Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Quotes

I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it “The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true. By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened

You wanna know how you'll know if you're doing disability justice? You'll know you're doing it because people will show up late, someone will vomit, someone will have a panic attack, and nothing will happen on time because the ramp is broken on the supposedly "accessible" building. You won't meet your benchmarks on time, or ever. We won't be grateful to be included; we will want to set the agenda. And what our leadership looks like may include long sick or crazy leaves, being nuts in public, or needing to empty an ostomy bag and being on Vicodin at work. It is slow. It's people even the most social justice-minded abled folks stare at or get freaked out by. It looks like what many mainstream abled people have been taught to think of as failure. (p. 124)

If movements got it together about ableism, there is so much we could win—movement spaces where elders, parents, and sick and disabled folks (a huge amount of the planet) could be present—strength in numbers! We could create movement spaces where people don’t “age out” of being able to be involved after turning forty or feel ashamed of admitting any disability, Crazyness, or chronic illness. We could create visions of revolutionary futures that don’t replicate eugenics—where disabled people exist and are thriving, not, as often happens in abled revolutionary imaginations, revolutionary futures where winning the rev means we don’t exist anymore because everyone has health care.

Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and a cultural worker. It's one the mainstream doesn't often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age 98.

I want abled people to get it together in 2018. Stop forgetting about disability and access. Read some of the many brilliant, made-by-disabled-people access guides out there. Normalize access and disability. Learn about disabled cultures and histories. Look at the histories of disability in your own family and communities. Ask how you are fighting ableism in every campaign you do. Don't forget about us. Realize you are or will be us.

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

The making of disability justice lives in the realm of thinking and talking and knowledge making, in art and sky. But it also lives in how to rent an accessible porta potty for an accessible-except-the-bathroom event space, how to mix coconut oil and aloe to make a fragrance-free hair lotion that works for curly and kinky BIPOC hair, how to learn to care for each other when everyone is sick, tired, crazy, and brilliant. And neither is possible without the other.

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.

At the risk of seeming like a Christian, or a Che Guevara poster, love is bigger, huger, more complex, and more ultimate than petty fucked-up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I’ve seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody. ("Making Space Accessible is an Act of Love for Our Communities")

A lot of people have had a brush with what it’s like to live a disabled life these last two years, and a lot of them want to forget it as quickly as possible. They’d rather expose themselves to all kinds of harm than continue to be disabled like us — mask, discuss risk, stay home, pass public policies for the safety of all.

I want to finish what we started. I want us not to abandon the revolutionary dream some of us touched and made in 2020-2021 — of a world where community care, mutual aid for collective survival and a refusal to obey are not just possible, they make up the bones of the new world.

disability justice asserts that ableism helps make racism, christian supremacy, sexism, and queerand transphobia possible, and that all those systems of oppression are locked up tight. It insists that we organize from our sick, disabled, “brokenbeautiful” (as Alexis Pauline Gumbs puts it) bodies’ wisdom, need, and desire. It means looking at how Indigenous and Black and brown traditions value sick and disabled folks (not as magical cripples but as people of difference whose bodyspirits have valuable smarts), at how in BIPOC communities being sick or disabled can just be “life,” and also at how sick and disabled BIPOC are criminalized. It means asserting a vision of liberation in which destroying ableism is part of social justice. It means the hotness, smarts, and value of our sick and disabled bodies. It means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.

I believe that Greta’s ability to tweet #Aspiepower and frame her autism as a superpower is a product of brave-ass autistic women and nonbinary people who have been speaking about our lives and demanding an end to the ableist violence of a world that wants us ashamed and self-hating rather than proudly ourselves and able to access housing, meaningful work (or the right not to work), safety from police murder and medical violence ­­– and love, respect and community, as we are.

We have ancestral shame to heal. We have disabled lineages to honor. Let’s get to it.

Everyone I know longs for healing. It’s just hard to get. The good kind of healing: healing that is affordable, has childcare and no stairs, doesn’t misgender us or disrespect our disabilities or sex work, believes us when we’re hurt and listens when we say what we need, understands that we are the first and last authority on our own bodies and minds.