Understanding Disability in the BIPOC Community
The true fight for justice and liberation acknowledges the various intersectional experiences of privilege and oppression that exist due to social identity. In the move to become a more equitable world, it is thus, our responsibility to actively center and uplift those identities that experience compounded oppression such as that of disabled people of color.
BIPOC folks with disabilities are often excluded or silenced due to the institutional effects of both racism and ableism that prevail within society today. It is through taking an intersectional approach that understands the intimate ties of disability justice with Black and Indigenous liberation that these oppressive structures can be overcome. Yet before confronting disability justice intersectionality, the construction of its oppression through discourse must be addressed.
Disability and language
Discourse plays a key role in keeping marginalized identities subverted, and so one of the key first steps toward equality is confronting terminology. The words we use to refer to people with disabilities must reflect respect and dignity. For example, in the past, language often defined individuals as their disability rather than as having a disability. This key distinction liberates individuals from having their disability be the definition of who they are, rather than a part of what they experience.
Alternately, it is crucial to reflect and change the way we reference people who do not have disabilities. Using terminology such as ‘normal’ people or ‘whole’ people to describe able-bodied individuals once again is problematic due to the negative associations it places on people with disabilities who are just as a whole.
Language is an important tool that frames reality and conscious effort that progresses discourse towards equality and away from marginalization is the first step within disability justice. It is only then that we can move on to address the BIPOC community with disabilities.
The history of Disability as a colonial contstruct
This world is an able-bodied person’s world. Ableism is a tangible form of violence and oppression used to deprive and exclude people with disabilities from political and economic participation. Often, discourse around disability is filtered through a lens of whiteness and wealth, systematically excluding BIPOC people with low or no income.
Following the spirit of the civil rights movement, disability rights were first secured in 1977 after a 23-day sit-in protest organized by disability activists in San Francisco. This resulted in the signing of section 504 into law, which says disabled people cannot be denied federal funding.
Eligibility for federal disability benefits is largely dependent on income and financial resources. If someone who receives Supplement Security Income (SSI) disability benefits gets married, the government considers the partner’s income to be their own, which can significantly reduce or terminate one’s benefits altogether.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which specifically lists addiction as a disability was passed in 1990, thus making it illegal to discriminate against anyone who is disabled.
These were moderate wins that unfortunately ended up neglecting and invisiblizing the lives of many BIPOC, immigrant, and queer people with disabilities. The second wave of disability justice began to emerge in the early 2000s among disabled queer folks and activists of color such as Mia Mingus, Patty Berne, and Stacy Milbern. They began organizing intersectional community spaces for holding conversations on the intersections of radical justice.
Such an intersectional framework ensures that there will be no erasure of identity and different systemic marginalizations are challenged. BIPOC folks with disabilities face oppression from two different systems - racism and ableism, and the failure to understand the compounded ways in which such discrimination manifests excludes this community from justice.
Understanding the disability justice framework
“There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate” - Aurora Levins Morales
Within social and cultural theory, disability today is often recognized as a social construct rather than a medical deficit. It is society’s inability to provide accessibility to individuals that makes them less able and so the disability lies outside of the individual’s construction and within society itself.
Additionally, disability justice comes with the anti-capitalist acknowledgment which recognizes that people have inherent value for who they are instead of how much they can produce. People, with disabilities or without, are thus whole as they are.
The work of Patty Berne lays out the disability justice framework as below which highlights that -
All bodies are unique are essential
All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.
We are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies but because of them.
All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation, state, religion, and more and we cannot separate them.
Ultimately, it is important to understand the permeating threads of systemic racism and ableism across institutions to include BIPOC folks with disabilities in our work. It is only by doing so that the inflicted discrimination through the prison-industrial complex and medical industrial complex upon people of color with disabilities can be addressed. We must remember that not every disabled person has the same experience, nor is disability monolithic. Just because you cannot see someone’s disability does not mean it isn’t there. The revolution must be accessible!
By Aastha Malik and Katelin Ling Cooper
