As an author I'm careful about the words that I use. Words matter. For example, characterizing someone as "wheelchair bound" or "confined to a wheelc… - Kim E. Nielsen

[being a historian of disability is] interesting and exciting, but it’s also an amazing analytical tool. To me, it’s the best way to bring together questions about race, class, gender, sexuality, all together into, into the same conversation.

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.

All of us go in and out of the category of disabled throughout our lives, some of us more permanently, others of us not, but, this is the story of what it simply means to be human.