Access as Love: Weaving Words for Liberation
Krystal Kavita Jagoo, MSW.
Dana Chan for Disabled And Here.
Agenda
LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
HOW TO SHARE SPACE EQUITABLY
CONNECTING BELL HOOKS’ ETHIC OF LOVE TO DISABILITY JUSTICE
INVITATION TO WRITE
VOLUNTARY GROUP DISCUSSION
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/
bell hooks’ All About Love
“One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. Culturally, all spheres of American life—politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, intimate relations—should and could have as their foundation a love ethic. The underlying values of a culture and its ethics shape and inform the way we speak and act. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change… Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions. I chose to move to a small city so I could live in the same area as family even though it was not as culturally desirable as the place I left. Friends of mine live at home with aging parents, caring for them even though they have enough money to go elsewhere. Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement. While careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we can only end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer accepting the notion that men should have more rights and privileges than women because of biological difference or that men should have the power to rule over women, that is when the agreement stops. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Sadly, many of our nation’s citizens are proud to live in one of the most democratic countries in the world even as they are afraid to stand up for individuals who live under repressive and fascist governments. They are afraid to act on what they believe because it would mean challenging the conservative status quo. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture. No wonder then that we are a nation of people, the majority of whom, across race, class, and gender, claim to be religious, claim to believe in the divine power of love, and yet collectively remain unable to embrace a love ethic and allow it to guide behavior, especially if doing so would mean supporting radical change.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Fear of radical changes leads many citizens of our nation to betray their minds and hearts. Yet we are all subjected to radical changes every day. We face them by moving through fear. These changes are usually imposed by the status quo. For example, revolutionary new technologies have led us all to accept computers. Our willingness to embrace this “unknown” shows that we are all capable of confronting fears of radical change, that we can cope. Obviously, it is not in the interest of the conservative status quo to encourage us to confront our collective fear of love. An overall cultural embrace of a love ethic would mean that we would all oppose much of the public policy conservatives condone and support.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Society’s collective fear of love must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes…Faith enables us to move past fear. We can collectively regain our faith in the transformative power of love by cultivating courage, the strength to stand up for what we believe in, to be accountable both in word and deed. Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn...While the contemporary feminist movement has done much to intervene with this kind of thinking, challenging and changing it, and by so doing offering women and men a chance to lead more fulfilling lives, patriarchal thinking is still the norm for those in power. This does not mean we do not have the right to demand change.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“Domination cannot exist in any social situation where a love ethic prevails. Jung’s insight, that if the will to power is paramount love will be lacking, is important to remember. When love is present the desire to dominate and exercise power cannot rule the day. All the great social movements for freedom and justice in our society have promoted a love ethic. Concern for the collective good of our nation, city, or neighbor rooted in the values of love makes us all seek to nurture and protect that good. If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction.”
bell hooks’ Ethic of Love
“In the small town where I live (now only some of the time) there is a spirit of neighborliness—of fellowship, care, and respect. These same values existed in the neighborhoods of the town in which I grew up. Even though I spend most of my time in New York City, I live in a cooperative apartment building where we all know each other. We protect and nurture our collective well-being. We strive to make our home place a positive environment for everyone. We all agree that integrity and care enhance all our lives. We try to live by the principles of a love ethic. To live our lives based on the principles of a love ethic (showing care, respect, knowledge, integrity, and the will to cooperate), we have to be courageous. Learning how to face our fears is one way we embrace love. Our fear may not go away, but it will not stand in the way. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, allowing it to govern and inform how we think and act, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.”
Connecting bell hooks’ Ethic of Love with Disability Justice
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
15 Minutes Break!
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.
THE
AUDRE LORDE QUESTIONNAIRE TO ONESELF
Adapted by Divya Victor from “The Transformation of
Silence into Language and Action,” collected in The
Cancer Journals.
Reflective Writing Exercise
Some potential jumping off points for writing:
Invitation to Write…
Voluntary Sharing of Narratives and/or Discussion of the Process? Questions? Concerns?
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
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Email me here: Krystal@equitableforall.com