Mingus excerpts

I want to specifically name my privilege as a disabled person, when so many of us are locked up in prisons, institutions, group homes, or in the back rooms of our families’ houses. I have a level of mobility that many disabled folks don’t have and I know it is a huge reason I am visible.

We are not anti healthcare or science, but are rather exposing the reality that many of us are dependent on the medical industrial complex while we are simultaneously trying to change it and ultimately build alternatives to it. Many of us don’t want to have to turn to the MIC, yet have few other viable options. There are no easy answers and the contradictions we are living in are often painful and unjust.

“Forced Intimacy” is a term I have been using for years to refer to the common, daily experience of disabled people being expected to share personal parts of ourselves to survive in an ableist world. This often takes the form of being expected to share (very) personal information with able bodied people to get basic access. Forced intimacy can also include the ways that disabled people have to build and sustain emotional intimacy and relationships with someone in order to get access—to get safe, appropriate and good access.

Disabled people are expected to “strip down” and “show all our cards” metaphorically in order to get the basic access we need in order to survive. We are the ones who must be vulnerable—whether we want to or not—about ourselves, our bodyminds and our abilities.

I think we need to work to challenge and dismantle binaries in strategic and relevant ways that are both grounded in the world that we exist in and that help move us towards the world we want. Simply avoiding binaries or pretending that they don’t exist, is not helpful, and often erases the current reality of disabled people who face very real oppression and violence everyday because they get marked as disabled.

I see this happening over and over as mixed-ability  spaces and groups begin talking about disability and ableism. All of a sudden the conversation quickly jumps to how “everyone is differently abled” and how “we’re all disabled in some way.” And while I think it is important–very important–to talk about how ableism impacts us all (because it does), we cannot ignore the truth that ableism impacts us all in very different ways. And while we may, someday want to live in a world where all of our different bodies are accepted and where we honor everyone’s different abilities, we don’t live in that world yet and we will never get there until we are able to sit with, face and understand what is. There’s where we want to be and where we are. And part of where we are, is that many people are living inside of this binary, being labeled as “disabled” in very real and violent ways, and being denied access to resources because of it; many people are dying inside of it. And many people are thriving inside of it, gaining very real superiority and able-bodied privilege that offers them distance and disconnection from those deaths and that violence. Where we are, is that there are many people who don’t have the luxury of escaping that binary or pretending it is something other than what it is. We cannot move toward disability justice without the lived experiences of the people who get marked and oppressed as disabled and any work to challenge, reimagine and transform what disability is or could be cannot forget this.

Isolation gets used as a tool across the board, against so many people, but it’s also something I think that colors so many disabled people’s lives. I would bet that most of us in this room have at one point or another struggled with our mental health. I would bet that most of us have experienced some type of abuse either from our families, within our relationships or even within our organizing. All of us have trauma and we all carry generational trauma in our bones, breath and cells.

Many times access is a quick fix, an add on or a “just tell me what to do and I'll do it” type of angry/guilty shuffling. I want us to not only to be able to be part of spaces, but for us to be able to fully engage in spaces. I don’t just want us to get a seat at someone else’s table, I want us to be able to build something more magnificent than a table, together with our accomplices. I want us to be able to be understood and to be able to take part in principled struggle together—to be able to be human together. Not just placated or politely listened to. 

 

         Mia Mingus