disability justice. It’s a framework that embraces abolition. And that is to say, it demands nothing less than the overthrow of all forms of ableism, you know, and the structures that support it. So, the difference between disability justice and disability rights is that disability justice says, you know, we’ve got to deal with racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, that these are the forms of oppression that make even disability differential. And so, if you think about the way that we responded to the COVID-19 crisis, for example, and to this day how we’re still responding to it, that disabled people who are Black and Brown and poor, undocumented, Indigenous, queer, gender nonconforming, they’re the ones that end up getting differential care, sometimes less care, sometimes inhumane care. They’re the ones who end up incarcerated, end up homeless, end up jobless, housing insecure. And that’s what disability justice tells us. And for me, I was forced to really come to terms with it by a number of folks who really were involved in the disability justice movement, who really forced me to think deeper about, like, what is a radical freedom dream, you know? Aurora Levins Morales, for example, is one who’s a really important disability justice activist who really kind of pulled my coattails on this.

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”)

disability justice is asking a lot of different kinds of questions about the nature of our bodies, and part of what I put forward to disabled student groups is to not settle for fighting for inclusion in existing movements but to really look at the ways in which disabled people have leadership to offer. For instance, our bodies don't comply with the demands of capitalism; what could we bring to the labor movement, which looks for better pay and better working conditions within a structure of work that is highly oppressive? Well, we can question the whole nature of what work is.

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

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.

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)

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.

It’s about recognizing a disability isn’t something broken to be fixed. For millions of Americans, their disability is a source of identity and power. Disability pride is about every American’s equal right to be recognized for who they are. It’s about celebrating the progress we’ve made and the future ahead.

If disability is defined as people who, because of variations in our body-minds, can't be efficiently exploited, the last thing we need is better access to exploitation, greater integration into a profit-driven society that is driving thousands of species toward mass extinction and making the planet uninhabitable for humans. The last thing we need is more opportunities to do our part in keeping the interlocking wheels of class, white supremacy, heteromale supremacy, and imperialism turning. This doesn't mean that we don't fight for what we need in order to survive, that we don't fight for the crappy job or inadequate benefits that will keep us alive for now. Life jackets keep us from drowning, but the only lasting access is universal inclusion, which means universal justice. ("The Truths Our Bodies Tell")

We recognize the great development there has been over the course of recent decades with regard to disability. Greater awareness of the dignity of each person, especially of the weakest, has led to the espousal of courageous positions for the inclusion of those who live with various forms of handicap, so that no one should feel like a stranger in his own home. Yet, at the cultural level, through a prevailing false understanding of life, expressions that harm the dignity of these persons still persist. An often narcissistic and utilitarian vision, unfortunately, leads not a few to consider persons with disabilities as marginal, without grasping their manifold human and spiritual richness. In the common mind-set, there is still too strong an attitude of rejection of this condition, as if it prevents one from achieving happiness and self-fulfilment. It is demonstrated by the eugenic trend of ending the lives of the unborn who show some form of imperfection. In reality, we all know many people who, despite even serious fragility, have found, albeit with difficulty, the path of a good life, rich with meaning. Likewise, on the other hand, we know people who are seemingly perfect, yet they despair! After all, it is a perilous deception to think we are invulnerable. As said by a girl whom I met on my recent journey to Colombia: vulnerability is intrinsic to the essential nature of mankind.
The answer is love: not that false, saccharine and sanctimonious love, but that which is true, concrete and respectful.

I think healing justice is about understanding our bodies as historically constructed, full of trauma, resistance, resilience, innovation, epigenetic scars, and epigenetic resources; [about] understanding that you can't do politics that doesn't include that and then really thinking about how we assess the impact of trauma on the work that we do.

I think this is one way in which we see disability operating as a concept really forcefully in U.S. history where slave owners and those embracing racism could categorize an entire group of people as disabled inherently in body and mind, which they did regarding Africans and African Americans, and thus justify slavery. They combined ableism and racism to do that really inseparably, and said these human beings are inferior, they’re, they’re inherently deficient, inherently disabled of body and mind, and thus need slavery...and I think that’s one of the real ironies here, right, is that slave owners and slave traders valued very highly the physical abilities and reproductive abilities of enslaved peoples, and obviously enslaved peoples produced economically and were, and they were forced to produce economically, and their labor was valued, and yet they were defined in racist and ablest terms as unable to contribute and needing slavery.

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.

Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair.