cripchick's blog

this week i had the opportunity to reflect on what i’d like to say if i had a chance to address disability rights community (i was filling out an application for an award). this is an abridged version of what i wrote:

“I would like to challenge movement leadership to grow, support, and create space for disabled people of color. I do not mean this as a platform for encouraging simple diversity or one-dimensional multiculturalism, but as a push for us to rethink and revision what we understand as disability community and history.

I want to talk about why disability looks white. I want us to understand how ableism has been leveraged against communities of color with black folks historically being thought of as less capable (therefore fit for slavery) and special education commonly serving as a means of segregating students of color both with and without disabilities. I want us to create a disability pride that acknowledges the complexities of our experience and does not pit living resiliently and proudly against the knowledge that disability is often created by injustice our communities face.

All of this must be done without flattening our differences, without saying being disabled is just like being of color, just like being poor, just like being queer. Let us bring our best selves to community and learn to be with each other in ways that transform and grow who we are, even when (and though) the work is hard.”

With that said, October is Disability History Month in North Carolina. In 2007, disabled young people decided teaching about ableism and disability history in schools should be a priority. We wrote a bill and lobbied our legislature to require local school boards to provide education on disability. This time last year, we ambitiously created a puppet show, skits, a self-advocacy rap, a video, a 100+ page zine, bookmarks, and buttons and took them into several classrooms to talk about things like self-determination, eugenics, and the models of disability . Inspired by theredtree posting one of our bookmarks, I am including below the text of a few of our bookmarks as an example of what we could say about disability history if we told the stories of queer disabled people of color.

Frida was a Mexican painter who painted using vibrant colors in a style that was influenced by Mexican culture. Frida had polio. Her art illustrated both her love of her body & her experience with disability. She was a modern woman & had many lovers. Frida is both a feminist icon for the way she was not afraid to be herself and a legend for the way she brought light to Mexican art and culture.

Harriet Tubman was an abolitionist. When she was 13, she threw herself between a slave & the overseer who was about to whip him. The overseer hit her & gave her a traumatic brain injury (TBI). After she escaped slavery, she went on secret missions to rescue other slaves. B/c of her TBI, many people brushed her off as “crazy.” She played up her disability so no one would guess she was mapping out paths for slaves to escape.

Audre Lorde was a feminist, poet, & activist known for organizing women of color. Her poems and teachings reflected her concern for oppressed people. When she had surgery for her breast cancer, she refused to wear a prothesis stating, “Either I love my body one breasted now or remain forever alien to myself.” She is celebrated by poets, feminists and activists everywhere.

A few other historical figures and pop icons we include are Curtis Mayfield, Helen Keller, Dummy Hoy, Danny Glover, Dorothea Lange, Howie Mandel, President Roosevelt, Damon Wayans and Chief Wilma Mankiller. (Check out their stories).

hi all!

putting my need out into the internet since it has been working lately! (love to you all)

do any of yall have information on liberation schools organized by the black panthers, community-led classes, popular education programs, organizing schools, or anything of that nature?

i am in the process of organizing a “campus” locally for the school of our lorde. where i live, this will mean people of color coming together every saturday to study the poetry, pedagogy [study of teaching], and politics of audre lorde

and the youth crew i am is also sketching out the framework we want to use for the event we are holding this summer for disabled youth to come together for a week and return home as revolutionaries

if you have access to online libraries, books you can rec, stories you know, stuff you’ve seen in your communities, models you’ve used, please let me know. told a friend today i was excited to learn that things in my head and in the collective are not new— being accessible is called “popular education”, events where youth come together to learn power analysis, activism, poetry is called “liberation schools”… just have to do the homework!

excited for 2010!!!

cripchick

Hi beautiful blog readers,

A few of you may have noticed that a lot of my posts are about my experience as an organizer with the Disabled Young People’s Collective, a crew of disabled youth living across North Carolina. By “collective” i mean that we share decision making power, rotate responsibilities, and are volunteer organizers working with a shoestring budget. It has been a challenge to become a collective (a lot of this has been around internalized ableist beliefs and disability hierachy) but I am so proud to be a part of DYP because it really teaches me what interdependence can mean and what leadership can really look like.

I am not able to go into too much detail online but the more we radicalize and organize from our own vision for what we want community to look like, the more we have taken financial losses. As a group made up of youth of color, foster youth, queer youth, low-income youth, and youth with disabilities traditionally ignored by the Disability Rights Movement, we are all fighting for self-determination in our own lives and do not have financial resources we can put in ourselves.

Right now, we are in the red and we desperately need to come up with some money so we can meet in January to regroup and figure out how we are going to move forward. Even though we will be sleeping on the floor of a friend’s apartment clubhouse, cooking our own food, and carpooling, it still costs a couple hundred to host a meeting that meet all of our access needs.

Our collective has done a lot of amazing work this year (for example, our Disability History Month Initiative where we went into ten 8th grade classrooms to teach about eugenics, institutionalization, self-determination and youth power this past October) and we want to continue it. Please help us make this possible by visiting thedypcollective.org and hitting the paypal button on the left!

This organization has transformed me and I thank you for your support.

In community,

cripchick

PS. Everyone who makes a donation will receive either a button you can rep DYP with, one of our limited 113 page zines that will teach you more than you ever wanted to know about disability rights, a few of our bookmarks highlighting frida kahlo, audre lorde, teddy pendergrass and other amazing disability leaders, or one of the hot DYP tshirts we rock everywhere (this will get you noticed!!). Our website is still under major construction but you can find out more at http://thedypcollective.org

told my dad the other night that being a collective felt like it was fighting human nature. when he started on his whole speech about the failures of socialism,  i started this list.

why disabled youth organizing is hard as hell (aka whose bright idea was this??):

• all of us are fighting for self-determination in our own lives
• all of us are coming from some place of isolation and alienation, abuse and trauma. we are all still learning how to talk about those experiences and trust each other.
• many of us don’t have basic tools for organizing (phone, internet, transportation, personal income, supportive family structures)
• many of us live in rural areas and lack access to community
• many of us are in survival-mode & are navigating fostercare, psychatric institutions, nursing homes, group homes, juvie
• all of us are told we are consumers, not leaders
• all of us are unlearning everything we’ve been taught
• all of us are learning about our own disabilities and each others
• hard to figure out who our allies are. in nonprofit industrial complex, when we make a decision that isn’t popular with allies (like using the word “disabled” as a political word of power in our name), we don’t just lose support, ageist and ableist tactics are used to try and take our power
• this is honestly first time a lot of us have been asked: what do you want? what do you see for yourself & yr community?

why radical disabled youth organizing is so beautiful:

• we live interdependence. there aren’t any feelings of one-way dependency or charity because everyone is helping each other out & knowing we need each other.
• disability + youth + non-hierarchical collective power structure = radical spin on inclusion, access, and self determination
• we know how to do a lot with a little. (e.g. feed 12 people for 3 days on $100, sleep 3 in a bed…  i want to see rachel ray top that shit.)
• we are often experiencing things for the first time with each other. travelling, being independent, crushes, love…
• we are creative as hell. (can’t wait for you to see our disability history zine, self-advocacy rap, and no pity comedy puppet show that we are using in schools this month)
• there isn’t any model for what we are doing so we get to pave the way and dream up whatever we want
• we have some amazing elders and allies who support us
• we are shattering every preconception known

writing this list for the hard times, like this week. can’t help but fall in love w/ them all over again.