$5 Book Bin Sale!!
Looking for Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn? Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw? This is your chance to get all the books you’ve been dreaming of reading!!
Continuing in Thaura Distro’s footsteps, friends and I are hosting an online book sale to support Mia’s and my move to the SF Bay. There are over a hundred books to choose from and you can pick up as many titles as you’d like. To purchase a book, leave a comment with the name of titles and use the chip-in widget at the bottom of the list. It will take you directly to paypal. 
Shipping costs are on us, but we ask that you donate between $5-10 for each title. If a title really speaks to you — like it’s the book explaining the hidden history of your people (been there!) — and you can’t afford $5 right now, no worries, just email me your address at consciouslycrip@gmail.com and it won’t even be a thing to send it to you for free. Each purchase comes with a small gift from either Thaura Zine Distro or artist Nadia Abou-Karr (check out the link to see art she has for sale).
A HUGE thank you to Aaminah, Mai’a, China, Bianca, and Mandy for coming up with this idea and donating TONS of books (and for many of them, shipping it out from their houses on their own dime!) Love you all so much.
Autism, Capitalism, and the Establishment
The Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) is a system where non-profit organizations become about making money and maintaining the status quo. A lot of people feel offended by the NPIC critique, but without this conversation we can’t really talk about the environment we are trying to create change in, the role institutions play in our work, or our vision for the world we want to live in.
This is what the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence , an organization who has been doing a lot of work around the role of the NPIC, says about the NPIC:
The state uses non-profits to:
- Monitor and control social justice movements;
- Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;
- Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;
- Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;
- Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;
- Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them
The clearest example of the NPIC I know of is the autism industry. Millions upon millions of dollars get poured into autism organizations that actually don’t actually do anything for autistic people. These organizations do not hire or include autistic people in their leadership. These organizations monopolize and control mainstream media narrative around autism. (For example, the founder of Autism Speaks — an organization many autistics have stated as harmful — is Bob Wright, who was CEO of NBC for 20+ years). To get funds, these organizations prey on the fear, misunderstanding, frustration of a lack of resources and ableist attitudes people have around autism. The only solution these organizations offer autistic people and the public is eradicating autism, as though our only responsibility in making the world better for autistics is to erase their difference.
Though the autism industry is a little bit different from the bullet points above*, the autism industry is a clear example of how organizations can actively work against promoting self-determination. (Other non-disability specific examples: Teach for America’s history of sending ivy league students for two year stints into struggling communities before they go off to their Fortune 500 careers, Planned Parenthood’s early history of promoting birth control as a means “to create a race of thoroughbreds”, colonizers cloaked as missionaries, and any foundation that pities the people it claims to serve).
Today is Autistics Speaking Day, a day that celebrates resiliency and calls on communities to listen to the voices of autistic people. It was created in response to Communication Shutdown Day, a day where the autism industry called on people to turn off their computers and communication devices so they could see what it was like to be autistic (ableist disability simulation at work once again). I hope you will celebrate with me and others by reading the writings by autistic people and reflecting on what you can do to support disabled people in the fight for self-determination.
* I think the autism industry is older than the emerging struggle for autistic/disability self determination. This is different from black and brown people-power movements where non-profits ares a newer phenomena and were introduced by the state to control people taking power. For more, please visit INCITE’s website or the book titled the Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
i love you. (so please get your WPS together.)
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.
for teukie
shiny crusts of pebble turn
turquoise in glistening brown boi hands
ocean cracking murals
on backs of closed eyes
you promise:
oppa did not find
femme for you
still, you paint glamour glittering as loud as
laughter, want as hopeful as
my calling heart
stumble stumble
shuffle shuffle
it does not matter that i cannot
will movement
you come
to me.
