10 Principles of Disability Justice (from Sins Invalid)
- INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”
- LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED “We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins Morales
- ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC In an economy that sees land and humans as components of profit, we are anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming body/minds.
- COMMITMENT TO CROSS-MOVEMENT ORGANIZING Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.
- RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
- SUSTAINABILITY We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.
- COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.
- INTERDEPENDENCE We meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.
- COLLECTIVE ACCESS As brown, black and queer-bodied disabled people we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity, to be in community with each other.
- COLLECTIVE LIBERATION No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require.
Against imperialism, colonialism, capitalism
Within the current genocide of Palestine and other mass atrocities, we witness how corporate and state actors responsible for their root causes – imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism – endorse the killing, disabling, and injuring of absolutely anyone for the sake of profit. If we, as conscious citizens mobilizing for the end of mass death, want to create a movement that brings an end to apartheid logic, then we must reject the notion that people are disposable. We must recognize how fighting against the oppression of Palestinians is connected to the global fight for disability justice.
Israel’s violent dispossession of Palestinian land and the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian people are not merely retaliatory, but the calculated method with which it intends to maintain imperial control. With the support of fellow settler colonial nations like the United States and Canada, Israel continues to kill, disable, and traumatize the entire population of Palestine. Even prior to the start of this genocide, disabled people in Palestine faced difficulties navigating everyday life. The beginning of the pandemic further exacerbated disabled peoples’ lack of access. They now face unimaginable horrors as they try to survive the unsafe and unsanitary conditions wrought by Israel’s destruction of Palestine.
Like fellow settler colonies such as the United States and Canada, Israel’s control and extraction of value from occupied territory relies on the elimination of the indigenous peoples of those lands, namely Palestinians. This logic of elimination is evidenced through Israel’s overt destruction of Palestinian land and life, but also their more subtle enactment of what has been termed “medical apartheid,” deliberate and segregated access to poorer healthcare resources. For example, Israel deliberately blocked access to COVID-19 vaccine distribution and denied their responsibility to provide Palestinians with vaccines, stating that “its own citizens must come first”. Palestinians experienced unequal access to healthcare before the COVID-19 pandemic or the beginning of this genocide, but both threats have greatly decreased or eliminated their ability to access care. Currently, COVID-19 and a cluster of other diseases pose a threat to Palestinians. The circulation of these diseases is a layered threat on top of the other physical injuries, psychological terror, and trauma that Israel continues to inflict upon them.
Israel, like other settler colonies, is driven by capitalism. The violence and control Israel exercises over Palestinian land and life is endorsed by other capitalist powers who are invested in Israel’s lucrative settler economy. Together, these globally-linked capitalist powers strengthen each other’s ability to destroy land and life anywhere in service of extracting resources and labour to produce capital and further concentrate the wealth of the 1%.
The global military-industrial complex, powering Israel’s imperial quest, is intimately tied to both the oppression of Palestinians and disabled people everywhere. Capitalist interests use militarized force to encroach upon resources, and then reinvest their capital in arms to ensure the continued protection of their extraction and production. We see this in the ways Canada, the United States, and Israel support each other. Canada and the United States export arms to Israel, and Israel uses those arms to kill and disable Palestinians. Israel has provided training to Canadian and American police forces, and Canadian and American police are deployed domestically to kill, disable, traumatize, and harass anyone deemed a threat to capitalist interests such as Palestinian or racial justice activists, or Indigenous land defenders.
Disability is an often neglected dimension of oppression. The majority of disabled people live in the Global South, where capitalist exploitation is concentrated. Structural racism, ableism, and other interlocking oppression in Canada and other nations within the imperial core result in higher rates of disability among marginalized people, who also face greater disparities in access to healthcare. In so-called Canada, conditions also continue to worsen for disabled people. Predating and alongside the grief of a pandemic that threatens those most vulnerable among us, the Canadian state has been transparent in its view of disabled people as disposable. Disabled people are offered paltry resources to live yet are offered “solutions” like MAID to end their lives. Throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic, disabled people have been disregarded. Additionally, the number of people disabled by COVID-19 continues to grow.
Pandemic truths
It is easy to see how we have been led to believe that COVID health and safety precautions are no longer necessary. Globally, there is denial imparted by public health departments that SARS-COV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19 infection, is mild, inconsequential, and easily avoidable if you “social distance” and wash your hands. Though we have been fortunate to access vaccinations against the virus, it has never disappeared. In fact, many public health bodies have overemphasized the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines in preventing transmission and protection against lasting symptoms such as Long COVID.
Contrary to their title, public health has not been protective of the public nor the public’s health in these past few years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Capitalist pressures to return to the status quo—for the sake of labour productivity and consumer spending—are behind the decisions of public health organizations to shrink COVID-19 precaution and prevention policies. The current denial of COVID-19’s true nature, as an airborne and vascular disease which results in cumulative and lasting damage, is part of a collective forgetting and denial of large-scale problems which threaten the power structures of society, much like settler colonialism and environmental destruction. The “return to normal” and the denial of COVID-19 further enshrines capitalism’s view of human life as structured around productivity and the exploitation of labour. In the capitalist paradigm, people are seen only for their contributions to the creation of capital. Therefore, public health has been stripped of its ability to hamper capitalism via healthcare spending, paid sick days, and upgrades to infrastructure. Instead of widespread structural COVID-19 safety precautions like employer or government-supplied PPE and diagnostic testing, clean air infrastructure, and easily-accessible treatments like Paxlovid, we are left with minimal tools to deal with the spread of a deadly disease.
Funding for what?
The spending priorities of the Canadian state are illustrative of their commitment to upholding and protecting capitalism. Why does Canada fund policing and military assets with unquestioned ease, yet abandon the public to navigate their own health expenditures? If Canada has billions for inserting special operative teams into Israel and unleashing dozens of paramilitary police crackdowns on pro-Palestine encampments across the country, then why can’t they fund paid sick leave, free masks and tests, and clean air infrastructure? Who benefits from all this death and disability? The truth is that Palestinian oppression and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic are linked by the same capitalist greed: that which is not beneficial to the production of capital is fit for elimination, whether it be Palestinian land and life standing in the way of Israel’s imperial project or those who are already disabled or become disabled by COVID-19 infection and are considered a burden to capitalist states.
We must advance a future that is free and accessible to all. When we isolate COVID-19 precautions like mask-wearing within spaces for protest or direct action, we render masking exceptional and those who continue to wear masks become threatened by intensified scrutiny. For example, North Carolina is in the process of banning the wearing of masks and other U.S. states are considering implementing such a law. These proposed legislations are direct results of the state’s desire to criminalize anti-Zionist and Palestinian liberation movements, as we know that American student protestors have been vigilant about mask-wearing. A ban on masks would allow the state to further neglect disabled, high-risk, and immunocompromised peoples’ access to spaces with clean air, as well as intensify their persecution of anyone wearing a mask they deem to be suspect—namely, Black and Brown folks who are already over-policed. In this way, we can recognize how mask-wearing, as an extension of disability justice, is thus an affirmation of community care and resistance against the state’s attempts to weaken and criminalize those most vulnerable.
Disability justice principles are key to building and advocating for the anti-oppressive future we want. Our abandonment of disabled and immunocompromised people gives legitimacy to the eugenicist logic of capitalist forces intent on extracting and destroying land and life everywhere for continued concentration of wealth. If we are building a movement that cares about people, we must fight in every way for the value of each life and do the best we can to care for them. We cannot abandon people to get sick. Disabled people are not disposable, despite what capitalism dictates. Disabled people are part of the movement and the future we want to build.
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