Why the fight against racism and ableism must be shared

I used to think I had the privilege of being at arm’s length from the politics of disability. I strongly supported anti-racist politics, but being “able-bodied” and without caring responsibilities, the disability studies and the disability rights movement was not a world that pertained to me. This was in spite of having loved ones with chronic pain, and intellectual disabilities. I have come to reflect that my unwillingness to acknowledge my proximity to disability was a form of ableism.

In recent months, through engaging with Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition by Liat Ben-Moshe in a reading group, listening to disabled people and undertaking some honest self-reflection, I am learning and unlearning. Learning that fighting white supremacy also means fighting ableism, and unlearning the ableism in my head. This is a reflection on how massive paradigm shifts can occur from a willingness to explore with humility political spaces beyond the silos of our own identities.

I am learning, through Ben-Moshe’s genealogy of carceral locales in Decarcerating Disability, that the idea of ableism is political in itself (Ben-Moshe, 2020). It reminded me of reading James Baldwin, who detailed how whiteness was dependent on blackness, meaningless without the fabrication of blackness. While I knew that whiteness was not neutral, I had not yet connected the dots that ‘ability’ was not neutral either. In the very first pages of Decarcerating Disability, Ben-Moshe makes clear the importance of “race-ability” and the intimate connection between ‘race’ and ‘ability’:

By race-ability, I am referring to the ways race and disability, and racism, sanism, and ableism as intersecting oppressions, are mutually constitutive and cannot be separated, in their genealogy (eugenics, for example), current iterations of resistance (in the form of disability justice, for example), or oppression (incarceration and police killing, for example). (Ben-Moshe, 2020, p. 5).

While we are taught that disability is the deviance from or deficiency of ability, the idea of being “able-bodied” isn’t actually a physiological condition either, but a decision of the state to grant access and withhold violence. While Judith Butler describes precarity in terms of the interdependence of human beings, the differential distributions of bodily precarity is a function of an environment that excludes them. Debilitation is a social process, not an individual state of being. I am learning that when I say I am anti-racist, I must also be anti-ableist. Not because it makes me morally pure, but because we are fighting the same battle against white su­premacist eugenics.

I am learning about disability justice, a framework that works to understand and dismantle able-bodied supremacy as an ideology and institution inseparable from intersecting systems of domination and exploitation such as white supremacy, transphobia and heteronormativity, and aimed at ‘creat[ing] alternative practices rooted in justice’ (Sins Invalid, 2020). By learning through this framework, the political identities I inhabited publicly and privately began to transform. I began unlearning narratives about racial justice that I uncritically accepted. For example, I am unlearning the classic liberal idea that racism comes from the fear of the unknown. The idea is still meaningful in some ways, but I am learning that white supremacy is not a fear of otherness, but the construction of otherness and the wielding of violence against those it deems “other”. Similarly,  disability is not a fact a priori, but a lived experience of violence and debilitation imposed by a hegemonic value system. ‘Otherness’ justifies exploitation, that’s why it is so important to capitalism. Otherness is a crutch for white supremacy, not a threat to it. I realise in a new way why no amount of awareness-raising or myth-busting about people of colour or disabled people can defeat middle-class, ableist, heteronormative whiteness. No amount of “normalising” can make us “normal” when “normalcy” is constructed in opposition to us.

This is what makes disability justice and anti-racism a shared struggle. It’s not simply that we share the common experience of our bodies being weaponised against us, but that the conditions of capitalism and white supremacy produce both racism and ableism. To make human dignity a scarce commodity, capitalism requires exploitation. This plays out as the objectification and exploitation of coloured and disabled bodies as political props, and the economic exploitation of these bodies for (spiritual, material and bodily) resources. It justifies the exploitation by notions of defect, distaste and deviance. And by doing so, it makes human dignity something we must compete for, rather than something everybody is meant to have. Though people experience racism and ableism in vastly different ways, I am also learning that our precarity is inseparable from one another, and that pitting one disempowered community against another helps nobody.

I’ve witnessed mainstream anti-discrimination advocates and disability rights advocates inadvertently reduce other communities to props in their appeals to likeness, leaning on ableist or racist tropes to seek their own belonging. This harmful rhetoric is often perpetuated by advocates with privileged platforms, rather than the many individual people with lived experiences. For example, as a child of generations of refugees, I want to be proud of the achievements of refugees. Yet, the earnest celebrations of the resilience and resourcefulness were often couched in discourses emphasising economic productivity and assimilation. This does a huge disservice to the fact of their survival, as well as an injustice to disabled people who have been deemed killable for their lack of economic value or inability to live a “normal” life.

On the other hand, we also see campaigns in the area of disability appealing to the likeness of whiteness on the basis that disabled people (particularly those with intellectual or development disabilities) are essentially “innocent”, “lawful” or “harmless” children that need looking after. I saw this especially in marketing for exploitative disability social enterprises. This plays into ideas of guilt and criminality that are used to justify the slow death of refugees in physical incarceration (in onshore and offshore detention) and functional captivity (when banned from healthcare, education, work, welfare, family reunion or voting). Appealing to such norms simply entrenches the same normative criteria by which self-surveillance and valuation of other bodies occurs.

This makes me think of Kinley, an eighteen-year-old Bhutanese asylum seeker living in Queanbeyan, who faced deportation in 2019 because the state decided that his developmental disability and hearing impairment disqualified his family from protection (Truu, 2019). His visa status made him disposable at the whim of the Department of Immigration, and his disability was used as a justification. These laws demonstrate how ableism and white supremacy play against each other in the interests of a government obsessed with border control. Kinley’s deportation was thankfully annulled, but the vast majority have no recourse.

Even more recently, there is the case of Florence Udawatta and her family, who are at imminent threat of deportation because Florence’s visa-holding husband had debilitating bowel cancer that meant their visa requirements to work were lapsed (Barbour, 2020). He passed away this year. Her community in Kempsey has rallied around her family’s cause, with the decision now in the Minister for Immigration’s hands, but the majority of migrants have no choice but to leave. In both cases, we see the paralysing impact of a racist system that only welcomes people of colour from whom we can extract economic value, and an ableist system that makes a disabled or terminally ill person (and their family) disposable. In Kinley and Florence’s cases we see how ableism activates racism (i.e. deportation of ‘unwanted’ people), and racism activates ableism (i.e. the disposability of ‘unproductive’ people). Though these stories are different, they are also the same in that their precarity suddenly becomes disposability at the hands of the state.

For me, learning about disability justice was a wake-up call. It was not just an exercise of learning about other oppressed folk. It was learning the inseparable roots of my own struggle and how that informs the way forward. It was learning that capitalism and eugenics can’t be chipped away at by the gradual acceptance of excluded people, but has to be dismantled to make way for our universal right to safety and dignity.

For far too many, precarity is something that is thrust upon, forced, decided on their behalf. But abolition requires a certain kind of precarity too. It requires an openness and vulnerability to the unknown because it’s inherently about destroying oppressive epistemologies that have been long held on to. The central critique of abolition is its lack of answers. But I think abolition is precisely about answers. Not answer as in solution, but answer as in “respond”, “response” as in “responsibility”, “resolve” as in “loosen, undo, (un)settle”. This is what is required of the privileged: to step into vulnerability as an ethical commitment and act in accordance with the recognition that abolition is the only answer.