Disability Justice Activists Look at "Ways to Maintain Ablism"

Disability Justice Activists Look at "Ways to Maintain Ablism" and Counter "How Our Bodies Experience Trauma in the Medical-Industrial Complex"
Disability justice activists gathered in Detroit to take part in the US Social Forum and the Allied Media Conference. "There is a growing framework about how disability connects with other issues," says Stacey Milbern. "It's a way to maintain ablism and not look at the way disability connects in with how our bodies are policed or experience trauma in the medical-industrial complex." [includes rush transcript]

[Stacey Milburn]... the National Youth Leadership Network.

And I'm Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and I'm a performance artist, I do some work with Sins Invalid.

[reporter] And what's this gathering here today?

[Stacey Milbern] Sure, this is a disability justive convening, um,

a bunch of us have been at the Allied Media Conference (AMC)

and there's been kinda, just this growing space for disability um and disabled people,

and there's this kind of growing framework about looking at the ways disability connects with other issues.

So, often times, disability gets separated, and it's a way to really like maintain ableism,

and not look at the way that disability connects in with like how our bodies are policed,

or how our bodies um experience trauma in the medical industrial complex,

or even just like how our bodies, yeah, are kind of forced to fit this standard of what beauty is, or what independence is.

[Leah] Yeah, and so the way I've been trying to describe it

is that I think that I feel like disability justice is to the mainstream disability rights movement

it's similar to the difference between environmental, the environmental justice movement,

and the mainstream environmental movement.

Um, what a lot of us in disability justice are working against

is a mainstream movement that's very white, very straight, very middle class,

um, we are led by people of colour, by queer people of colour,

and we have analysis that goes beyond access

to looking at the effects of environmental racism on disability,

or poverty, or the medical industrial complex,

and also, um, just echoing what Stacey said,

a lot of us feel that as people who do social, many kinds of social justice work,

often people with disabilities, y'know we get to kind of be the cute people who march at the beginning,

who roll at the beginnning of the march, who people feel heart-warmed by,

but we're not seen as leaders or as part of the movement,

and we wanna change that.

[interviewer] And what does disability justice mean to you?

[Stacey] To me, what I think what's been most amazing about it is like,

disability justice has been a, just has been a space to kind of be whole.

Like, you don't have to cut yourself up into little pieces,

and go here and go there,

and also just like being able to connect with folks in like this really interdependent way,

where everybody's really taking care of each other,

and yeah, just, yeah kinda creating community and developing relationships

where people are actually like practicing liberation.

[interviewer] And what are some of the specific things that you're calling for?

[Leah] I think it's really important that we build movements that are sustainable.

Um, and I think that's one of the things that disabled people are really fierce and know a lot about.

Um, speaking as a chronically ill, queer, disab... queer woman of colour, I've been working in movements since I was 16,

and there's a way of organizing that assumes that everybody can make it to 16 meetings a week, and live on coffee.

And for a lot of us, whether we're disabled, whether we're parents, whether we're old, that's not an option,

and it stops us from making movements that don't burn out,

and that are actually going to be around to transform society.

So I think making sustainable and interdependent movements in the new world we're building

is what DJ (disability justice) is all about.

[Stacey] Yeah, actually can I add onto that?

I think, too, disability justice has just been, I don't know, like when we think about...

there's a really limited idea of access and accessibility,

and when we're really really able to stretch it out to like what do people need to be who they are?

It becomes like creating a world where everybody can really participate.

Mothers, we've seen that work out well, and um, yeah, working class folks, everybody,

and disability kind of really pushes that forward.

[Amy Goodman] We'll be broadcasting from the US social forum tomorrow, then on to Toronto, I'll be speaking in Toronto on saturday night, you can go to our website democracynow.org...