Disability Justice acknowledges that all bodies are valuable, hold beauty, and are deserving of care. This extends to our community bodies, to the bodies of our plant and animal kin, and to our shared planetary body itself, the earth.
Capitalism, an extraction based economy, debilitates the earth. A debilitated earth, whose precious resources are violently taken and used as fuel for endless consumption, causes and worsens disabling conditions for individuals and communities. Capitalism rests on the lie that disability is individually tragic and collectively burdensome. It rejoices as the world around us dies. As the world dies, disabled people (Crips) know that no one from the ableist white supremacist corporate world, including the governments it bought, is coming to save us.
As climate crises fast approach a previously unthinkable tipping point, Crips everywhere are in grave danger.
We witnessed this when “particulate matter” in city air worsened asthma and made COVID-19 more deadly. We witnessed it when Crips were killed by medical professionals instead of being evacuated during Hurricane Katrina. We know we are one power outage, one “evacuation,” one war away from abandonment.
This is why disabled people must act together, in cross-disability unity, to ensure a future which includes and embraces us as Disabled People. This is why the most marginalized disabled people so deeply understand settler-colonial cis-heteropatriarchal ableist capitalism, as we have the most experience meeting and resisting its violence, including in climate chaos. This is why Black, Brown, Indigenous, Queer, Non-Binary, Trans Disabled People must be at the forefront of Climate Justice movements.
Disability Justice insists we recognize that all of our bodies are integral to any movement toward justice. All too often in ableism, we witness people believing that some bodies are superior to other bodies, and in this myopic violent vision, believe their lives to be more valuable than others. This typically racialized arrogance is what underpins the fast track processing of Ukrainian refugees over Mexican, Central American and Haitian refugees who wait in detention centers with no access to safe health care.
Our beloved and complex Black, Brown, Indigenous, Fat, Queer, Non-binary, Trans Disabled Bodies are as deserving of care and loving tenderness as any other body on the earth. The brown and green lands and the deforested lands, the fresh clean breezes and the stagnant polluted air, the deep unlit seas and the dying coral reef, all parts of our debilitated powerful earth deserve our respect and our care.
Sins Invalid uplifts that our understanding and practices of liberation must hold the complexity of disability experience and racialized ableism. We must address not just health, not just respect for bodily autonomy, but also the fight for justice for all oppressed people and the earth itself. We uphold our collective beauty, our strength, our Crip wisdom and our love for each other through future victories and collective losses. We envision an end to corporate fracking and drilling, even as we mourn countless disappearances of kin species. We feel joy in witnessing flower blossoms even through our grief over red or black skies. May we hold each other through our individual struggles and triumphs, our collective transitions, and beyond — for this is Disability Justice.
