Disability Justice is More Than Just Link To Black Arts/Thought Movement Than The Disability Rights Movement

I think early Disability Justice looks more like the Black Arts/Thought than anything else before DJ was kidnapped. I was there among others! Knowing that DJ came out from a cultural art project, Sins Invalid and continues with Krip-Hop Nation among others. The aim was community building not institutions like academia. At this point of time of my work, I am focusing on the Black community in general because I think and have seen that the Black community is still far behind when we look at the advancement of the disability community that created disability rights movement, legal rights, organizations, disability studies, arts, music and models we use to view people with disabilities. My goal of my Ph.D. program is to open up what I call the Krip-Hop Institute that I’ll talk about later in this essay.

There are differences between Black Arts/Thought and Disability Justice of course but the reasons why Disability Justice was born was the same frustration that our Black elders established Black Arts/Thought with our support and knowledge of disability rights movement and Black disabled activists who played a major role but just like Black people in general got sick of not seeing the advancement of Black community generally, facing police brutality and the promise of civil rights Sins Invalid around early 2000’s, a group of disabled people of color also lived through high percentage of discrimination through institutions like police, schools, non-profit agencies, health care, housing and so on after the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Just look at the cover of that civil rights law for Americans with disabilities and you see only White people with and without disabilities while President George W. Bush Sr. signed the law into existence.

Like Black Arts/Thought, Sins Invalid used arts and cultural expression to not only express our life but to build empowerment among Black and people of color with disabilities who are queer, transgender, straight and poor and our communities that’s why we, the late Patty Berne, the late Stacey Milbern, Mia Mingus, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret . 

From Sins Invalid the reason why they/we started Disability Justice:

“because the Disability Rights Movement and Disability Studies do not inherently centralize the needs and experiences of folks experiencing intersectional oppression, such as disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.”

In my view Disability Justice also was created because of our harmful stories of being in Black and people of color spaces where our knowledge, politics, art through disability were not recognize or were seen as getting a check, services or being hash hash about it or receiving charity so not seeing disability as radical, historical, political, artistic aka an identity with history, art, activism, ancestors…. This harmful viewpoint and action has created wounds in early Black and people of color disabled justice activists/artists so much that now it made it almost impossible to do Disability Justice work in one of our target community that needed it the most, people of color communities and in my view that is one reason why DJ is in many place liker academia to grant making foundations thus everybody is benefiting from what Sins Invalid created except the communities that were created for.

In the beginning and still now Sins Invalid used cultural expression to display their political stories in this new Disability Justice empower mirror by finding disabled ancestors from Audre Lorde to Brad Lomax to Black blind Blues artists to victims of police killings that were disabled etc.. As we know the following:

The Black Arts/Thought was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of Harlem.

We can see the same in Sins Invalid’s Disability Justice in the San Francisco Bay Area, Krip-Hop Nation and other early groups like Stacey Milbern’s Disability Justice Culture Club that she started in Oakland and Alice Wong’s The Disability Visibility Project which is an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Sins Invalid, Krip-Hop and others early Disability Justice groups and artists are upholding a lot of movements and concepts that came from our White disabled rights and culture leaders like Steve Brown who have been writing about disability culture going back to the 1970’s and 1980’s and at the same time adding our art, music, plays, books, poetry, fashion, ancestors stories to Disability culture, arts, studies, Blues to Hip-Hop and more. 

All of this, Disability Justice creates empowerment, pride and activism that can create in communities especially communities of color finally a welcoming mate and shift the outlook on disability then and only then DJ will make a change in institutions like in the media, higher education so we need more community spaces lead by DJ activists, artists and or scholars to help to continue what the original DJ founders had envisioned for Disability Justice aka community building.

This is where the vision of a Krip-Hop Institute comes in like the main vision of the Black Arts/Thought that created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. Disability Justice and my involvement in it has led to thinking and vision of a physical cultural institution in the Black community aka the Krip-Hop Institute that can continue what Sins Invalid birth, Disability Justice with a Krip-Hop twist. Like I said in the beginning that my work at this time doing my Ph.D. in anthropology/linguistic program at UCLA is focus to add to the Black community to help to bring the Black community up to date around disability from arts to political thought basically continue the Disability Justice community building awareness, political education and an artistic expression avenues through song, Hip-Hop and visual like paintings etc.