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From within Sins Invalid, where we incubate both the framework and practice of Disability Justice, this burgeoning framework has ten (10) principles, each offering new opportunities for movement builders:

1. Intersectionality.

2. Leadership of Those Most Impacted.

3. Anti-Capitalist Politic.

4. Cross-Movement Solidarity.

5. Recognizing Wholeness.

6. Sustainability.

7. Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity.

8. Interdependence.

9. Collective Access.

10. Collective Liberation.

-Tiffany

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In recent years, on websites and new media locales, on flyers and in informal conversations, I've witnessed people add the word "justice" onto virtually everything disability related -- from disability rights based services and access audits to disability scholarship -- while doing nothing to shift either process or end goal, thinking that the word change alone brings that work into alignment with disability justice.

Not so. So when Jane Dunham with the National Black Disability Coalition asked me to write "What Is Disability Justice" for the 2015 SDS Pre-Conference Disability and Social Justice Summit, even though SDS was demonstrating NO commitment to Collective Access for those of us who cannot pay, physically or financially, for ableist transportation, I appreciated Jane's valuing my voice and contribution, and her efforts struggling with the unspoken and passive aggressive liberal racism of the academe, so I agreed. Plus, I really like Jane ♥. I wrote the following also knowing that it would serve as a good draft for the upcoming Sins Invalid project writing a Disability Justice statement, which will certainly be different and better after being worked through by the crew here.

However, I wanted to put it on this blog to continue my individual process of decolonization from ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism which tells me to keep a low profile lest I be hurt. So, with the deepest thanks and acknowledgements to Aurora Levins Morales and David Langstaff for their words intertwined with mine, and with gratitude to Aurora Levins Morales, Cara Page, Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz, Stacey Milbern, Kiyaan Abadani, Micah Bazant, Leroy Moore, seeley quest, Ernie Cath, David Langstaff, Nomy Lamm, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Laura Hershey, Leah Lakshmi Peipzna-Samaransinha, Natasha Simpson, Lateef McLeod and so many others who have all held fierce conversations and sleepy eyed dreams of what we building together....

I'd like to start off with a quote from Aurora Levins Morales' book :
"There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth. What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality...What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies."
There was phenomenal and historic work to develop the disability rights movement in the U.S., and it had many successes in advancing a philosophy of independent living and opening possibilities for people with disabilities through the establishment of civil rights for people with disabilities. Like other movements, the current disability rights movement includes advocacy organizations, service provision agencies, constituency led centers, membership based national organizations, as well as cultural and academic spaces.

And, like many movements, it is contextualized within its era of emergence and left us with "cliff-hangers": it is single issue identity based; its leadership has historically centered white experiences; its framework leaves out other forms of oppression and the ways in which privilege is leveraged at differing times and for various purposes; it centers people with mobility impairments, marginalizing other forms of impairment; and centers people who can achieve rights and access through a legal or rights-based framework. The political strategy of the disability rights movement relied on litigation and the establishment of a disability bureaucratic sector at the expense of developing a broad-based popular movement.

While a concrete and radical move forward toward justice, the disability rights movement simultaneously invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression - disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.

In response to this, in 2005, disabled activists of color, originally queer women of color incubated in progressive and radical movements that did not systematically address ableism - namely, myself, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern, soon to be joined by Leroy Moore, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret - began discussing a "second wave" of disability rights and ultimately launched a framework we called Disability Justice.

Given the isolation enforced by ableism and classed boundaries, many of us have often found ourselves as agents of change from within our respective communities and isolated from in-person community with other disabled people of color or queer or gender non-conforming crips, finding "liberated zones" instead online. In many ways, Disability Justice is a nascent framework that some call a movement, still identifying the "we" - sometimes in fluid spaces and sometimes in each others' hoped and spoken words, touching each other through the echoes of those we mentor close by.

Given this early historical snapshot, I assert that Disability Justice work is largely done by individuals within their respective settings, with Sins Invalid, the NYC-based Disability Justice Collective, Seattle's Disability Justice Collective, and Vancouver's Disability Justice Collective being notable exceptions. Some voices may emphasize a particular component of the framework over another, as can be expected in early movement moments. However, what has been consistent is the leadership of disabled people of color and of queer and gender non-conforming disabled people.

Disability Justice activists, organizers, cultural workers understand that able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to intersecting systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, each system co-creating an ideal bodymind built upon the exclusion and elimination of a subjugated "other" from whom profits and status are extracted. 500+ years of violence against black and brown communities includes 500+ years of bodies and minds deemed dangerous by being non-normative - again, not simply within able-bodied normativity, but within the violence of heteronormativity, white supremacy, gender normativity, within which our various bodies and multiple communities have been deemed "deviant", "unproductive", "invalid."

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them. We understand that all bodies are caught in these bindings of ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state and imperialism, and that we cannot separate them. These are the positions from where we struggle. We are in a global system that is incompatible with life. There is no way stop a single gear in motion - we must dismantle this machine.

Disability Justice holds a vision born out of collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority -- black and brown people -- share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.

From my vantage point within Sins Invalid, where we incubate both the framework and practice of Disability Justice, this burgeoning framework has ten (10) principles, each offering new opportunities for movement builders:

Like the above principles, Disability Justice shares two additional principles with other justice-based movements - an Anti-Capitalist Politic and a Commitment to Cross Movement Organizing. We are anti-capitalist as the very nature of our mind/bodies resists conforming to a capitalist "normative" productive standard, with the actual construction of "disability" derived from the exploitation of the body in an economy that sees land and human as components of profit, deriding the integrity of our very real crip labor. Necessarily cross movement, Disability Justice shifts how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, lending itself toward a united front politic.

This is Disability Justice, an honoring of the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform. Disability Justice is a vision and practice of a yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful.

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Disability Justice - a working draft by Patty Berne - Sins Invalid

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In recent years, on websites and new media locales, on flyers and in informal conversations, I've witnessed people add the word "justice" onto virtually everything disability related -- from disability rights based services and access audits to disability scholarship -- while doing nothing

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Rightful Presence NOT Diversity..................................Would like to move beyond diversity and inclusion to transformation. See: Yeh, C., Tan, P., & Reinholz, D. L. (2021). Rightful Presence in Times of Crisis and Uprisings: A Call for Disobedience. Equity & Excellence in Education, 54(2), 196-209. - Tiffany

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Rightful Presence NOT Diversity..................................Would like to move beyond diversity and inclusion to transformation. See: Yeh, C., Tan, P., & Reinholz, D. L. (2021). Rightful Presence in Times of Crisis and Uprisings: A Call for Disobedience. Equity & Excellence in Education, 54(2), 196-209. - Tiffany

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ABSTRACT
Borders-territorial, economic, political, and ideological-are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are regulated, patrolled, and maintained by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. Likewise, mathematics is used as a border that divides and politicizes. In this article, we seek to explore how the field can disrupt and transform borders in mathematics education. We draw on border and third space theories to challenge the ontological and epistemological borders in mathematics education that are taken as normative yet reify exclusion through the following questions: (1) What is mathematics? (2) Who can do mathematics? (3) Where is mathematics done? We situate these questions within the COVID-19 pandemic as context of continued injustice. We call for the field to be disobedient and ready itself for the changes that must come so the field can create a humanizing and just alternative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note

1. Throughout this article, we intentionally use terms such as disabled students, rather than students with disabilities, to convey the social construction of disabilities, the ways systems disable individuals, and the ongoing political struggle for disability justice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cathery Yeh
Cathery Yeh (she/her) is an assistant professor of mathematics education and a codirector of the Ethnic Studies Minor and Interdisciplinary Cluster at Chapman University. Her work centers on critical mathematics education, humanizing practices, ethnic studies, and social justice teaching and organizing. She is a coauthor of the books Reimagining the Mathematics Classroom: Creating and Sustaining Productive Learning Environments, K-Grade 6 and Catalyzing Change in Early Childhood and Elementary Mathematics: Initiating Critical Conversations, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a coauthored book on mathematics lessons that explore and respond to social (in)justice and mathematics for liberation.

Paulo Tan (he/him) is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University in the Urban Teachers program. He engages in equity struggle with a focus in mathematics education and disabilities. He is a coauthor of Humanizing Disabilities in Mathematics Education: Forging New Paths.

Daniel L. Reinholz
Daniel L. Reinholz (he/him) is an assistant professor of mathematics education at San Diego State University. Also, as a professor of equity, he provides professional development to faculty and staff on the university campus. Broadly speaking, his work focuses on addressing racial and gender inequities in STEM, both at the level of classroom practices and in larger organizational structures. He is also a codeveloper of the EQUIP classroom observation tool ( https://www.equip.ninja) for tracking and dismantling inequities in STEM classrooms.

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Rightful Presence in Times of Crisis and Uprisings: A Call for Disobedience

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ABSTRACT Borders-territorial, economic, political, and ideological-are processes of social division. They monitor and exclude and are regulated, patrolled, and maintained by an array of power regimes, but borderlands are also sites of movement, agency, and resistance. Likewise, mathematics is used as a border that divides and politicizes.

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I struggle with the idea of diversity for diversity's sake; because that can often lead to diversity of body without inclusion or acceptance of that diversity. For instance, diversity relates to representation in a nice way, but the organization needs to be open about the actual challenges of diversity.

How do we move past diversity and into inclusion of different thoughts, perspectives, and cultures while not othering certain people as the "diverse perspective". Do people learn on "diversity" as the solution. It cannot be a solution, but a pathway to a solution, and not the actual end result. This Ted Talk is really interesting from a gender perspective, but can be transferred to all aspects of identity.

https://youtu.be/9EBkS2kE7uk

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"A Seat at the Table" Isn't the Solution for Gender Equity | Lilly Singh | TED

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Plus: Increased benefits of difference.
Delta: Proxy for white supremacy at the intersections of other forms of oppression to continue.

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Whiteness: An Unexplored Barrier to Your School’s Equity Goals

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Whiteness –defined as structural arrangements and ideologies of race dominance – is a significant barrier to achieving educational equity in schools and districts, and Whiteness functions in every aspect of schooling. Thus, this Equity by Design brief is intended for preK-12 school leaders who want…

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Dianne- Challenges- varying definitions of diversity (i.e. what it means to one person may not be the same for another person) and true inclusivity and the limits that exist in diversity 

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Dianne- Challenges- varying definitions of diversity (i.e. what it means to one person may not be the same for another person) and true inclusivity and the limits that exist in diversity 

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My future teachers sometimes have to be taught what diversity means and then be convinced that it makes the world better. It is challenging for me to see how little they know and are receptive to sometimes.

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The hard work of creating a space were students and staff are willing to have these difficult conversations. At the end of the day, it is up to the participants.

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The depth of the ways of how we can be different is inspiring to help figure out to solve our problems collectively.

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Dianne -visibility and acknowledgement are benefits 

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Dianne -visibility and acknowledgement are benefits 

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Diversity magnifies creativity, enhances teamwork, and provides exposure to bias.