Posted June 1, 2024 by Alice Wong Guest Blog Posts

In Service of: Thoughts on Claiming Disability Justice

Margaret Price

What are we trying to say when we say “justice”?

I have a particular “we” in mind here: white academics who are securely employed, straight and cis people, nondisabled people, especially some combination of those.

We need to check ourselves.

Check

April 2007: I was sitting in Sisters Chapel at Spelman College, an HBCU for women in Atlanta. The college president, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, told the story of conversing with a white ally. This person said to her, “But I don’t have a prejudiced bone in my body.” She replied, “Check again.”

I didn’t understand how to apply Dr. Tatum’s wisdom when I came to Spelman as a brand-new faculty member in 2004, a white genderqueer femme, full of fear and arrogance. At that time, I didn’t want to be a racist, and so I assumed I wasn’t. I was likely to understand “check” in terms of a checklist–checking something off. I didn’t realize that Dr. Tatum meant “check” in terms of stop. I hadn’t yet learned that I might not know what listen meant. Nor had I learned the difference between intentions, impact, and practice.

When we say “justice,” what are we really talking about?

Check again

Disability justice is now well-known in academe, especially in the U.S. and other Western countries. It’s cited constantly in academic work from disability studies, medical humanities, queer studies, feminist studies, and other disciplines. It pops up in countless calls for papers. But the citations are selective, partial; for example, they often take up “Interdependence,” but rarely mention “Anti-capitalist politic.” Let’s go back to the “10 Principles of Disability Justice” by Patty Berne, first published in 2015 on the Sins Invalid website:

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.”
LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED “We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins Morales
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.
COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.
RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
SUSTAINABILITY We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.
COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.
INTERDEPENDENCE We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.
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.
COLLECTIVE LIBERATION No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require.

Which of these principles fit comfortably with your academic work? Which don’t? Which ones do we tend to skim over as some of us proudly claim to be disability justice scholars? What does ‘disability justice scholar’ actually mean?

I can’t speak for all academics, especially not in this moment of global horror, genocide, lack of health care, lack of adequate pay and jobs, and slow death for almost everyone in academe. You might be reading this and thinking, “My position is precarious as fuck.” I get it; it probably is. And I get that people grounded in Disability Justice may also be part of academe in all sorts of capacities—students, instructors, visiting scholars, workshop leaders, invited speakers, authors, artists. I can’t draw any neat lines here. What I am able to do is ask you to check again.

Checking yourself doesn’t just feel “uncomfortable.” It usually feels like shit. It’s embarrassing and confusing. Being checked by someone else often feels … unjust. It’s especially tough if you’re someone, like me, who came into this world with a boatload of racial and economic privilege. I was raised specifically to assume I should feel comfortable in all situations. And here’s the most frustrating part: checking yourself doesn’t necessarily do anything. Not right away. Or in ways you can perceive.

In the rest of this essay, I focus on two of the Disability Justice principles and tell a story about learning that principle. Not just reading it, but really learning it, over time and with difficulty. I’m not done; this is only where I am now.

Leadership of those most impacted

October 2004: I had been teaching at Spelman for all of two months. I felt very white and very queer. I also felt indignant. Some of my queer students had told me that they felt ostracized—by their fellow students, by the campus at large. I decided to send an all-campus email.

I no longer have access to that email, thankfully, but it went something like this: “I am QUEER, I am HERE, and Spelman is NOT DOING ENOUGH for its LGBTQ students and I would like to CALL THAT TO EVERYONE’S ATTENTION.” I hit the send button. Then silence fell.

Generally, the building that housed my office was not quiet. It includes the Departments of English and Comparative Women’s Studies; the Audre Lorde Archives; the Fine Arts Museum; and miscellaneous meeting rooms, digital-media spaces, and a large auditorium. But as I sat in my office that day, after sending my email, it felt very quiet. Uncomfortably quiet.

Around three o’clock, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall came by my office and asked if I would come down to the Women’s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) for a cup of tea or coffee with her.

It was a calm, genial talk. Dr. Guy-Sheftall asked how I was getting along, showed me around the WRRC, and told me about some upcoming events. Just as I began to wonder why I was there (except that I could tell I had definitely fucked up), she began telling me about the history of LGBTQ organizing at Spelman. It went back decades. Much of it was situated in the WRRC. She was working on a new grant project aimed specifically at this issue, and there were new initiatives to come. She asked if I wanted to help with the new grant project.

At no point did Dr. Guy-Sheftall say any of these things, but I slowly understood them:

Your voice doesn’t need to be the center of this.

You may not perceive everything that’s happening here.

Not everything here is about you.

Not everything here is for you.

One of the usual items on an “Anti-Racism” or “Anti-Ableism” checklist is the directive Listen. Rarely is there more information about what it means to listen. In my experience, it doesn’t simply mean to comprehend what another person is saying. And it doesn’t mean listening once. It means something more akin to stop. Stop thinking about your response, stop thinking about what you meant. Stop moving, stop suggesting. Just stop. Wait.

Here’s something that took me a couple of years to pause and notice: Dr. Guy-Sheftall gave me an enormous gift that day. It required her time, her labor, her expertise, and especially her grace. I didn’t deserve her wisdom that day. She gave it anyway.

Academics love to make a mark. We love to start things, take credit for things, be the first at something. But it’s not possible to see who else is already leading if we don’t become quiet. If we don’t stop, listen, and remember that there are actions already underway that we don’t know about, and didn’t try to know about.

Anti-capitalist politic

OK, you know this part already: we are all ensnared in late capitalism and there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Academics who understand that truth are not exempt from it. Being minoritized doesn’t exempt us; loudly critiquing the system doesn’t exempt us; doing community-based work, having crappy job security, stating our principles on social media, none of those things exempt us.

So what does that mean in terms of claiming disability justice? It means check yourself, especially if you are a white person. Are you working in service to anti-capitalist principles, or are you merely citing them while most of the material benefits of a project flow back to academe? What is your work costing you and what are you gaining? What are the impacts of your work? Your relations? What does your work cost others? Do you know who they are?

What do you think are your contributions to community?

December 2015: With a group of friends, I planned to attend the Cultural Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University. At that time, Akemi Nishida was a newly hired tenure-track faculty member, Charone Pagett was (and still is) a community organizer, Ashley Volion was a graduate student, and Karen Nakamura and I were (and still are) tenured faculty members. Our workshop proposal was accepted, and we started figuring out how to get to East Lansing, Michigan and eat and sleep for a few days together.

Akemi suggested that we could create a shared pool of resources, including travel reimbursements and paid-for hotel rooms from those who had them. Akemi is an experienced activist and scholar, and has been part of numerous care collectives. I had read Mia Mingus’s famous blog post “Reflections on an Opening,” but at the time of that 2016 conference, I had never been part of an organized conference pod that shared all needed resources—transportation, food, space, a place to sleep, knowledge, and energy.

The pod itself worked as we’d hoped. I was surprised that it turned out to be fairly simple while we were at the conference: we slept, we ate, we arranged rides to and from the airport, and we checked in periodically throughout the days and evenings. The conference itself had a fairly good access plan, including a quiet room; comfortable seating; no stairs to get into or move around the conference space; and snacks throughout each day. I noticed, as I moved through the three days with the other folks in our impromptu pod, that I felt freer than usual to rest or ask for help.

However, pushing against the academic system and my own assumptions was more difficult. An academic reimbursement system is set up not only to keep you from stealing resources, but also to keep you from sharing those resources. Folks with funding had to work around academic systems of surveillance, which include demanding itemized receipts in order to check how many people are using a hotel room, or how many meals went on one restaurant tab. And, more embarrassing but probably more relevant, this was the first time I had thought of the travel fund provided by my employer as anything other than mine. At the time, I was 46 years old and had been working in disability studies for over 20 years. I was still learning what it meant to practice the principles that I said I believed in. I’m still learning now.

Practice

Academics probably won’t be much use to the disability justice movement until we’re willing to stop grabbing and claiming it, and until we’re willing to truly understand and practice it in our everyday lives. Disability justice is not a thing to possess. Here are some questions to consider: If a project claims to use disability justice principles, who’s going to benefit from it? Who thought of the research questions, or the main argument of the paper? Who takes the lead? Who is the audience? Do you know who’s being harmed?

My own work was deeply changed when I read Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Breeanne Matheson’s “Decolonizing Decoloniality.” In their article, Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson argue that work can operate in the service of decoloniality while not necessarily being, itself, decolonial. We might consider the same for academic work that engages disability justice.

What would it mean to work in service to disability justice rather than claiming that you are personally doing disability justice? What would it mean to consider all the principles of disability justice, rather than just a select few, when writing a new article or organizing a new project?

What might we do?

ABOUT

Margaret Price, a white genderqueer femme, wears a green polka-dot dress and sits in front of a brick wall. Her chin-length hair is gray and her face is smiling slightly.

Margaret Price is an Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric & Composition) at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as Director of the Disability Studies Program and a member of the Transformative Access Project. A white, genderqueer femme, Margaret’s research focuses on analyzing insitutional cultures and fostering dialogues about care and accountability. Her book Crip Spacetime was published in April 2024 by Duke University Press and is available open-source.

In Service of: Thoughts on Claiming Disability Justice