cripchick's blog

i read this morning on facebook that laura hershey passed away last night. this is outrageously heartbreaking. she was her queer disabled feminist activist poet self before a lot of us gay baby crips were even born. how much of our refusal to stay in the shadows is a dare shaped by her breath, the sound of her words?

today i am not afraid. just somber and sending love to those who knew her.

to find out more about laura, please visit cripcommentary.com or laurahershey.com.

Petunias
by Laura Hershey, 1991

I knew you planned
– you knew I supported –
this arrest.

Yet when I watched you,
unstoppable as ever,
driving your chair
around a cop,
up a hill,
through careful, distinctly unrevolutionary
petunias,
past a police barricade,
and knew I’d probably seen
the last for at least
that day
of you –
my selfish spirit whispered
a small wish
to call you back,
forget the cause,
abandon the movement,
pick some petunias,
and take you home.

Another whisper reminded me
how fragile
our home might be.
The world we share
– our meals, our bed,
our work, our freedom to live
together
alone –
depends on this clash
and on our mutual
– you of your liberty
one or two days
– me of you
in my bed –
sacrifice.

I wanted right then
to offer — like a hand-picked bouquet –
my small insight
to you, and hear
your thoughts in turn.

But by then I could see
no sign of you
except
your tire marks through the petunias.

though i am active in many communities, most of my time and energy goes towards the disability rights movement. this is largely because it raised me, i work for a disability rights organization and i love disabled people more than anything/anyone i’ve ever loved before.

but damn if the disability rights movement isn’t pissing me off now.

frustrations/issues:

1.) more than 14 queer youth have killed themselves in the last 6 weeks because the violence they experienced at the hands of others was too much to live with. though many of us have experienced almost this exact form of bullying, i haven’t heard a peep out of the disability community. no calls to queer organizations, no vigils, no brown bag lunches.

so — why are we so damn silent? why does the disability rights movement refuse to acknowledge that the root of our oppression is not a lack of a curbcut but a culture that polices and otherizes bodies that are framed as deviant? and when we do talk about bullying, why is the solution anti-bullying laws? is that the best you’ve got — to send youth to juvenile detention centers? what world do you live in if you think the prison industrial complex is a just institution that can be a king solomon to our issues?

i guess it wouldn’t be so easy to push a one-issue agenda if we had to talk about the fact that the bodies society considers deviant, dirty, or bad aren’t just disabled, but also are black, brown, poor, trans, female and living on the res.

2.) society for disability studies, a group of disability scholars, is now wanting to study disability justice, a movement and framework being developed by disabled people of color. this might be okay if the society was led by and predominately involved people of color.  but many black and brown folks explicitly say they do not feel safe in sds. many say it is racist. the academy studying people of color is not a new phenomenon.

it might also be okay to host a conference on disability justice if it actually was about disability justice. the cfp begins by quoting paul longmore, a white man. it then talks about the ADA and the UN Convention, both which are important but explictly fall under a rights framework. there is never any mention of the role of institutional violence in disabling communities of color, the myriad of ways people are resisting modern day eugenics, the myth of independence, community accountability/access, or the long list of work disability justice activists are doing.

it means something that white people are wanting to “explore” disability justice before disabled people of color have even reach consensus about it. i’m not trying to say sds, centers for independent living and others can’t do work on race/class/gender/queerness, just that they should start by doing a conference on white supremacy, heteronormativity/more. if you already have, do it again. and again. and again. just be careful about defining disability justice before we get to.

3.) my friend can’t get a job in this movement. we’ve gone through the same ranks. we’re both great at what we do. the difference is he’s black. and dark-skinned. and a man of color. he is on my mind all day, mostly in regards to the roles we are asked to play in this movement and how our roles are so invisibilized. when we go to an event, i am the asian woman doing the behind-the-scenes logistics/”women’s” work, he is the one making people feel welcome in a space, and the white people are the ones networking with the important guests. we sign up for these roles because it is what is expected (and because we are good – aka socialized- for them) but no one talks about the history of black minstrelsy and what that means for him to be the one making people comfortable. no one talks about how so many organizations are run by unseen women who are either underpaid or not paid at all.

and with all this, people still don’t believe things are connected together. but of course they’d don’t, then they’d have to acknowledge we aren’t all in community with each other. they’d have to acknowledge they were hurting as much as they were helping.

*WPS= white people shit.

yes, yes, and more yes. this is exactly  why i believe so much in the work of creating beloved community. our liberation waits on us learning how to radically love one another.

for me, justice is what love looks like in public. when you love folk, you hate the fact that they’re been treated unjustly. you loathe the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. and if you don’t do something the rocks are going to cry out because when you talk about justice, you’re not talking about some abstract notion, you’re talking about something you feel deep in your soul — the way you would if you heard curtis mayfield play his guitar. you gotta feel.

- dr. cornel west

via colinresponse blog

“ROAD WEARY TROUBADOUR / MAYBE I’M AN AMBASSADOR/ NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH SOME SPOOK OR BASTARD BY THE DOOR” -CHUCK D, Tear Down That Wall

i want to find a way to say:

friend,

i understand that your actions are rooted in strategies for survival and self-preservation. i know that you are in a place where that need is more than legimate. i am proud that you are a fighter. i admire you for surviving isolation, exclusion, and all that comes with living in a world where you can not be your beautiful whole self.

but, because i love what we have built together,

i also have to say that your survival strategies are perpendicular to the work you, i and others have done to build beloved community. every day you are laying your loyalties down with institutions that have (historically) (and in the present) hurt us collectively and individually. though you may win merit with them, your survival comes from siding with people who will never be accountable to us as a people. these are people who hurt us and instead of being outraged or crying out in pain, you are washing your own blood off their hands.

to be frank, i/we are learning to love ourselves too much to allow ourselves to be expendable casualties caught in the way of your surivival. i can’t imagine a life without you but i also know we can’t keep on like this.

i/we love us. so i/we will not let you hurt us. please let me/us love you too.

-cripchick.