cripchick's blog

i am so overwhelmed by the support, blessings, and solid crip advice mia & i have received in our effort to move across the country. most of the emails i’ve received are from people i do not even know yet: we are all a friend of a friend.

leaving family (who meets a lot of my access needs), moving across the country, trying to get attendant services in california, finding a second job, searching for a wheelchair accessible home, setting up a careshift collective, moving in with someone for the first time, opening the most vulnerable parts of myself… i think this whole thing is impossible at least 3 times a day. your support keeps me believing and i am so thankful.

below is one example of azolla love (taken from facebook).

Dear friends,

As someone deeply impacted by the love, life & works of both Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern (two absolutely amazing queer diasbled diasporean Korean community organizers, writers, mentors, liberation lovers & friends) I would like to help raise money for their incredible move to the Bay area through an Etsy shop. And I’m going to need your help!

I am planning on selling my handmade jewelry, and possibly some other of my handmade items. But I would love to offer a wide range of items from a wide range of artists. Therefore, I am calling for other artists who support Mia & Stacey’s journey “to the other side of dreaming” to donate works to be sold. I know that many of you are artists or closely tied to artist communities, and I hope that we can put our talents and connections toward supporting these two inspiring women.

Once the Etsy shop is up and running, I also hope that you all will shop, or encourage your friends to shop in support of this amazing move.

If you have something you would like to donate, or any questions/comments, please contact me directly via Facebook or at: julijeong@gmail.com

If you need more information about Mia & Stacey’s move towards living disability justice, liberation and the Bay area, please visit: http://blog.cripchick.com/archives/7908

Thank you so much! Please forward widely.

Teukie Jae (aka julijeong)

Dear loved ones,

Mia Mingus and I have decided to live together and create/cultivate interdependent queer disabled korean diasporic radical women of color home together. We are embarking on a journey together to put pieces of disability justice into practice, love each other and live on the other side of dreaming. A huge part of this is our need, as crips, as queers, and women of color, as korean (and all) diasporic people; we need each other and we need you.

We’re reaching out across our bi-coastal networks to move to the Bay, specifically Berkeley because of the level of access that can be found there for disabled folks. This is a huge, complicated and multidimensional decision that we have struggled with and we will be writing more about it to you, our loved ones and family, in the coming months.

But right now we need you. We need help finding a place to live and creating a community careshift collective.

Need One: Affordable Accessible Housing is Not an Oxymoron: We dream about an amazing 2 bedroom wheelchair accessible house/housing filled with love and lots of light in Berkeley, CA… We hope to have a great landlord that understands disability justice, but it is not a requirement since we can use our crip super powers to work through anything and with anyone!

Need Two: Growing Collective Interdependent Access and Care Through the Cracks of State Systems: Evidently in this country, disabled people don’t move–and we certainly don’t move together. Our systems for disabled folks are broken, we know this. And we are trying to leverage what we can to get to a place where we could live outside of them, but until then… We need to create a community careshift collective to support me (Stacey) in the months I will be in Berkeley before my disability/medicaid services get started in California. I am a powerchair user and we need people who could come to our home in shifts to help me do things like get out of bed, use the bathroom, get dressed, etc… We dream of a group of community-minded, interdependent disabled and non-disabled folks to help out with these daily access needs. We dream of moving beyond capitalist notions of “payment” for care/access and instead want to have conversations and inspiration-sessions with those interested in what we can all offer and give. We especially invite folks who are interested in putting disability justice into practice and learning together with us.

Do you want to be part of creating collective access with us? Do you want to be part of creating something out of nothing that can hold us outside of the current broken and dignity-stealing systems we are up against?

Our first priority is housing. Please let us know of any information, contacts, or leads you have ASAP. Please feel free to pass this note on to loved ones of your own who might be able to help us. Thank you!

To the other side of dreaming,
Mia and Stacey

Mia Mingus
miamingus@gmail.com

http://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/

Stacey Milbern
staceymilbern@gmail.com

http://blog.cripchick.com/

don’t feel the way white supremacy creeps into your life and plops itself in the center?

in the last wk, white ppl have:

• told me how to rearrange my words as to be more approachable.
• made my need to have ppl of color time about them.
• asked me invasive medical questions about my body.
• dominated conversations.
• engaged in passive aggressive communication.
• told me about long lost family who share ancestry with me.
• not noticed that there were practically no youth of color present.
• said wanting to centralize youth of color comes off as “exclusionary”.
• gotten mad when i didn’t have time to instantly call or email them back.
• not even known what i was doing this wk, even though the last eight months of my life has been prep for it.
• offered advice when i didn’t ask it.
• put me in the asian woman role of taking care of everybody’s feelings.

just documenting. for myself. so i remember why i’m so emotionally exhausted. that it wasn’t just hosting two back to back conferences or handling access needs or facilitating or being a good hostess 14 hours a day or figuring out who can clean up the shit, puke and pee, it was also whiteness.

ego masturbation mixed with
crisis aversion mixed with
late night whispers of revolution
told to help you get up & go to work
in the morning

i hold all our shit down
do it out of love when really family
is my only calling and
you don’t even know
to offer me
home