A Black political, academic, community thinker who pushes back in and outside of academic spaces on an international scale to correct well known Germans economic theorists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and continue to change the thinking about the contributions of Black people with his theory, the Black Radical Tradition, that many Black groups have lean and built on in the twentieth century, Cedric J. Robinson’s (1940-2016) work has changed how institutions of learning to Black scholars, artists and recent Black movements approach, teach and carry on Black radical history. Knowing that in short, Cedric Robinson’s research, travels, activism and challenging academia to write The Making of The Black Radical Tradition (1983) was about all Black rebellions, radical art and movements globally from back in history to today that was the platform of the creation of the Black Radical Tradition. Moore continues with his lifelong work that was the theme of his 2024 masters’ thesis entitled, Krip-Hop Nation: Community-Based Education at the Intersection of Blackness & Disability (Moore, 2024) to build on Robinson’s work by bringing the Black Radical Tradition into the Black disabled experience, what Moore calls Black Kripping like Black queers who had and continues queering the Black Radical Tradition.

 

Like Robinson corrected Karl Marx on his thoughts of Black radical history, this essay will also show that Marx also had negative attitudes towards people with disabilities thus leaving disabled people out of his theories and why many people of color pushed White disabled theorists from the social model of disability to create Disability Justice, which disabled theorist A.J. Withers wrote about the radical model of disability (A.J. Withers. 2021).

 

Moore ends by restating and explain his main thesis and that is by Black kripping Black theory, Black history, Black arts, Black music, Black culture and Black politics, it will bring Black disability into a Black political, cultural, historical and radical viewpoint that needs more research and drastically can change on how the Black community can live openly and actively with their Black disabled ancestors who some were mentioned in Robinson’s writings, Black disabled movements to everyday Black disabled people.

 

Cedric Robinson clearly left his studies and theories like the Black Radical Tradition open to be incorporated into future and diverse Black people and Black recent movements like Black Lives Matters, Black women and Black gays, lesbians, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and intersex (GLBTQI), so it makes sense that Black disabled scholars like Moore will put a disabled spin aka Black Kripping on the theories/writings of Cedric Robinson especially his Black Radical Tradition.

   

While vast reserves of labor were amassed in the Poor Houses and slums of Europe’s cities and manufacturing towns and villages, in the African hinterland some semblance of traditional life continued to reproduce itself, sharing its social product human beings with the Atlantic slave system. For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the re-creation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively recreate a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, (Robinson p.309 1983).

 

Before Black middle class scholars who had a chance to go to universities like W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Eric Williams who all brought so much to the Black Radical Tradition but it didn’t start there.  As we know Robinson tells us that slave revolts like Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner are a part of the Black Radical Tradition.  Robinson also said that Black Radical Tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and reformed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embed- ded in culture. It gave them cause to question the authority of a radical intelligentsia drawn by its own analyses from marginal and ambiguous social strata to construct an adequate manifestation of proletarian power. And it drew them more and more toward the actual discourse of revolutionary masses, the impulse to make history on their own terms. And finally, the Black radical tradition forced them to reevaluate the nature and historical roles of ideology and consciousness (Robinson p.170 1983).

 

The Making of The Black Radical Tradition 

Robinson’s push to write Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition thus forming of the Black Radical Tradition came when he was eventually suspended by the administration for six-months from UCB because of his involvement in anti-racist and anti-imperialist political organizing, numerous struggles on campus. In this six month suspension, Robinson travels according to Myers: …Robinson again learned and lived Black Study. This would result in a sensibility that maintained a particular connection with the ideas and with the memory of a people that inculcated an approach to understanding Africa and Africans that never left his consciousness. Southern Africa remained with him for the rest of his life. The lessons learned there resonated and informed ways for thinking of a liberatory, anticolonial future (Myers p. 149 2023).

 

Robinson main pushback on Karl Marx is explained by Robin Kelley who wrote the foreword of the third edition of Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (1983) explain as follows:

Cedric takes Marx and Engels to task for underestimating the material force of racial ideology on proletarian consciousness, and for conflating the English working class with the workers of the world… Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force (Robinson p.xvii 1983).

Linking Robinson’s Pushback on Karl Marx to Disabled Theorist’s Pushback: Creation of The Social Model of Disability To The Radical

 

Just like Robinson challenges Karl Marx’s lack of mention and research of countries outside Europe, thus not thinking that Africans didn’t have anything to contribute towards political and radical history and theory. Disabled academic scholars like Staffan Bengtsson, Nichola Brown, Laura Jaffee and many more have built up Marxism and Disability Studies and wrote on Karl Marx’s writings towards the body and people with disabilities. Staffan Bengtsson wrote in his 2017 article, Out of the frame: disability and the body in the writings of Karl Marx.

 

As noted by Marx, the ideal man was not just a passive observant in the world, but someone who responded to the world by interpreting it and then using his or her capacity in a certain direction. In other words, the true essence of man was constituted by a process that intertwined cognitive factors with the physical, in which a mental image was materialized. The ideal man therefore stood in relation to labor… To a high extent, Marx seems to exclude people with disabilities from the regular working class. Thereby, he also excluded them from the forces of social change, since the class struggle, in Marx’s thinking, was the struggle over the means of production, and the utilization of surplus value. Since they belonged to a residual category, they were also less likely to experience the kind of class consciousness that Marx saw as a precondition for social action. (Bengtsson p.134 & p.158 2017).

 

So like Marx’s lack of attention to the radical history of Black people outside of Europe, the disabled body and mind in Marx’s writings was seen as unable to work under the fast expansion of industrialization of the economy so because of that viewpoint people with disabilities were not power players in Marx’s theory. Like Cedric J. Robinson has done more than pushback, disabled academics like Mike Oliver (1945-2019), a White British disability theorist who popularized the social model of disability that replaced the oppressive medical model that came from people outside of the disabled community who had authority to implement the outcome of the medical model which was to try to erase disability from society. Mike Oliver in his 2013 article entitled, The social model of disability: thirty years on that appeared in Disability & Society Journal simply defines the social model of disability as follows:

The idea behind the social model of disability stemmed from the Fundamental Principles of Disability document first published in the mid-1970s (UPIAS 1976), which argued that we were not disabled by our impairments but by the disabling barriers we faced in society (Oliver p.1024 2013).

 

Although the social model of disability has been uplifted as the godsent for people with disabilities, later in this essay Moore will return to what Black and Brown people with disabilities thought about the social model of disability and tie it to Cedric Robinson’s work to the creation of the radical model of disability.

 

According to Kelley, Robinson describes the Black Radical Tradition:

“As a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people” (Robinson. p. 169 1983).

This means like Robinson told us discovering that Black existance in not always what the west has define people, struggles that Black people have their own history, music, resistance and theories that goes against what we are taught but it’s up to us to find and spotlight this Black experience in the face of well known expertise like he did with Marxs and going against institutions like he constantly did inside of academia from his early days at University of California at Berkeley to his dissertation and so on. 

The Opening of Cedric Robinson’s Writings To Expand on Disability

To come back to how Cedric Robinson left his writings to be open to future readers in his book, Black Movements In America (1997) like when he mentioned slaves rebellions and other Black resistance to lynching to early Black theaters to Black activists going back to early slave revolts like Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) who was beaten on the head from her so called owner so bad that it cause her to have seizures that actually helped to bring many Black people to freedom and opened a home for sick and elderly free Black people to Elias Hill (1819-1872), who was born with his physical disability and took the KKK to court in 1871 and led Black people after the court case to Liberia, Africa. 

 

In both cases and more the reader would have had to read disabled scholars, mainly White to know that a lot of Black people, Black resistance to early Black entertainment/plays all had a disability component to it.   Yes, these people were part of the Black radical tradition however what changes if we, Black disabled scholars, take what Robinson gave us and build on it with Black disabled politics, studies  and a disability justice lens to it?  For  example Moore had a wonderful chance to interview Rev. Sam McGregor and Patricia to talk about the grave of Rev. Elias Hill in the backyard of the church that led them to uncover Elias’ history and his leadership.  Black disabled scholars, researchers and artists must continue to reveal these Black disabled radical stories/histories.

In chapter one of Black Movements in America entitled The Coming to America and in chapter two, Slavery and the Constitution Robinson wrote, “some slave rebels didn’t wait for their arrival to express their rage…” (Robinson p.10 1997).

 

Because recent disability researchers and Hip-Hop scholars and artists like KRS One, and Hip-Hop scholars like Elijah Wald in his book, Talking ’bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap (2014) wrote and spoke about the origin of the Dozens we know today that the Dozens were disabled Africans and were separated from their non-disabled family members on slaves boats and came up with some type of telling oral stories to pass the time, then the White settlers looked at it as entertainment so many were forced to entertain them, as we know today the Dozens gave us battle rap.  This too can be looked at as Black rebellion but it is  up to Black disabled scholars to continue to push Black studies, Black scholars to view the disability components of these histories as political, radical and historical aka to face their Black ableism to continue to what Moore sees as once again kripping the Black radical tradition. 

 

These kinds of stories are all throughout Robinson’s book, Black Movements in America (1997) from names like Fannie Lou Hamer who had polio beaten by police that cause her walk with a limp to the lynching of a Black disabled young boy, Jessie Washington all the way up to Black artistic expression like the play Porgy & Bess where as we know Porgy has a physical disability.  To see the these cases as being apart of the Black Radical Tradition, there needs to be for Black disabled people, what Myers writes in Of Black Study in chapter, Of  Order-Cedric Robinson:

the Black radical tradition had at its foundation a desire for recreation, rebuilding, and preservation (Myers p.145 2023)

 

Knowing that Black disabled people are viewed as almost like the pro-slavery apologists wrote about Africans aka not contributing nothing in 1856.  That’s why Moore believes that Black disabled people must bring Robinson’s work into the Black disabled experience by recreating and rebuilding. 

 

Let’s imagine a Black disabled scholar going back to Robinson’s Book, Black Movements in America with Moore’s Black disabled archives, interviews and books like Black Disability Art History 101 or Black Disabled Ancestors now that scholar will write from a Black disability political viewpoint aka bringing Robinson into the Black disabled radical history and present, he or she is now recreating and rebuilding.                   

 

Toward the end of the book, Robinson talked about the Black Panther Party as a part of the Black Radical Tradition so this is a good time to try to continue to tie Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition to Black disabled issues from theories like medical to social all the way up to radical models of disability. Also looking Black disabled academic scholars, like Sami Schalk who wrote the book, Black Disability Politics (2022), that talked about the Black Panther Party involvement in the 1970’s Bay area’s disability rights movement also looking at Black and people of color disabled political thinkers/activists of today like Talila A. Lewis, Lateef McLeod & Mia Mingus and others who wrote a chapter entitled,“Radical Disability Politics” for Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics (Brown, Erickson, Gorman, Lewis, McLeod & Mingus 2019).    

 

The work of Black disabled theorists, activists artists and their writings, studies, art and books are increasing today however the work of changing minds toward disability especially in Black radical spaces will take time to erase decades of ableism that has been forced on them in slavery according to Moore jr. & Kitossa in their chapter entitled, A Krip-Hop Theory of Disabled Black Men Challenging the Disabling of Black America, Resisting Killing and Erasure Through the Arts and Self-Empowerment in the 2021 book, Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism explains how disability was seen in slavery as  follows: A most cogent statement of the “normalization” of Black disability can be read in Theodore Dwight Weld’s (1839) American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. One of the principal architects of the American slavery abolitionist movement during its formative years from 1830 through 1844, Weld is best known for drawing attention to the strategies of euthanasia and eugenics inherent to the capital-intensiveness of chattel slavery. In his anti slavery time, Theodore Dwight Weld dryly writes that in respect to large classes of slaves, it is for the interest of their masters to treat them with barbarous inhumanity.

Old slaves. It would be for the interest of masters to shorten their days. 

The incurably diseased maimed. In such cases it would be cheaper for masters to buy poison than medicine. 

 

The blind, lunatics, and idiots. All such would be a tax on him, it would be for his interest to shorten their days. 

 

The deaf and dumb and persons greatly deformed. Such might or might not be serviceable to him; many of them would at least be a burden, and few men carry burdens when they can throw them off. 

 

Feeble infants. As such would require much nursing, the time, trouble and expense necessary to raise them would generally be more than they would be worth as working animals… 

 

Incorrigible slaves…It is for the interest of the masters…to put upon such slaves iron collars and chains, to brand and crop them; to disfigure, lacerate, starve and torture them—in a word, to inflict upon them such vengeance as shall strike terror into the other slaves… (Moore. & Kitossa p. 195, 2021)

 

Lastly, highlighting today’s work of Black disabled authors, organizers, academic scholars building what Moore calls the process to get to Building Black Krip Radical Tradition dealing with Black ableism that have helped to close the doors of many Black disabled movements in the US and some internationally. Moore explain why Black disabled people needs to Black krip a space what he calls In Stages: Reaching Up To Black Krip Radicalization follows:

 

Stage one: As a Black disabled person, we must see ourselves but you ask how? It can start as little as seeing others who are Black, disabled doing stuff in the community, online or seeing or reading or hearing a Black disabled person,this can lead to Black disabled self empowerment. This process must continue so it can erase internal ableism to be replaced with an eagerness to learn more and in the process you start to see that it is people’s ableism that kept you in an unachievable and lonely path of trying to overcome disability and you realize that you must become an advocate and educator.

 

Stage two: Black Kripping for me means when we enter a spaces that left us out or have oppressed Black disabled’s accomplishments, history, music, arts, politics in the Black community, history and movements, so when we must first take inventory of the Black ableism in that space then come with our Black Krip politics etc with others knowing that we have been wounded by our own and we must be prepared knowing it will take time to first get our Black community to recognize their Black ableism and why they need to change. Black Krippling is action knowing that we were always there so we are putting into the Black disabled experience with our own Black disabled expression, politics and more. We must know that this process is ongoing and must go deeper than a hashtag. Black spaces can be movements, cultural expression industries like Black music, arts like what Krip-Hop is doing in Hip-Hop and the work of JADE BRYAN,S company, Deaf Talent in the movie industry etc. etc.

 

Stage three: During and After Black Kripping then we will continue to politicize our Black community, Black history, culture, art, music with Black disabled culture, politics, terminology, activism aka Black disabled empowerment aka living out loud and proud and putting ourselves, our politics, art, music and theories into Black politics, movements, history and future. We are going from oppression to erasure to self pity to self empowerment to seeing disability as a political, cultural, historical, international identity and movement.

 

Stage four: To reach the stage of Black Krip Radicalization the person or group is way beyond awareness and self pride, they are politicalize and view that others and society must question what mainstream feeds us thus is not satisfied with inclusion but needs liberation and revolution. We also lean on our Black disabled ancestors who gave us paths to liberation. Also at this stage we are creating new theories, terminology, art, music for not only for ourselves but for generations to come. Don’t get me wrong, at this stage we will use all tools to stay solid and to bring others into Black Krip Radicalization.

 

Throughout the stages: While building to Black Krip Radicalization, we must continue to build Black Krip (Disability) Culture knowing that this is an ongoing process to add to!. (Moore 2023)

 

Once again to give encouragement to Black disabled activists, scholars and artists by looking at Black activists and scholars who are a part of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex, LGBTQI community have been leading the way on how they have been putting their spin aka queering the Black Radical Tradition with books, Ph.D. students’ studies and events, and articles like the followings: Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers (2018).Ph.D. students like Dominique Hazzardin at Johns Hopkins University, who wrote, Queering Black History (2018).

Getting professors like Matt Richardson who was a keynote speaker at a October 23, 2018 event entitled, Talk: Queering The Black Radical Tradition at UC Santa Barbara.

 

We also have Black women who are leaning on, expanding and correcting all together regarding The Black Radical Tradition like Ula Y. Taylor’s 2009 article entitled, Read[ing] men and nations”: Women in the black radical tradition and H. L. T. Quan who was a student of Cedric J. Robinson, her 2005 article entitled, Geniuses of resistance: feminist consciousness and the Black radical tradition in the Institute of Race Relations.Making Black Lives Matter: Tracing the Role of Women in the Black Radical Tradition. This public discussion happened at the Museum of the City of New York on Tuesday, May 16, 2017.

 

One pushback on Cederic J. Robinson’s writing of his book, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition on gender issue was Ula Y. Taylor’s 1999 article entitled, ”Read[ing]) Men and Nations” Women in the Black Radical Tradition” where she writes the following: Too often when we celebrate black radical historical traditions we evoke the same major thinkers and activists, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Samori Marksman, and Jarvis Tyner. And though no thinking person would dispute the influential work of these men and their importance in shaping the historical trajectory, seldom do we include women in this established order. This can be frustrating for those of us who are aware of the lifelong activism and intellectual contributions of women like Sojourner Truth, Charlotta Bass, Queen Mother Moore, Frances Beal, and Charlene Mitchell (Taylor p.72 1999).

 

Many Black women like Carole Boyce Davies in her 2016 essay entitled, A Black Left Feminist View on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism pointed out although in the last chapter entitled, An Ending, mention a new generation includes Angela Davis but only in a list.

 

To say the above, it’s time for the disabled community, especially Black disabled activists, Black disabled artists, Black disabled scholars and Black disabled writers to start or continue to explore the radical side of disability and how they can build on, use and deepen the Black Radical Tradition. Beyond the goals here, one of the first steps is more recognition of new writings telling radical disability theory like mentioned before the chapter, Radical Disability Politics that a recent Ph.D. Black disabled graduate, Lateef McLeod in anthropology who argues in the chapter the need for the Black community to really be open to the radical model of disability and Disability Justice work on to eliminate what Moore calls Black ableism. 

 

According to disability theorist, A.J. Withers in their 2021 book, Disability Politics and Theory talks about the radical model of disability:

The radical model defines disability as a social construction used as an oppressive tool to penalize and stigmatize those of us who deviate from the (arbitrary) norm. Disabled people are not problems; we are diverse and offer important understandings of the world that should be celebrated rather than marginalized.

 

There are four key concepts in the radical model. Firstly, disability is not separate from other forms of oppression; rather, it is interlocked with and overlaps them. Secondly, what is considered normal is arbitrary and requires deconstruction. Up until this point, all of the models of disability have failed to challenge the supremacy of the norm. Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price (1998: 236) have written, “A more radical politics of disability, then, would disrupt the norms of dis/abled identity… by exposing the failure of those norms to ever fully and finally contain a definitive standard.” Thirdly the disability label is used to marginalize specific types of people in order to obtain and maintain power; the classification of disabled is a political determination, not a biological one. Disability is not about whether or not something is “wrong” with someone; it is about the classification of disability, which allows certain people to be marginalized and other people to both benefit from that marginalization and justify it, because the rest of us are inferior. Lastly, accessibility cannot be addressed universally; rather it must be approached holistically.(Withers,  p.98 & 99  2012).

 

Intersectionality

A foundational component of the radical model is the idea of intersectional­ity: addressing multiple oppressions together and in conjunction with each other. The word “radical” is derived from the Latin, meaning “having roots? A conceptualization of disability that did not include, at its base, the acknowledgment of and engagement with the interlocutory nature of oppressions could not be a radical model…Within disability theory, intersectionality is often ignored. For instance, disability studies have been called “white disability studies (Bell 2010: 374),(Withers,  p.99  2012).

 

Wonder if the authors of the chapter, Radical Disability Politics can meet Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, the authors of the 2017 book, “The Futures of Black Radicalism” after a talk on Black ableism to help open the term, Black radicalism, to Black disabled people that Robinson wrote about in the book, Black Movements In America but without mentioned their disabilities, that kind of meeting could open up new questions like how did Harriet Tubman used her disability as a strength to free Black slaves and so many more writings of Black disabled radicalism. 

According to Moore, he defines Black Ableism and what is happening if it goes on being unchallenged as follows: Discrimination and social prejudice against Black people with disabilities or who are perceived to have disabilities from Black non-disabled people as far back as slavery. Unchallenged Black ableism not only holds the Black community from advancing the project of justice for all its members, but it also makes the Black community hurtful and irrelevant for the Black disabled people and their families. Black Ableism can cause many deep-rooted problems in a Black disabled person. The problems are as broad as low self-esteem, to trying to reach the unreachable, also known as overcoming or hiding their disability, to most importantly, not having a community. Ableism, like racism, manifests from individual to institutional, where it corrupts Black institutions (Moore, 2024).

 

Once again just like Robinson who not only corrected Marx but wrote into existence Black radical history, as of the 1990’s to today Black disabled activists, scholars and artists have formed movements, wrote books, art and pushing back on the social model of disability like the groundbreaking UK book, Reflections: Views of Black Disabled People on their Lives and Community Care (1994) by Begum, Nasa, Hill Mildrette and Stevens, Andy who pushed back on the social model of disability by writing that the social model of disability didn’t talk about race and racism in the UK disability rights movement who had a strong self-identity as not only Black people but also as Black disabled people.  However the roadblock to completely Black krip the Black Radical Tradition is what Moore wrote early in this essay, Black ableism.  Once more and more Black disabled scholars, activists and artists return home (offline) in masses to the Black community with support and funding knowing that their open wounds of Black ableism will hurt at first but in the long run Black disability radical politics and Black disability culture will go to the roots to water thus growing what Moore calls, Black Krip Radicalization.

 

To see disability as a movement with international stories is once again following the teachings of Robinson and his Black Radical Tradition knowing that Black disabled people have movements, radical histories and more that needs to be written and included in books, curriculums, arts and so on.

 

Black disabled academic scholars also pushed back on disability studies by writing academic articles within the academy like the late Christopher Bell who wrote the essay, Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal that was first published in The Disability Studies Reader (Bell 1997) that shook Disability Studies and helped a new wave of academic writing on Black disability issues including Moore’s graduate studies. Beyond the late Christopher Bell, Black disabled activists have been pushing back on Disability Studies in many ways. In June 2013 a group of Black disabled activists and parents took over the annual meeting of Society for Disability Studies (SDS) at San Francisco State University, (SFSU) that led to a tour on college campuses to promote the National Black Disability Coalition’s Black Disability Curriculum and more Black disabled activists in the community offering Black disability workshops and more awareness from non-disabled Black social media spaces to have more Black disabled presentations, panels during Black History Month.  This kind of pushback can and is happening outside of academia for examples Krip-Hop Nation’s Disabled Africans Musicians Summer Bay Area Festival in July of 2019 in Berkeley, CA, and The BIPOC Disability Justice Summit: Our Presence is Our Power of 2023 held by The National Alliance of Melanin Disabled Advocates (NAMED Advocates), Keri Gray  to name a few.

 

What Black Disability Studies Can Offer Further: Understanding of the Scope of the Black Radical Tradition

 

A lot of concepts that Black scholars like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney and Cedric Robinson have wrote to explain not only the need to continue the Black Radical Tradition but also the limitation of university learning fits well into disability and disability studies from Robinson’s notion of the Break to his concept of Principle Of Incompleteness to Order to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney are all questioning on how humans do things from just being human. Once again back to the notion of a break and the power of the university comes up, this time by Sylvia Wynter has consistently argued in chapter two, Of Human Sylvia Wynter in Joshua Myers book, Of Black Study as follows: This break, she consistently argued, can only come from a liminal space, a beyond space, a marginal space. It is not about becoming a part of the canon, of being human in terms they recognize. Liberation will not come from within the house. The house is implicated  (Myers. p.98 2023).

 

To learn from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013), Black disabled people can be a part of their Undercommons where Black disabled people’s brokenness can be seen as positive and something to hold. On page six, the authors make it clear about Black people’s brokenness that Black disabled can also follow: If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls (Moten and Harney p.6 2013).

 

Disability studies can benefit from the book, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Another concept that could be useful if applied to Black disabled people and disability studies is a term that kept on appearing in the readings and from Amiri Baraka, Robin D. G. Kelley, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney and Cedric Robinson all wrote about Blues Time. Robin D.G. Kelley wrote in the forward about Blues Time as follows: Only the promise of liberation” captures the essence of Black revolt and introduces a completely different temporality: blues time. Blues time eschews any reassurance that the path to liberation is preordained. Blues time is flexible and improvisatory; it is simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. Blues time resembles what the anarchist theorist Uri Gordon calls a “generative temporality.” A “generative” temporality treats the future itself as indeterminate and full of contingencies. By thinking of the Black Radical Tradition as generative rather than prefigurative, not only is the future uncertain, but the road is constantly changing, along with new social relations requiring new visions and ex- posing new contradictions and challenges. (Robinson 1983 p. xxviii).

 

Disability studies can add to the above knowing that many Black Blues artists had disabilities to Crip Time where Alison Kafer, a White disabled academic scholar says.

 

”Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds” (Kafer 2013).

 

Once again Moore has Black Kripping aka bringing Black disabled experience in the notion of time knowing that not only Kafer have crip it in her White disabled experience and also knowing the popular phrase Colored Peoples’ Time, CP Time, according Bilal G. Morris of a  Black news outlet, NewsOne:  CP Time is an American stereotype that refers to Black people frequently being late. It derives from slavery and the Antebellum South. White slave owners often used physiological warfare against their slaves calling them lazy and unreliable. The expression stuck and was eventually commonly used in Black culture spaces, sometimes even to describe one’s self (Morris 2023)

 

So Moore builds on CP Time and Kafer’s Crip Time by putting a Black disabled historical spin to it in his poem song, It’s Black Krip Time (Moore 2023). Although the importance of music such as Blues is constantly mention as part of the Black Radical Tradition in the writing from Robinson to Myers there is no mention of the Jazz and People’s Movement of 1970’s that was started by a Black blind jazz musician, Rahsaan Roland Kirk (Stewart 2020) or we can see it as another opening that Robinson left Black disabled scholars like Moore or McLeod to fill in? 

The Jazz People’s Movement has connections to Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition because of how Rahsaan Roland Kirk thought and acted on what he called Black Classical Music is, the love of his Black people and the radical action he delivered on and against television networks in the 1970’s on behalf of Black musicians who were not on television aka talk shows.  According to Moore’s interview with  Dorthaan Kirk, Rahsaan Roland Kirk was very political and had ties to the Black  Panther Party and on stage it was  music mixed with Black radical politics. However, according to Michael S Foley in his abstract of the 2020 essay, Black creative genius matters: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the Jazz and People’s Movement, and the politics of “black classical music,” he goes on to say:

But Rahsaan Roland Kirk and the Jazz and People’s Movement do not fit neatly into the usual categories historians use to describe the politics of the “long Sixties.” Kirk occupied a hybrid position – equal parts radical, reformist, and countercultural – and fashioned himself as what scholars such as Elizabeth Jelin and Lorena Oropeza have called “memory entrepreneurs”- men and women who give voice to those disappeared or otherwise silenced by the state.  Rahsaan Roland Kirk acted as jazz’s fore- most memory entrepreneur not to expose state violence, exactly, but to reveal the whitewashing – the disappearing – of black creative genius out of American popular memory. (Foley p.1 2020)

 

Foley’s writings & Moore’s interview with Mrs. Kirk is one way of placing a Black disabled radical musician and activist back into times of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement and Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition and Black disability studies.

 

Conclusion: Black Disability Politics to The Ongoing Creation of Black Krip Radicalization Building On Cedric Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition

Now let’s completely bring in Black disability politics that can be mixed in to the Black Radical Tradition by bringing in Schalk, 2022 book, Black Disability Politics, she writes the following: “I argue that Black disability politics can be expressed and performed by any Black person who interrogates the intersection of racism and ableism and attempts to combat both of these oppressions. Second, I include “not necessarily based on disability identity” as a central quality of Black disability politics because some Black people with impairments, disabilities, or illnesses do not claim disability as an identity for a variety of reasons. These reasons may include lack of access to official disability diagnoses, services, and resources (in other words, not being legally or medically recognized as disabled); the traumatic or oppressive circumstances of their disablement; internalized ableism; identification with disability- specific rather than disability- general communities (i.e., Deaf, autistic, Mad, etc.); the potential for a disability label to further their marginalization; or identity. (Schalk p.13 2022)

 

Black disabled activists of today like Lateef McLeod, Wilfredo Gomez and Dawn-Elissa Fischer to name a few would totally disagree with what Schalk talks about Black disability politics, many don’t see that as Black disability politics it’s like saying don’t tell. To get to Black disability politics there needs to be Black disability political education from Black disabled activists. What Schalk wrote about the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party and their involvement in disability issues like the late 1970’s disability protest in San Francisco and their school that had Black disabled youth plus their well-known sickle cell program was advocating and working in disability issues but not Black disability politics.
 One of Sami Schalk’s reasons why Black people don’t see disability as an identity is because many times for Black people disability has come from state violence that means there is some shame around it or a hush hush. Although Black people have become disabled  from state violence, the Black community should be aware that  disabilities come in all ways, some are born, some by state violence some by age but it’s up to Black disabled people to do that education saying Black disabled people have always been here since Moses with his speech disability with radical stories, histories, cultures that must told.
 This kind of radical and self-identity would continue to build on the writings at the end of Black Movements in America (1997) where Robinson writes about the Black Panther Party as one of the Black movements is another opening but only when Black disabled grasp what Robinson reminds us to get to Black Radical Tradition and that there needs to be research knowing that the research will sometimes challenge authority to make a break from views that don’t see pride and radical Black disabled moments past and present.

Like H.L.T. Quan , a student of Robinson pushed back on the lack of women in Cedric Robinson book, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, but like Moore she found representation of herself, a Black woman in the book, Black Movements of America.  Quan explains the omission of Black women at that time only mentioning class but not gender was implicated in a November 10, 2016 article entitled, A Black Left Feminist View on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism by Carole Boyce Davies when Quan was quoted:   On the omission of gender, a much more supportive take is offered by H.L.T. Quan, in which the writer–a former student of Robinson–asserts appropriately that the “simplistic inclusion of women does not, of itself, render a text feminist” but instead one gets instances of women as self-activating subjects involved in various forms of liberation. She also points out that Robinson explores the contributions of women in his subsequent work, Black Movements of America. I find this reading useful but still limited. Black Marxism, like many of the works of its time authored by male scholars, particularly Marxists, extended the reading to include class and race, but did not see or have the tools (or did not care) to articulate how gender was also implicated. So Quan’s reading is useful in the sense that she sees Robinson’s work as open-ended, providing the space in which a range of other intellectual projects could evolve. (Davies, 2016)

 

Just like Cedric Robinson found Black radical history from his travels, researcħ and had commitment to Black people, there needs to be the same when it comes to uncovering, publishing more Black disabled radical history and that starts with self-awareness to get self-pride that would lead to the work of what Robinson did in his early days at UC Berkeley with a small group of Black students who not only saw themselves as important but created spaces. To say that although the work of Black disabled scholars, activists and artists is happening in pockets but to get the masses there has to be a process/education that leads to a strong Black disability identity, Black disability politics, Black disability culture, Black Disability Justice, it’s a process what Moore calls, In Stages: Reaching Up To Black Krip Radicalization (Moore 2024) that he has talked and wrote about it on a podcast and in a chapter entitled, A Krip-Hop Theory of Disabled Black Men: Challenging the Disabling of Black America, Resisting Killing and Erasure Through the Arts and Self-Empowerment” in the book, Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism (Moore and Kitossa 2021).

Another opening for future Black scholars is to explore and tie it to the Black Radical Tradition is the struggle of Black disabled scholars, activists and artist who wrote theories to be consistently oppressed by the White disability movement and even their people of color communities and because of that plus a lack of funding many had to close their doors.  The stories are out there locally and internationally but it’s up to Black disabled scholars to write about it on a grand scale inside and outside of academia.

 

Recently there has been a growth of Black disabled scholars and organizations who have written curriculums and textbooks like The National Black Disability Coalition (NBDC). In the early 2000’s they wrote up a Black disability workshop to present their Black disability curriculum that traveled to a handful of campuses and there are a lot more of Black disabled academic scholars who are writing books and teaching course like Dennis Tyler and his book, Disabilities of the Color Line Redressing Anti Blackness from Slavery to the Present (2022) and many more.  This work includes more than writing books, at the same time like mentioned before it means realizing that the Black community, Black activists and Black scholars needs a lot of hand holding to erase Black ableism so they will be able to view disability as an identity that holds radical history, culture, politics, arts and more that needs to spread from families to community to institutions.

 

However, because of Black ableism, the co-opting of Disability Justice, lack of funding, and the need to continue kripping Black theories, histories, spaces in the Black community off of social media on a grand scale with funding and backing of Black scholars, Black national organizations and even Black entertainers and athletes helps to keep the work of a few invisible. With more and more Black disabled people coming back home to the Black community to continue to bring Black disability politics that was explained earlier in this essay as Black kripping aka brinning Black disabled experience from Black disabled ancestors to Black disabled scholars of today into  more Black theory, history, and arts.  Black disabled people doing this work must realize that it will hurt to open that wound of Black ableism knowing that they might not see their full achievements in their lifetime but knowing that their work will make it better for the next generation of Black disabled people just like the work of Cedric Robinson continues to touch today’s Black scholars, activists, artists and Black graduate students like Moore.

 

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