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

I think the big irony is that industrial labor was really disabling, whether that was coal mines or shoemaking or farm work, industrial farm work. Those are really hard on bodies and often on minds, and it was very disabling. So even while it excluded disability at the beginning, it created a lot of disability.

I never want to present the disability rights movement as a movement that was free of racism or sexism or homophobia, or even ageism or ableism. The movement has really struggled, but I think like all social change, groups and waves discovered that all of this stuff is highly intersectional, and the more people we can include and the more broadly we can make these analysis of power, the more effective we can be.

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.