Disability Justice Learning
Krystal Kavita Jagoo, MSW.
Dana Chan for Disabled And Here.
Agenda
LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
HOW TO SHARE SPACE EQUITABLY
DISABILITY JUSTICE PRINCIPLES
ACCESS NEEDS EXPLORATION
VOLUNTARY GROUP REFLECTIONS
Land Acknowledgment
I wish to acknowledge this land on which I reside. It is the traditional territory of many Nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. I acknowledge that Tkaronto is covered by Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and the Williams Treaties signed with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. This land remains home to many Indigenous communities from across Turtle Island and I am grateful to have the opportunity to live here, as I work in solidarity with Indigenous folx. Additionally, I acknowledge the many people of African descent who are not settlers, but whose ancestors were forcibly displaced as part of the transatlantic slave trade against their will, and made to work on these lands.
Anti-
Oppressive Practice Wishlist
Prioritizing Access in This Space
Please use the space you are in as you need or prefer.
Sit in chairs or sit on the floor, pace, lay down, rock, flap, spin, move around, move in, out, and around your space. Communicate through your body, chat, Zoom features, or voice. Feel free to engage by listening, reflecting, etc.
Close your eyes. Draw, doodle, write.
installation piece: Shannon Finnegan, Do you want us here or not, 2018; People’s Hub (movement school) slide.
"If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you & say you enjoyed it.”
- Zora Neale Hurston
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097879/
The 10 Disability Justice Principles
1. Intersectionality
2. Leadership of Those Most Impacted
3. Anti-Capitalist Politic
4. Cross-Movement Solidarity
5. Recognizing Wholeness
6. Sustainability
7. Cross-Disability Solidarity
8. Interdependence
9. Collective Access
10. Collective Liberation
Overview of Disability Justice Principles
1. INTERSECTIONALITY
“We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”.
2. LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED
“We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins Morales.
Overview of Disability Justice Principles
3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC
In an economy that sees land and humans as components of profit, we are anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming body/minds.
4. COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING
Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.
Overview of Disability Justice Principles
5. RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS
People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
6. SUSTAINABILITY
We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.
Overview of Disability Justice Principles
7. COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY
We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.
8. INTERDEPENDENCE
We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.
Overview of Disability Justice Principles
9. COLLECTIVE ACCESS
As brown, Black and queer-bodied disabled people we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity, to be in community with each other.
10. COLLECTIVE LIBERATION
No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require.
Applying Disability Justice
“Disability Justice is fundamental in disrupting how we define a productive member of society. DJ also clearly challenges gender roles in terms of what it means to be a traditional male.”
— Lateef McLeod
“Instead of building a shared identity, Disability Justice builds identities out of a shared politic, working to build what our people are practicing...a shared and central power analysis that seeks, creates, demands a different kind of relationship to power and resources, so that resources actually get directed to those who have less.”
— Lezlie Frye
Disability Liberated Poem (1 of 5)
Come. You. Yes, you.
Tonight we are gathering stories, ours, yours.
Each of us with our bundles of sticks, each of us with our strands of cord.
The word in your pocket is what we need.
The song in your heart, the callous on your heel.
Come out of the forest, the woodwork, the shadows to this place of freedom
quilombo, swamp town, winter camp, yucayeque
where those not meant to survive laugh and weep together
share breath from mouth to mouth, pass cups of water, break bread
and let our living bodies speak.
Disability Liberated Poem (2 of 5)
Our history is in our bodies what we do to breathe,
how we move, the sounds we make
our myriad shapes, our wild gestures
far outside the boundaries of what’s expected
the knowledge bound into our bones, our trembling muscles, our laboring lungs
like secret seeds tied into the hair of our stolen ancestors
we carry it everywhere.
Disability Liberated Poem (3 of 5)
Come beloveds from your narrow places
from your iron beds, from your lonely perches
come warm and sweaty from the arms of lovers
we who invent a world each morning
and speak in fiery tongues.
Come you with voices like seagulls
dissonant and lovely, with hands like roots and twigs.
Come limbs that wander and limbs like buds and limbs heavy as stone
come breathless and swollen and weary, fevered and wracked with pain.
Disability Liberated Poem (4 of 5)
Come slow and heavy, come wary and scarred, come sweet and harsh and strong. Come arched with pleasure, come slick with honey
come breathless with delight.
We say with our feet, with our backs and hands
no life belongs to another, our bodies are not acreage livestock, overhead, disposable tools.
We hum as we travel, songs heavy with maps that lead us back to ourselves
singing you, yes you, are irreplaceable.
Disability Liberated Poem (5 of 5)
Here we are, and here we are fruitful
our stories flower, take wing, reproduce like windblown seeds.
No surgeon’s knife can cut the lines of spirit. Our family tree remains.
– Patricia Berne, David Langstaff & Aurora Levins Morales, from Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement is Our People, A Disability Justice Primer, pages 55-57
THE
AUDRE LORDE QUESTIONNAIRE TO ONESELF
Adapted by Divya Victor from “The Transformation of
Silence into Language and Action,” collected in The
Cancer Journals.
Interested in having me present to your organization?
�Check out my website here: www.EquitableForAll.com
Email me here: Krystal@equitableforall.com