Wherever You Are Is Where I Want To Be: Crip Solidarity

I want to be with you.  If you can’t go, then I don’t want to go.  If we are traveling together, sharing political space together, building political family together, then I want to be with you.  I want us to be together.

We resist ableism dividing us.  I resist my disability being pitted against your disability.   We will not be divided.

What does crip solidarity look like?  Between crips?

We are traveling, trying to track down food.  My chair can’t go into this restaurant, your dog isn’t allowed in that restaurant; so we will order in.  You can’t fly to the meeting, so we will come to you—all of us.  They won’t let you go to the bathroom because they say you’re “too slow”, so we will demand they do—and make them wait for you—together.  Sometimes we are comrades, sometimes we are strangers, but we will stay together.  We move together.

I know what it is like to be left behind, left out, forgotten about.  I know you know as well.  We vow to not do that together, to each other.

I am not “giving-up” an evening out with able bodied friends.  This is a glorious evening in with crip love as opposed to a night out without you (and without parts of me).  Loving you more helps me to love me more.  Loving me means loving you.

Because the truth is, I am continually giving-up the able-bodied-washed version of myself that people have come to know.  What I came to know as a disabled child because I never knew things could be any other way.  For most of my life it has been easier to perform a survival able-bodied-friendly version of myself, rather than nurturing the harder to live disabled-self-loving version of who I ache, desire and need to be.  Because it has often meant the difference between a-little-bit-more-connection and a-little-less-isolation.  But what is the point of connection, if you still feel isolated and alienated from your self?  And what is that connection built upon and from?  How do I want to be connected?

And it is not easy.  But being together helps.

And when taxis won’t take us because of one of us, or both of us.  And I can’t use mass transit, but you can.  Then we will use our crip super community powers and do what we do best: make shit happen; make something out of nothing; and survive, one ride, one pill, one stop to rest at a time.  Together.

We will find other ways (create our own ways) and talk liberation and access and interdependency with our comrades.  We will weave need into our relationships like golden, shimmering glimmers of hope—opportunities to build deeper, more whole and practice what our world could look like.  We will practice what loving each other could look like every day.  Courageously.  And we will help each other to do it, in the face of seductive ableism; in the face of isolation as queer people of color, again; in the face of isolation from political community and movements, again.  We will help each other love each other and, in doing so, love ourselves.

Desiring Revolutionary Bodies and Movement(s)

I believe that disabled people have so much to give and so much to teach from our lived experiences.  We have so much that our movements can learn from.  We have so much to learn from each other, cross-disability.  I believe that disability justice can be something that shifts and changes how we have been taught to organize; how we have been taught to move.  There are many different ways of moving through the world.  And the more I learn, the more mistakes I make, the more victories I have, the more time I take to reflect, center and listen to myself and those around me, the more I keep coming back to disability justice.

For so long I have tried to (been forced to) squeeze myself into ableist ways of doing things.  The way I thought about activism and the revolutionary body was never with disability at the center.  And I was so hungry for things that reflected me, that I settled for crumbs: a little queer here, a little people of color here, a little Asian here, a little feminist here, a little woman of color there.  And part of it was that I wasn’t raised by disabled parents and family members and the community I was raised in, though disability was everywhere you looked, never talked about disability—and certainly not in a political way.  And I was so used to doing without and being separated from pieces of myself—being cut right down the middle; having to survive on crumbs as a transracial and transnational adoptee of color, that I didn’t ask.  I didn’t say what I knew inside:  something is wrong.

And I was seduced by ableism, as we all are, as I still fight against.  The seduction of ableism is so strong, sold to us as so absolutely desirable that we don’t notice when there are no disabled people in our lives.  We don’t notice when we never have to think about disability and ableism.  In fact, we prefer it that way.  The seduction of being desirable—of even the possibility of being desirable—is enough to keep us hooked.  As I fight against the ableism inside of me, it at once forces me to shift and queer what desire means.  It at once forces me to shift and queer what I desire.  It forces me to shift and queer racist, gendered and capitalist notions of desire; of who and what is desirable.

And as revolutionaries, I believe we have to shift and queer the kinds of revolutionary bodies, minds, thinking, and movements that we desire as well.

Most of us are beating down the door, trying to get in to have access to the skills, conversations, strategy and knowledge that is kept at the top/bottom of stairs, bound by language, locked by pace.  Most of us are aching for cross-movement work with an integrated anti-ableist analysis and commitment that includes (but doesn’t stop at) access; that understands access within a political framework.  Some of us have turned away completely—why should we fight to be a part of something that doesn’t even want us?  That doesn’t even include us?  That doesn’t even desire us—that doesn’t even know the first thing about how to desire us; about how we want to be desired?  Some of us will not or cannot turn away, because these are our people too, we are you and you are us—how can we be divided?  You are my people too, am I not yours?  So we have carved out ways that we can stay connected anyway we can, pushing for more; slowly and firmly.  And many of us have felt all of these at one time or another.  And all of us are doing our work: to survive, create, organize, fight, build community, build movement, and tell our stories.

Someday we will all look back at the segregation of our organizing and movements. How many cross-movement, social justice, multi-issue organizations, groups, collectives working for liberation would dare move forward with all men or with all whites?   Someday we will talk about the days long ago when non-disabled folks never included disabled people, politics, histories and legacies in their work.  Because it is our work, we are each other in so many ways.