a thank you letter to the advocate
Dear Advocate Magazine,
THANK YOU! I can’t even begin to express my gratitude for your last cover… You’ve just made my work so much easier. I’ve spent a lot of time this year cringing and praying “please please please don’t go there”, only to have leaders and colleagues compare lack of wheelchair access to people of color going through the back door, the r-word to the violence of the n-word, and “_____ struggle as the last civil rights frontier”. I know folks still won’t get why it’s not okay to use these analogies in keynote speeches, as points thrown out in heated arguments, or as reason to bring an issue to the table, but damn, with your blatant ignorance and privilege spread out all over the cover of a #1 gay rights mag, you’ve brought light to the issue of privilege in a way i never could. for that, i have much love and appreciation for you.
today i had the honor of moderating a call where media makers came together with disability activists to talk about the issue of inclusion and how we could support micah fialka-feldman’s fight for access*. analogies were made on this call— analogies that did not silence anyone or render anyone invisible. grace lee boggs connected this issue of inclusion to the environmentalist movement and said that both raised questions of humanity and recreated a world that was based less on individualism. a fellow blogger explained how the issues micah were bringing up on his campus were similar to those raised by students of color around what education is (competition? degrees? or community education?) when andy smith was denied tenure. another connected this to the feminist movement, with the personal being political. it was so good to take disability issues and connect it to issues of liberation for all. i’m so damn happy, can’t even work cause i’m just sitting around grinning…
so for those that were worried about how you can fight the good fight without coming off as racist or a cultural appropriator, the answer is yes— you *can* indeed make connections to other movements that do not offend people, make assumptions about our lives, require us to be silent, relegate us to textbook cases, or rewrite our history… it is easy! listen. ask. don’t go for the easy route. think before you speak…or use native american story sticks.
love,
cripchick
ps. oh yeah. this post was in reference to this:
the advocate's recent cover: gay is the new black
*micah is a student w/ a cognitive disability who is advocating to live in his school dorm. his activism has brought up questions around what education is, what inclusion can mean, and who the disability community fights for. this case is precedent-setting in that there are a lot of initiatves sprouting up around the nation for students with intellectual disabilities on college campuses and this will determine what they are and can be.
