Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Quotes

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")

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.

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.

It doesn’t have to be either healing or organizing: it’s both. Someone asked me at a talk I was giving at Portland State University’s Take Back the Night how we choose between healing and activism. I tried to tell them that healing justice is not a spa vacation where we recover from organizing and then throw ourselves back into the grind. To me, it means a fundamental—and anti-ableist—shift in how we think of movement organizing work to think of it as a place where building in many pauses, where building in healing, where building in space for grief and trauma to be held makes the movements more flexible and longer lasting.

It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?

everyone deserves basic income, care, and access. Everyone. Including people you don’t like. Including people who are not that likable…Because nobody deserves to die or suffer from lack of access, even if they’ve been an asshole. ("Making Space Accessible is an Act of Love for Our Communities")

For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does.

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

Many disabled people noted that the pandemic made for a “cripping of the world” — where for perhaps the first time in a while, the world, gripped by a global pandemic, dwelled in disabled reality. Remember how, for a minute, so many forms of access disabled people had long fought for were here because abled people needed them? Remember virtual work, pandemic pay for frontline workers, online school, online events with captioning and ASL, teaching people how to freaking wash their hands and stay home when they were sick, the ability to reschedule an appointment or a plane ticket when you got sick and not get yelled at or charged a fee, and immunocompromised shopping hours? These waves of access, mixed with mass resistance in the streets and at home against anti-Black, white supremacist violence, made for a powerful-ass two years. If that kind of mass access, resistance and mutual aid could happen, revolutionary change could happen too. The state wants us to forget that.

Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

Ableism mandates that disabled and sick people are always “patients,” broken people waiting to be fixed by medicine or God, and that we’re supposed to be grateful for anything anyone offers at any time. It is a radical disability justice stance that turns the ableist world on its ear, to instead work from a place where disabled folks are the experts on our own bodies and lives, and we get to consent, or not. We’re the bosses of our own bodyminds. This has juicy implications for everyone, including abled people. (“A Modest Proposal for a Fair Trade Emotional Labor Economy”)

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.

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.

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

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.