3 myths about disability justice that keep us from making life so much better for everyone

I stumbled onto disability justice partly out of necessity and partly out of luck. I was born with a complex type of spina bifida that left me partially paralyzed from my lower back down. But it wasn't until I became a student activist that I encountered the disability justice framework. During an awareness campaign around disability and sexuality, I found myself for the first time in a space where I felt acceptance as a physically disabled and racialized queer person. 

Disability Justice (DJ), a term coined in 2005 by disabled activists of colour, takes a radical approach to liberation for disabled people that's distinct from that of the mainstream disability rights movement. The DJ framework aims to transform society by centring those oppressed on multiple fronts and empowering them to lead the change — significant since disabled people who are also queer, racialized or otherwise marginalized have been the most excluded from the process to now.

But one challenge it faces, even from those same people who support the goals in theory, is resistance and even dismissal on a practical level — in other words, when it comes to working toward actual change. 

For that reason, we look at three myths about DJ in order to dispel them.

Myth: I'm not disabled — this doesn't really affect me 

Embedded in DJ's foundation is the goal of "collective liberation," which seeks justice for all of us, disabled or not.

"I think non-disabled folks forget that they benefit from DJ's anti-capitalist politics and its insistence on asking for our needs to be met without shame," said Shayda Kafai, an assistant professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and author of Crip Kinship. "When DJ says that they want to move forward without any body/mind left behind, they mean everyone." 

To see how revolutionary this is, you only need to consider how ableism affects us across the board. Many of us experience intergenerational trauma from colonialism, slavery and indentured labour, which valued our ancestors only as objects of productivity. Others may not recognize their own chronic pain as a disability while being penalized for it all the same. Still others may fear that if they're honest about their disabilities, they'll be labelled productively worthless. Transgender, Black and poor people, for example, are more likely to report having a disability and to be diagnosed incorrectly or not at all. With so many affected by ableism, so many stand to gain from DJ.

Of course, some of us are more impacted by these systems than others, which is why they are upheld as leaders in the DJ movement. "We are led by those who most know these systems," said writer and artist Aurora Levins Morales, who's credited with helping conceptualize the DJ framework. Multiply marginalized people are uniquely impacted by these systems and need to both lead the work and be credited for it. "I have also heard … white academics talking about disability justice principles without acknowledging the lineage of disabled folks of colour who were integral to the creation of the movement-building framework," said Kafai. She called it an "appropriation of disability justice." 

Ultimately, this is collective work for the collective good. "We have to model our crip networks after the billions of fungi," wrote Patty Berne, co-founder of Sins Invalid, a performance collective led by disabled people of colour, in Kafai's book. "The mycelium network has the ability to communicate and support each other beyond what we [as humans] have demonstrated so far; I think we can strive for that."

Myth: DJ requires too much work, and we'll never get it right anyway

Trying to achieve societal change is overwhelming and can feel impossible. Many people throw themselves into learning about the DJ movement and burn out before they've even started the real — lifelong and ever-changing — work. 

However, making a meaningful and sustained impact can start very simply. For instance, you can make space for someone to communicate their needs and limits or you can accept when you've made a mistake and take the time to understand where you went wrong.

"Revolution is not a moment. It is a practice. It is a culture of making mistakes, of transforming harm, of celebrating joy," said community organizer Sammie Ablaza Wills in Crip Kinship.

Aside from being daunting, perfection could be seen as antithetical to DJ since it reinforces the ableist message that we're only as good as how well we do something.

Myth: DJ is all about looking for the worst in the world. It's too heavy to think about every day

It's true that disability justice means facing injustices where they occur, and they are dark and heavy. The consequences of ableism — especially for those whose disabilities intersect with other identities such as race, gender or class — can be deadly. Equitable health care is not a given in our society, something that became more apparent with the onset of COVID, when discriminatory triage protocols and care put disabled people at greater risk of death. Even our standard of living, to say nothing of our pleasure, is constantly deprioritized because accommodating us is seen as inconvenient or complicated. According to Statistics Canada, disabled people are more likely to live in poverty and to not have their medical needs met due to cost.  

But this heavy reality is all the more reason the DJ community centres pleasure and love. DJ wants us to experience fun and joy and all forms of pleasure, but that isn't possible when our basic needs aren't met. 

"Care isn't always orgasmically pleasurable: people need to be able to get what we need and go to the bathroom whether or not it feels like a dance party," Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote in an essay in adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. We, as disabled people, may feel we have to choose between advocating for our needs and seeming less burdensome and more "fun." Once our society is designed to provide those basic needs to all, we'll be able to focus on happier things.

DJ helps us imagine a better future for everyone and is essential to making it possible. As Kafai puts it, "If we are to survive resiliently and truly in collectivity, especially in our current time of climate crisis, we need disability justice."