What does a society which celebrates, rather than one that alienates, incarcerates and pathologizes disability look like? How do we break free from the chains of ableism and racism, and centre our politics around the idea that all bodies are special, and all bodies have their own specific needs that must be met? What does a non-hierarchical, universal accommodation system mean and what does it look like? Abolitionists and Columbia Law school students Pri and Reakash debunk, expose and examine the present systems of oppression and carceralisation, while working to imagine a system that works for the most marginalized and oppressed. They look for solutions in the social, political, and economics of disability and consider how the system constructs institutional structures that activate surveillance and alienation. These structures ultimately direct the person towards a carceral system.
Disability, much like race, is socially constructed. Under racial capitalism, when disability intersects with race, it only further compounds existing vulnerabilities of oppressions, marginalisations and criminalisations. In this podcast, Rae and Pri take a deep dive into the various ways of understanding disability and race in America where people with disabilities, particularly black people, people of colour, queer and trans folx are marginalized. The podcast traces the dyslexia to prison pipeline by interrogating the label of disability—how this label is formed and framed within the normal-abnormal, able-disabled, general-special dialectic of white supremacy, the racialised construction and manifestation of such labelling, and the systemic performance of these labels.
FEATURING
Ameer Baraka
Formerly Incarcerated Emmy nominated actor, Dyslexia Advocate
“In the penitentiaries, they make jeans, women lingerie, they make hats, they make shoes, they make stop-signs. 15% of our appliances are made in prisons. All our kitchen appliances are made in prison. And, who’s getting that money?! The people who invest in that prisons. Know what they paid me? After four years of labour in the prisons? I left with a cheque for 82 dollars. Four years worth of labour. So we need illiterate people. And they will not stop it. It will not stop. It’s called capitalism. And if you think you are important. You gotta be crazy… I know my place in this country. I have no place in this country.”
What are we willing to do knowing what we know. If we think about education and schooling…where black and brown folks are being educated…those schools do not have what those folks need. There’s a caveat in this. Because people think about those schools as dysfunctional schools. And I think we have to trouble that a little bit. Because those aren’t dysfunctional schools under white supremacy. Those are schools that were intended to do exactly what they are doing under white supremacy. So Abolition says, “What are we willing to do to refute that? And now we are placed at with the things that get students what they need. What are we constructing— by way of curriculum, by way of pedagogy, by way of classroom design that now allow students to actualise their world, what they need and the possibility of doing things different. Right! So Abolition says, “You must do things differently to create the capacity, to create something different.”
Dr. David Stovall
Professor, University of Illinois, Chicago
“Like Talia Lewis and Angela Davis have said, “the only way to systemically address these injustices, is to undo this oppressive foundation entirely”. I think care work, Abolitionist teaching and other disability justice practices can help us do that.“
-Reakash Walters
“It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?”
– Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha
IN
“In practice, the holistic nature of Black disability politics means that this political work can take a variety of forms, from patients’ rights advocacy and health-care reform protests to the creation of community-support systems and individual consciousness-raising and empowerment. Black disability politics provide a framework for understanding the wide variety of ways that systems of race and (dis)ability intersect in our world and the many avenues one might take to fight these oppressive systems.“
-Sami Schalk
In
WATCH FURTHER:
SUBINI ANNAMMA AT THE HAAS INSTITUTE– A Dis-Crit framework explores how mostly marginalised disabled students are both socially and spatially positions-the way they resist structural violence education in courses, and what they can teach education. Consequently, Dis-Crit is a tool for me to both examine and reconceptualize education’s contributions to both problematic and liberatory classroom spacesDID YOU KNOW….
INTERESTED TO EXPLORE FURTHER? WORRY NOT! WE GOT YOU COVERED…
What we speak of…
- C. Moody, et al, Prevalence of dyslexia among Texas prison inmates, Tex Med. 2000 Jun;96(6):69-75. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10876375/
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Craig Collinson, Dyslexia as ‘paradox’, 04 September 2023 https://nasenjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8578.12481
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Barbara Riddick, Dyslexia and inclusion: Time for a social model of disability perspective?, November 2001, International Studies in Sociology of Education 11(3), DOI:10.1080/09620210100200078
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Mathew Ward, Breaking The IEP-To-Prison Pipeline, December 2020, Teach Magazine. https://teachmag.com/archives/11979
- The 504 Protests and the Black Panther Party, December 19, 2021, Disability Social History Project, https://disabilityhistory.org/2021/12/19/the-504-protests-and-the-black-panther-party/
What we hint at…
- Ashley Roberts, The School to Prison Pipeline, The Dyslexia Initiative, October 2, 2020. https://www.thedyslexiainitiative.org/post/the-school-to-prison-pipeline
- American Civil Liberties Union, Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers, June 15, 2022. https://www.aclu.org/publications/captive-labor-exploitation-incarcerated-workers
- A Systemic Solution to Low Literacy Rates, Poor Instruction, Dyslexia and Social Ills with Debbie Meyer, A’Lelia Bundles Community Scholars Program Lecture, https://sps.columbia.edu/events/systemic-solution-low-literacy-rates-poor-instruction-dyslexia-and-social-ills-debbie-meyer
Why we continue to struggle: A past and present . Or shall we say, the apple does not fall far from the tree…
- Columbia land acknowledgment: https://universitylife.columbia.edu/NAC-on-Lenape
- Johanna Alonso, Columbia Suspends 2 Pro-Palestine Groups, Inside Higher Ed, November 10, 2023: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/free-speech/2023/11/10/columbia-suspends-two-pro-palestinian-groups
Thank you for engaging with our podcast
In love, rage and solidarity,
Reakash Walters, Nikita Agarwal, Priyanka Radhakrishnan
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