Disability justice explores disability from a social justice perspective, which fundamentally shifts the way we see disability. As a society, disability is viewed as an undesirable trait and individual problem, instead of calling the societal structures that punishes non-normative bodies into question. In fact, the binary categories of abled and disabled falsely perpetuate the myth of health as a fixed state, instead of something that will be in flux throughout our lives.
Disability is one of the most organic and human experiences since we are all aging in a world on the brink of climate catastrophe, yet we consider In contrast, there are ways disability is tokenized to prop up the notions of meritocracy, that we have to be remarkable in order to compensate for what we are lacking (due to our disabilities). Dismantling ableism requires us to confront our own ableist beliefs by reexamining how capitalistic notions of productivity infiltrate our interpersonal relationships and restructure those power dynamics.
Lydia X. Z. Brown, an autistic disability justice advocate, asserts that we often reproduce a hierarchy based on labor and contributions within our activist communities. When we limit our ideas of what legitimate forms of activism can look like – going to all the meetings, all the protests and demonstrations – we replicate a hierarchical structure that devalues the contributions and labor of disabled people (“Disability Justice Is the Art and The Practice of Honouring the Body: An Interview with Lydia X. Z. Brown”). We must honor every person’s contribution, and recognize that we as a community need to foster multiple forms of empowerment and strategies towards liberation (“Disability Justice Is the Art and The Practice of Honouring the Body: An Interview with Lydia X. Z. Brown”).
In order to truly value the lives of disabled people, we need to acknowledge the very real ways that certain bodies are labeled and treated as disabled. We need to reexamine what our capitalist system sees as “disposable” and recognize the epistemic knowledge stemming from those lived experiences of disabled people because as Ethnic Studies have proven time and time again, invaluable sources of knowledge come from inside the margins of the margins.
