A Different Way
“Our movements themselves need to be healing, or there is no point to them.”
-excerpt from Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
In March I wrote about the Disability Justice movement. It wasn’t simply about sharing some info on ideas that might be new to you (and me!) These things are a way of being that beg to be lived out. Disability Justice speaks to a longing for safe and authentic community that many of us hold. As I continue to unlearn ableism, internalized capitalism, and whiteness, the principles of Disability Justice resonate more and more. Interdependence. Collectivity. Intersectionality. Wholeness. It’s these kinds of learnings and reflections over many years that are now coming together to form a new vision for myself and for the disabled and chronic illness communities I’m now part of. Not just head knowledge to be intellectualized, but learnings to be embodied. I want better from and for our movements, communities, and relationships – and I know I’m not alone.
The longing for authentic, safe community to be our full selves is innate and part of being human. It’s also something our white, western, ableist and capitalist culture actively rejects. These things go against the status quo and built-in gatekeeping that serves the dominant group(s). Safety is typically reserved for wealthy, white, cis-gendered, hetero, non-disabled people. Also, men. So, when we talk about safety, we also have to ask, “Safe for who?” There are constant examples of slapping “DEI” onto our research and projects and claiming it’s enough. But this doesn’t effect needed change or create better spaces, and it is awfully performative. Even with good intentions we are perpetuating the same problems within our disability activism and advocacy, research, and education as we see in larger society. When the roots and foundation are rotten, we need a full overhaul. The systems and “norms” we uphold – whether intentionally or not – are rooted in oppression. That’s simply fact. In order to do better, we have to see and name the ways these things emerge in our communities, in our work, and in our selves. That is an ongoing process individually and collectively.
“Healing is rarely an event, a singularity we can point to. It is a process, an unfolding over time, a turning toward the place of injury for as long as it is needed.”
–Hillary L. McBride, PhD, Psychologist, Author of The Wisdom of Your Body (which I highly recommend!)
The Practice of Naming
I’ve been thinking on what this all means for my role in community – with regards to activism and advocacy; with regards to relationship building; with regards to being – and I’ve landed on some reflections and hard, but liberating, truths. Here are a few.
- 1) Authentic relationship, depth, and safety in community is more effective for change and a lasting movement.
Cultivating spaces that are continually building safety, authenticity, and care may seem slower in a time and space of unmet needs, but it isn’t slower. And it isn’t less effective, either. Catering to the ways of harmful systems; catering to “urgency” and “saviourism” ways of being; always fighting without rest, without joy – this is a recipe for burnout. This is the way of oppression. Continually pursuing – and often failing to capture – the respect, attention, and investment of those in power is a slow game, indeed. Plus, these ways are soul-sucking and non-inclusive (tokenistic, at best). Chasing these coattails holds up the status quo and perpetuates harms and “othering”. Building in this way means we are urgently going nowhere, fast. And/or leaving many people behind on any progress that is being made.
- 2) The raw, vulnerable nature of advocacy and activism means we need safety with those we’re working closely with.
I don’t mean that I need comfort. Challenge is needed and necessary – specifically at the intersections of our privileged identities. Getting comfortable with discomfort is part of learning, growing, and building safe community. Safety means an ability to name and repair harms within community. Safety means space for all lived experiences and ways of being. Safety means regularly questioning ourselves. Such as, “How am I building safe space with others? Where do I need to check myself?” It especially means considering how we participating in “othering” those who are: neurodivergent, autistic; mentally ill; queer, trans; Indigenous, Black, racialized people of the global majority; poor, houseless; disabled. We must be continually contending with the ways we are upholding oppression and othering. We must continually check and question ourselves as white people and white-dominated organizations if we truly want our work and movements to leave no one behind.
- 3) There is a lot of “talk” of relationship-building and community care without the actual work and embodiment.
We do this regularly in spaces that cater to the status quo. An endeavour that doesn’t have intentional depth and cultivated safety as an ongoing and open process will always automatically have it built-in for the dominant group (ie. white, cis-, neuroconforming). So, start questioning what you consider “a given” or what things are simply “norms”. Normal for who? Who cannot be here? Who is the labour falling onto and/or who is this unsafe for? Without leadership of the most impacted and without embodied intention (dropping DEI buzzwords ain’t it…), our spaces are very unlikely to be truly safe and inclusive. It is commonplace to claim “inclusivity” without doing any of the work, but stating it does not make it so! How does this still need saying in 2023?! How do we still not know that words are cheap and meaningless without action. I’ve seen and heard the excuses from within our disabled and chronic illness communities. I’ve even experienced them applied to me by other disabled people. And it is always rooted in ableism, white supremacy, and capitalism. Claims of urgency and no time; claims of “we can’t please everyone”; putting the labour on the shoulders of those being marginalized or pushed out to “speak up” or to do the work themselves “since it’s important to you”; using our disability to assuage responsibility (ick!). We just continue to build things that serve white bodies; affluent bodies; conforming bodies. As per usual, we are leaving people behind. As per usual, we are performative. As per usual, we are literally harming and oppressing people while serving our own interests. Ultimately, we have to question, reflect, and be willing to not just listen but to change. Otherwise, we will just repeat harmful, discriminatory history over and over.
“We don’t get the work done by burning through people we consider disposable.” – Kaia Arrow
Dreaming the Future
Collective Care is the Future, Artist: Angela Faz
Image Description: a black and white illustration of seven people of varied ethnicities and genders, wearing masks, with hands over their chests and the text reading, “Collective Care is the Future”
Needless to say, I’ve been realizing it is far more life-giving, and less draining of my limited energy, to have something emerge out of a space of intentional depth and safety; out of cultivated, established relationship; and out of space that honors and celebrates true diversity. I am in a season of intentional naming. Naming harms. Naming needs. Naming dreams. I need different than the white-dominated, neuroconforming, capitalist advocacy we’ve been building. I need community that demonstrates commitment to accessibility and safety for all. I need spaces with built-in repair for when harms occur – spaces that are unsafe for white men to complain about disabled women, for example. I need – we all need – embodied community care led by neurodivergent, disabled, racialized, queer, gender-marginalized people. These spaces exist but are so often drowned out by white-dominated groups and organizations. I’m dreaming of a way of being that means more space, more rest, more breath, more joy, and more being. Because advocacy and activism is not all fighting and exhaustion. It is daring to live as our full selves in opposition to the status quo that is trying to kill us. It is daring to care for one another and come together even while the powers that be attempt to divide and conquer. I dream of operating outside of the systems, protocols, policies, procedures that demand we comply in order to earn our crumbs. Instead, I dream of creating different and better for ourselves, in ways that aren’t dependent on the downcast gaze of those married to corrupt power. Ultimately, I dream of joy and rest as resistance; and healing, collective care, and activism emerging from this way of being. Because, as my friend Kaia says, “The work is in the work.” It’s in how we do the work.
“The idea that movements themselves could and should be spaces of healing, that care didn’t have to be a sideline to the ‘real work’ but could be the work…I took that knowledge back with me…quietly determined that I would figure out a way to find the places where the movement work healed us, instead of burning us out. And if I couldn’t find them, I would help make some.”
-excerpt from Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Hat tip to my bestie and partner in life, Rohadi, for influencing me for the better. We’ve been talking about joyful and restful resistance for years, and it’s now clicking for us in a new way.
Image Description: a Tweet by @rohadi reading, “Joy is an act of resistance to all that is not right in the world.”
Joy is an act of resistance to all that is not right in the world.
— Rohadi (@rohadi) March 22, 2021