April 11, 2016 - 22:52
This is going back to our discussion last week about the intersection of race and disability. I had never gotten around to posting about the materials I found in relation to this intersection of identities, so I wanted to share a few of those now.
This article, entitled “Black and Disabled: When Will Our Lives Matter?,” is by Eddie Ndopu, who identifies as a “queercrip man of color.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eddie-ndopu/black-and-disabled_b_9221756.html
In the article, Ndopu engages with the need for a more inclusive black liberation movement that makes room for—and draws strength from— people with disabilities. “A serious engagement with disability, and the lives of sick and disabled Black people,” he writes, “would mean an expansive view of what constitutes activism and resistance, and in the process move us all toward an entirely new and more beautiful conception of Black liberation at large.”
Ndopu explores the ways in which a disability perspective can reframe our understanding of oppression and of a better future:
“What would it mean to understand prison abolition politics through the prism of deinstitutionalization of sick and disabled people?”
“What if disability was the starting point for re-imagining the world?”
Here is another article written by Ndopu that includes a really nice discussion of intersectionality (and a quote from Eli Clare!)
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/01/201312musings-from-a-queercrip-femme-man-of-color/
I love this quote from the article: “I dwell in the grace of my differences”
I also wanted to mention Kay Barrett, who is a really cool disability justice advocate and poet who came to speak at Haverford a few weeks ago. Kay’s work does a great job of exploring the intersectionality of identities and oppressions.
This is Kay's website: