Striving to remove barriers that prevent us from building Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities!
A disability inclusive world cannot be built until we learn how tightly racism and ableism are bound to each other, and the Disability & Philanthropy Forum's resource list begins there. One writer the Forum quotes explains why the common habit of treating them as two parallel systems that never touch erases the lives of disabled People of Color. It also hides how race itself gets pathologized: racism manufactures barriers, the harsh circumstances those barriers create produce disability, and the idea of disability is then invoked to defend discrimination aimed at whole groups. The Forum asks readers to start with its webinar linking racial equity with disability and its explainer A New Reckoning, produced alongside The Chronicle of Philanthropy, before moving through the lists of readings that follow.
Racism against Black people and ableism come together in police violence, in the workplace, and in who gets heard. Vilissa Thompson argues that Black disabled people deserve a real hearing, and the list pairs her view with reporting that police violence reaches Black disabled Americans at higher rates and a piece by D'Arcee Neal on racism and ableism at work. Thompson's syllabus on Black disabled women and an essay titled In My Own Words keep those women's accounts in front of readers. A national committee on responsive philanthropy asks whether philanthropy counts the disability community in its diversity, equity, and inclusion work. One more section turns to disabled Asian Americans, whose experience of racism and ableism together is documented by AsAmNews.
Money is where the two systems add up in numbers. National Disability Institute ties disability, race, and poverty together in one study and, in another, counts the financial toll of systemic inequality and overlapping identities for disabled people of different races and ethnicities. The Chicago Community Trust's Disabilities Fund adds a piece on the wealth gap between racial groups and its meaning for disabled people, a dialogue with Dr. Angel Miles on how wealth and disability inclusion connect, and a two part series built on a well known disability rights slogan. These titles name poverty, a racial wealth gap, and systemic inequality as places where racism and ableism land on the same people.
Pull one strand of a knot and the other draws tighter. Schools show how tight it gets. The reading list closes with the pipeline that carries disabled students of color from school discipline toward prison, through a study of school discipline policies from the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the National Council on Disability on students with disabilities, Temple University's Institute on Disabilities on racism and ableism inside that same pipeline, and Lydia X. Z. Brown's insistence that disability can never be addressed apart from race. Our own position is that barriers related to race and disability stay in place wherever inclusion was never planned in and the people who know those barriers are not consulted. That is the gap this list lays bare: students carry race and disability at once, while the habit of thinking of the two as parallel systems leaves them standing in between.
Race and disability should be named in the same breath whenever our work takes shape, never as parallel tracks. Treating the two as separate would leave out the lives of disabled People of Color, so we should bring in their own accounts before our plans are set. Plans written with race and disability in one view would make room for Vibrant, Diverse, Inclusive, Accessible Communities for People with Disabilities.
Keeping both strands in one hand is how we stop pulling the knot tighter.
Read the Full Article: Intersections Between Racism and Ableism.
By: Disability & Philanthropy Forum
Also See:
- What is ableism, and what is its impact?
- Horror movies have an ableism problem. Isn’t it time we found new ‘monsters’?
- Ableism 101: What it is, what it looks like, and what we can do to to fix it
- How to talk about disability sensitively and avoid ableist tropes
- I was nine when I learned what ableism is
- Anti-Ableism Fast Facts - Ways to Combat Ableism:
- Becoming Anti-Ableist: A Disability Justice- Informed Approach to Supporting the Disability Community
- 8 Ways Ableism Shows Up In Religious Spaces
- Inclusion Is Not Something You Earn
Questions for Reflection
- When we talk about racism and when we talk about ableism, do we treat them as parallel tracks, and whose lives does that leave out?
- Which accounts by disabled People of Color have we read or heard together, and how did they change our plans?
- How do poverty and the racial wealth gap shape who can take part in our programs, and which costs do we ask people to carry?
- What do we know about how schools near us discipline disabled students of color, and what part could our community play?
- Who could help us plan with race and disability in one view, and have we invited them to do so from the start?
