peers in movement space to recognize that the lack of disabled leadership is not just an issue of inadequate representation but a gaping absence. This dearth of critical strategic leadership means our movements will be inherently incomplete and destined to fail. To that end, our strategy is to
- Respectfully and lovingly: DO BETTER.
- Push people around you in movement space to do better, don’t be satisfied with a status quo that passes disabled communities, our analysis, resistance, and tactics by.
- If you don’t have disabled leadership in your work or in your movements BEGIN NOW building the trust necessary with disabled community leaders. Build, listen, show up, be accountable, resource and follow marginalize disabled leadership that is connected to the disability justice community.
- Continue to develop and grow a critique of how disabled people are talked about, the way ableism permeates everything, what it means, what is lost and what is missed through the lack of anti-ableism and DJ analysis in abolition, decriminalization, defund, racial, repro, migration, queer, trans and more movement spaces.
- Expect more implemented political rigor of yourselves and movement to integrate disability justice into the hub and heart of strategy.
- Decline complicity with the current low bar of engagement and collaboration with disability justice politics and its leadership.
Defining the Violence: Criminalization and State Control
Naming Eugenics
Historically a significant driver of targeted attacks on disabled communities was the “eugenic movement” that many view as time limited and fringe when it was neither. The eugenic movement gained traction by trying to solve the social “ills” of society through the breeding of specific genetic traits, by the regulation, criminalization and population control of those deemed a threat to the genetic purity of the state. The logic behind eugenic ideology is the belief that the genes of certain types of people cause “moral delinquency,” illness and disability and have no place in a white puritan patriarchal nationalist country. The eugenic period didn’t start in the 1920s and never ended, it simply adapted to be more concealed, to move less explicitly and therefore be less vulnerable to critiques, criticism or pointedly a coordinated resistance.
Eugenics remains active, tensile, and dangerous. Under the current political conditions, we see its core tenets of white supremacy, ableism, misogyny, xenophobia, anti-Black racism and the hatred of the poor being normalized. These are now referenced casually and messaged to all as acceptable and reasonable cultural, political and indeed policy response to address the “threat” that disabled people’s existence poses to a white puritan, Christian, capitalist, authoritarian police state.
As disabled people we are particularly equipped to identify and understand how eugenics consolidates power for a wealthy elite leveraging ableism to not only instill fear and complacency in us but also to threaten non – disabled marginalized communities. To quote disability justice activist Talila Lewis “You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism “
Ableism, White Supremacy, Colonization and Anti-Black Racism
Ableism is both a supremacy system and one that acts as fuel and mechanism through which other supremacy systems, such as anti-Black racism, operate. This results in anti-Black racism and ableism being inherently linked supremacy systems that use race (particularly, Blackness) to surveil, criminalize, warehouse and eliminate racialized disabled bodies. The history of the United States tells the story of ableism and anti-Black racism’s union, beginning with the mass disabling of African people through the capture and transfer through the Atlantic slave trade into enslavement, coupled with the genocide of indigenous communities. The physical, psychological and spiritual torment that enslavement and indigenous genocide created produced a caste of people considered to be subhuman, chattel whose only role was to produce capital for the wealthy elite. Woven throughout this time came the creation of pseudo-science that dictated that Black enslaved people who ran towards freedom must be mentally unwell, suffering from “drapetomania” or that Black enslaved people were inherently lazy. The creation of the slave patrols to return the enslaved (i.e.: property) back to their enslavers (i.e.: owners), morphed into the present day policing system that is more concerned with protecting the property of the elite than protecting and serving communities, through the surveillance, criminalization and warehousing of Black disabled bodies and communities in mass incarceration systems.
Care is not cure; Care is not control
Institutionally, systems such as the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC), use ableism, anti-Black racism and misogyny for eugenic and ableist ends that are masqueraded as treatment, care and support. The MIC is a system made up of public and private entities, corporations, hospitals, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, that deliver and finance health care and home-based care services. The MIC places cure and profit at the center of how it operates and has eugenics deeply ingrained in its design – not as an accident but by intention. Disabled people are pre – judged as having bodies in need of cure or fixing of a people who wish not for medical support and health care but to be freed from our afflicted bodies and by extension, lives. If we cannot be “cured” of our disabilities then it is justified that we are are to be controlled and managed, often through forced treatment, unnecessary surgeries, or medical neglect.
The MIC is intrinsically a carceral system that works alongside policing and prison systems to control bodies and whole communities that are deemed unhealthy and deviant, and by extension undesirable, dangerous and criminal.
Education is not special
The education of disabled people, especially strongly disabled kids, is contained within special education departments of public and private schools and their classrooms. Here our children encounter alarmingly low expectations for their social, educational, intellectual, and civic development. Supervision replaces academic instruction, and the use of restraints, mistreatment and physical violence is commonplace, instead of a supportive classroom designed to engage the full breadth of the student, their families and communities. We know that disabled Black students along with disabled queer and trans students face the most violence in these settings, with disabled students being 3x more likely to be referred to or arrested by police versus their non-disabled peers. [1.1]Again, the throughline of the devaluing and demeaning of disabled lives plays out, with disabled students seen as having little or no productive value in service of the wealthy and therefore have little to no right to the educational system.
Guardians of what?
Guardianship is the legal practice of appointing a guardian (often a parent of a disabled adult child) who is “responsible for” and in charge of every aspect of an adult disabled person’s life. This includes if they can work and how they spend their money, who they get to see and hang out with, when and where they get to go out to, if and who they can date or be in a relationship, the clothes they can wear, if they have access to a cell phone or computer with internet, etc. Guardianship offers no autonomy for the disabled person under it. Guardianship is not limited to family members; disabled people can be under the legal guardianship of State appointed guardians who have no social or familial ties to the disabled person. Black and brown disabled people are more likely to be appointed a state guardian.
Demands
- We call on all movements fighting for the bodily autonomy of their people to see us in you – remember us, we are your familiars made strange. The fight for the right to self-determination for bodily autonomy for any and all bodies – will only be truly won when it too is true for marginalized disabled people.
- Access is a non-negotiable component of any organizing work
- Recognize that access is crucial for the actual participation and dignity of disabled folk and is a vital cornerstone of anti-ableism and key to the realization of justice.
- Access alone is not an organizing strategy
- Do the political development and growth the deep study and organizing work that will dissolve the structural system of ableism and redistribute power and resources
- Be rigorous like any marginalized community we to have internal work to do
- DJ is rooted and birthed in the value of collective gain over individualized needs – it’s core tenet is to build power for all and not serve the convenience of a few
- Resist the pull and pressure to essentialize, pathologize and tokenize disabled, people’s identities
- Recognize that the experience of ableism is not equal
- Its impact is individually felt through different identities and experiences of white supremacy, misogyny, anti-Black racism, disability targeted violence, sex work, immigration, employment (in) stability, formal / higher education, transphobia, age, class, education, incarceration, and parenting
- Utilize strategic collaborations across identities yet within shared values to embed disability justice and anti-ableism into the heart of justice movements.
- Dissolve and erode the disability carceral state as an abolitionist project
- The Disability Carceral State (DCS) is a system that surveilles, criminalizes, and warehouses disabled people outside of the prison industrial complex. The DCS works in parallel with the PIC but operates at locations outside of it, such as group homes, institutions, sheltered workspaces, special education, guardianship and personal attendant care.