Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan

Author:Shira Hassan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Disability Justice and Harm Reduction

As syringe exchange activists in the mid-1980s built on the existing “survivor centered” frameworks that were co-evolving in the antiviolence movement, they also built on existing ideas of Disability Justice.

According to the second edition of the Disability Justice primer, Skin, Tooth, and Bone, published by Sins Invalid in 2020:

In 2005, disabled queers and activists of color began discussing a “second wave” of disability rights. Many of these first conversations happened between Patty Berne and Mia Mingus, two queer disabled women of color who were incubated in progressive and radical movements which had failed to address ableism in their politics. Their visioning soon expanded to include others including Leroy Moore, Stacey Park Milbern, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret. These conversations evolved over time, at conferences, over the phone, formal and informal, one-on-one and in groups. While every conversation is built on those that came before it, and it’s possible that there were others who were thinking and talking this way, it is our historical memory that these were the conversations that launched the framework we call disability justice. This group named and made clear that “ableism helps make racism, Christian supremacy, sexism, and queer- and transphobia possible” and that all those systems of oppression are intertwined.

•  All bodies are unique and essential.

•  All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.

•  We are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.

•  All bodies are confined by ability, race, gender, sexuality, class, nation state, religion, and more, and we cannot separate them.

Disability justice activists, organizers, and cultural workers understand that able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to other systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, created in the context of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of Indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy uses ableism to create a lesser/“other” group of people that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable. A single-issue civil rights framework is not enough to explain the full extent of ableism and how it operates in society. We can only truly understand ableism by tracing its connections to cis-hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. The same oppressive systems that inflicted violence upon Black and brown communities for five hundred-plus years also inflicted five hundred-plus years of violence on bodies and minds deemed outside the norm and therefore “dangerous.”

As anti-police and prison abolitionists, many members of the Disability Justice Collective were also present for harm reduction conversations and organization building during the late ’80s and early ’90s. Just as it is not accidental that harm reduction is a space safe for sex workers (because we were there to bring it to fruition), harm reduction must also be grounded in anti-ableism because it is essential to understanding how able-bodied and able-minded supremacy drives the stigmatization and criminalization of so many survivors’ experiences.

I was first diagnosed with a chronic illness—endometriosis—when I was sixteen. By

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