A Conversation on Disability Justice and Intersectionality

Disability Justice as a concept and an activist practice was developed in 2005 by the Disability Justice Collective, a group that included disabled queers of color in the San Francisco Bay Area, Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern, along with the founder of Krip-Hop Nation, Leroy F. Moore, Jr., and disabled trans activists Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret (Kafai, 2021). Conscious of how the mainstream Disability Rights Movement and its academic arm, Disability Studies, had effectively erased the life experiences of poor, queer, trans, disabled communities of color, and instead centered the experiences of white disabled activists and scholars, the Disability Justice Collective was formed to counter this erasure. In her 2021 book, Crip Kinship, Shayda Kafai (2021) describes Disability Justice as “a movement building framework… [that] not only responds to gaps in the mainstream Disability Rights Movement but also offers principles framed in wholeness and persistence… to formulate strategies of survival for all our disabled queer of color bodyminds” (pp. 22–23). In 2015, Patti Berne, a co-founder of Sins Invalid, a grassroots arts activist organization, worked with disabled, queer, trans of colour communities, and fellow artist-activists to establish a written record of the key principles of disability justice that were published first in a blog post ( www.sinsinvalid.org ), and later in a manual entitled, Skin, Tooth, Bone: The Basis of the Movement (2019). The ten key principles of Disability Justice include: (i) a commitment to intersectional frameworks; (ii) relying on the leadership of those most impacted by disability justice; (iii) adhering to an anti-capitalist politic; (iv) a dedication to cross-movement organization; (v) and cross-disability solidarity; (vi) recognizing that each person is full of history and experience and has worth outside of the commodification of capitalist relationships; (vii) working towards the sustainability of on-going justice and liberation; (viii) meeting each other’s individual and collective needs via interdependence; (ix) a dedication to collective access for brown, Black, and queer-bodied disabled people to be in community with each other; (x) and a commitment to collective liberation with no body/mind left behind (Skin, Tooth, Bones, 2019).