Disability justice, I’m learning, is hard to distill down into a tidy definition and, as someone brand-fucking-new to disability justice, I am far from an expert on its principles and where it shows up. I had my first introduction to disability justice when reading adrienne maree brown’s book Pleasure Activism because she includes a conversation she had with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarahinsa, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. I’ve now listened to the first half of Care Work in its audiobook form but haven’t finished it yet. Given that I referenced some ideas from Care Work in my last post, I thought I’d gather some of the core tenets of disability justice in a post for future reference.
My understanding is that disability justice, a term conceptualized by a group of queer, disabled women of color, was created in response to the exclusion non-white, queer and trans disabled people experience in the more mainstream disability rights community that often has and continues to center the experiences of white, cishet disabled people. Disability justice understands how ableism fortifies and is fortified by white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other systems of oppression.
But disability justice is not only about rejecting all forms of oppression, it’s also about centering the wholeness of disabled people, creating access and community care, building solidarity across different types of disability, and recognizing the unique smarts, talents, offerings, and life hacks that disabled people have. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarahinsa says in Care Work, “to me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks – because they’re equally important and interdependent“. Disability justice is not leaving people behind, is operating at the pace of the slowest moving person in your group, and is about building sustainably.
Something of particular interest to me is that disability justice understands that most people will become disabled: by age, injury, debilitation through work, or, like for me, a Covid-19 infection. People who are not disabled are, more accurately, not-yet-disabled. And, in the inverse, many people ARE disabled (or crazy, mad, neurodivergent, etc.) even though they might never call themselves that. Some people, especially Black and brown people and queer and trans people are not allowed to identify as disabled because their survival depends on them performing health and ability. This framing challenges the binary between ability and disability in a way that helped me understand my own slide from “abled” to “debilitated” to “disabled”.
There is a TON of nuance and intricacy to the concepts of disability justice. Disability justice can be messy, hard to pin down, hard to see when it’s happening, and vast. I couldn’t cover it all even if I had the capacity and knowledge to. As such, here are a couple links to more on disability justice for you and I to engage in.
- Sins Invalid’s 10 principles of disability justice. Foundational in the disability justice movement is Sins Invalid, a performance art group that centers and supports Black, brown, LGBTQ, and immigrant disabled people.
- Aurora Levins Morales’ Instagram account, her blog, and her published works. She is a balm and a visionary.
- Project LETS has an incredible starter list that I myself need to make my way through. Let’s both do that.