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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… - Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
" "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.
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About Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (born April 21, 1975 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a Toronto and Oakland-based poet, writer, educator and social activist.
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Additional quotes by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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")
The problem of surviving climate change as disabled people is not an individual problem, and because of this, there is no individual solution that will be enough to save us. Life as the only crip who survives may not be worth living.
In the immortal words of Sins Invalid, as disabled people, we are committed to a politic and practice of "we move together, with no one left behind." When I read those words for the first time, and since, I know that they are not a simple description of reality. There are plenty of us who have been abandoned to die, who have been left behind. But we know that as disabled people, we are some of the only ones of us who slow down and move at the pace of the slowest of us, call the nursing home over and over demanding to know if someone is OK, sit in the hospital ward letting the staff know people care about our friend who is sick. That phrase / those words, are an assertion and a challenge, to disabled and abled people alike. What strategies come to us at the slow back end of the march? The place where we leave no one to die?
As disability justice folks, we're gonna figure out the answers to surviving climate change together, with all the disabled ingenuity and creativity we've shown for our whole entire lives. We already are. We will not leave our people behind, and not slowly die with our disabled roots ripped out in strange soil.
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