Until We Are Free by Rodney Diverlus

Author:Rodney Diverlus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2020-01-09T16:57:00+00:00

PART IV

Theorizing Blackness: Considerations through Time and Space

12

The Need to Root Disability Justice into Movements

Sarah Jama

As a child I was convinced that I was struggling to maintain my sanity.

My teachers varied significantly in their treatment of me, either treating me like a savant or like someone with zero ability to learn independently. At one point educators enrolled me into a class for children with autism, unsure of my ability to perform in mainstream classes. As I got older, people mistook my friends for helpers. I was seen as too angry when I spoke my mind and too disabled and without agency when I didn’t. It meant being fetishized for my Blackness and desexualized because of my disability. It meant never fitting into the Black communities around me; it meant being too visibly disabled, which made aunties and uncles uncomfortable. It meant never fitting into the disability communities around me because my Blackness made it harder for the white disabled people around me to ignore their role in the project of white supremacy. To some, being disabled meant the erasure of all privilege, full stop. Being Black and disabled meant going through the medical system believing, for years, that my tolerance for pain was higher than average, a sort of superpower, instead of what it really was: a tolerance for pain built through years of doctors denying my reality of living with cerebral palsy. It meant doctors attempting to convince me to redo surgeries for aesthetic purposes, enduring months of rehabilitation. While eating in public I have been prayed for by strangers, and by my age-mates on school grounds.

For a long time I believed I was struggling to stay rooted in reality because the ways people had chosen to interact with me varied so much that I would have to engage in a twisted game of role playing in order to get through the day. If I fell down in front of an able-bodied white man, as I often did while learning to balance my movements as my height changed, I learned it was easier to let them try to help me than to get up on my own—not because I needed it, but because to try and deny this help would be perceived as violence or ungratefulness, leaving me in a more vulnerable position. I learned that asking more questions and allowing teachers to feel like they were walking me through a gateway of understanding would make them feel accomplished and they would grade my tests higher. I began to see this as a sort of code-switching,1 a necessary survival tool, and carried these skills with me into post-secondary education. It required an erasure of the self on a daily basis that I really didn’t learn to undo until my introduction to organizing.

My organizing started off with a group called the Young Communist League (YCL) in Hamilton, Ontario. It was run primarily by students at McMaster University; in its formative years its members were mostly white, and during my time there, mostly people without disabilities.

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