There's the nitty gritty of surviving the now, but the difference between a Band-Aid and a step is "does it open up more possibility?"...The small ac… - Aurora Levins Morales

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.

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.

Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse need ways to reconstruct history that restore a sense of our inherent value as human beings and immunize us against the elite mythology that our only worth is in our ability to make them rich.