As you know if you have been following my work lately, I had made a hard left in my disability activism and scholarly writing and research. I came to realize that I’ve spent the majority of my life advocating, writing and studying one side of my identity aka disability although I know my Black history, music, arts and Black movements and the connection of my two identities from Jim Crow to Porgy and Bess to Black disabled musicians to even knowing of Black disabled movements that I have traveled to like in London, UK in the mid 1990’s to Toronto, Canada in the early 2000’s.

I knew of, wrote about and constantly used disability theory like the social model of disability, the philosophy of the Independent living and of course disability rights and now disability culture but I always wonder why my Black community was still not getting disability even after the work I did in the 1980’s and 1990’s in and out of nonprofits in and out of academia and even in organizations of people of color that I’ve help created? In the early 2000’s when I was one of the founders of Sins Invalid and Harambe Council I and we felt almost the same feeling I felt as a young Black disabled boy in Black spaces and that was the familiar hush hush what is now called Black ableism.

Because of Black ableism, I argue that there has been a miss opportunity in both communities. Very recently once again I looked at my disability side and realized that I and many other Black disabled activists have been raised on White disabled theories, White disabled history, White disabled rights, White disabled philosophies and lately White disabled studies and White disabled culture. I helped coin the concept Black Ableism, addressing the unique historical and cultural context of ableism within the Black community, tracing its roots to slavery and the subsequent internalization of negative perceptions of disability.

I have defined Black ableism as: 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. For example, slave owners used disability as a reason to devalue a slave because of what he/she could contribute to the plantation. And as we, a new people emerged out of slavery and saw by the slave master’s example that disability meant devalued. Therefore slaves internalized disability was a sin, something that needs to be healed using the outdated Religious Model of Disability mixed with The Tragedy/Charity Model of disability that says the following:

The idea that disability is essentially a test of faith or even salvation in nature. If the person does not experience the physical healing of their disability, he or she is regarded as having a lack of faith in God. Mix with depicting disabled people as victims of circumstance, deserving of pity. (Moore, 2024)

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.

Black ableism can only be eradicated by stripping what the Black community has been taught about disability through the lens of oppression and then rebuilding. This rebuilding process must be conducted by coordinated teams of Black disabled people and family members who have had a presence in both the disability and Black communities. Also, part of the formula includes individuals who have held on to their identity politics and have a disability vision and reality for the Black community. In other words individuals who have a deep rooted love of their community and are willing to risk exposing their pain to help the Black community have an understanding of disability from a race and culture perspective. This process will be a long term commitment to healing and detailing the historical significance of disability to present day issues, including Black ableism. For Black disabled people and our families the rebuilding will lead to a path of Black disabled empowerment and a commonality with our Black community. The Black community will be all the richer by embracing their disabled sisters and  brothers from a historical, political, participatory and cultural way of life.

As Krip-Hop Nation we use Hip-Hop to reclaim, educate, advocate and Krip a space so to connect to the above, I have Krip Public Enemy’s 1989 song, Fight The Power to Fight Black Ableism, link.

Not until 2022 or earlier I made a commitment to myself to not only come back to Black history, Black culture and Black theories but to look for my disabled ancestors, to reread these histories, theories, art, music and then try to krip it into the Black disabled experience.

Black Kripping for me means when we, Black disabled people enter a spaces that exclude deny the existence of the Black disabled community’s accomplishments, history, music, arts, politics in the Black community, history and movements locally and internationally, we must first take inventory of the Black ableism in that space then engage with our Black Krip politics. Recognizing that we have often been wounded from our own Back non-disabled community so knowing that we must be prepared knowing it will take time to first get our Black community locally and globally to recognize their Black ableism and why they need to change. It stresses the importance of strategic approaches, but also communicates that it takes time to shift people’s understanding. Learning is a process, this is especially true when unlearning (speak to ableism directly) needs to take place first.

By doing this research and writing especially now as a Ph.D. student I’m hoping this relearning and kripping will help not only bring our Black disability identity, history, politics, new disabled people of color theories/movements like Sins Invalid’s arts and Disability Justice and others into Black theories like the Black Radical Tradition, Guerrilla Intellectualism but more importantly then our Black community can also work on erasing Black ableism so we can reveal that we, Black disabled people share a common history, struggles and accomplishments and have a lot to share leading to Black solidarity with Black disabled people worldwide.

Although Leroy Moore was one of the founders of Sins Invalid and was there when Patty Berne came up with the term and practice of Disability Justice in the East Bay Area, Sins Invalid shared the pushback in our communities of color in our disability activism. The early thinkers and founders of Disability Justice were all people of color and mainly women, including queer and transgender women, and one of the goals was to not only fight back from the disability rights community but also to educate our communities of color on Disability Justice. Because of the lack of disability 101 and disability rights, disability awareness in people of color communities especially in their organizations from grassroots to national organizations created a roadblock for Sins Invalid to do political education to build up to Disability Justice. That roadblock and open wounds that were experienced by early disabled justice activists in the activist of color spaces led towards avenues that were more open to political education, which happened to be in whiter radical spaces.

Today we see Disability Justice almost everywhere– like academia, philanthropy, and even in new Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives– except in people of color communities. Sins Invalid didn’t have the time to implement Disability Justice fully in their communities, including people of color and poor people before it was hijacked mainly by academics, philanthropy, DEI movements and sometimes disability rights advocates. So, the question is, can Disability Justice activists of color make the praxis come back to its roots and demand a time of healing so our Black and Brown disabled justice activists can do the basic disability 101 that can lead to disability rights, arts and culture thus laying the building blocks to get to Disability Justice to be embraced by black and people of color communities?

As a Ph.D. student at UCLA Leroy wrote about why the Black community falls behind to get disability rights, culture, arts etc. and that is realizing that disability theory, philosophies and now disability studies were and sadly still created by majority White disabled elites.And on the other side there has been a lack of looking at Black theories to see how Black disabled scholars and activists can put their own spin on it aka krip it.

Leroy is now kripping Black radical theories like Cedric Robinson’s Black Radical Tradition and Walter Rodney’s Guerrilla Intellectualism. We hope by kripping Black theories along with Black Disability Justice and looking internationally in the African diaspora like Brazil’s Black disability movement can help strengthen Black Disability Justice in the Black community worldwide with our own Black disabled theories, terminologies, studies and more.

This means there needs to be a healing process to erase Black ableism so that Black disabled people can finally come home to the Black community to build not inclusion but toward Black Disability Justice and Black Disability Liberation!

Today more and more Black disabled scholars with Ph.Ds, Black disabled activists and Black disabled artists are doing this work, but we need more support, funding and solidarity from our communities.

To keep Disability Justice in the community, not in the academy, there must be community spaces where DJs can be seen, taught, read, artistically expressed and celebrated. We must realize that almost everything that is taught in educational institutions came from the community — from poetry to Black studies and even disability studies. Sins Invalid is one of the community spaces, as well as the upcoming Krip-Hop Institute which will be in a Black community in Inglewood, LA. More DJ community spaces are needed to keep it rooted in the community first. Just like in the Bay Area, Black studies came from Black activist groups like the Black Panthers and others. This way DJ can hold educational institutions accountable just like Hip-Hop artists/elders have tried to hold the field of Hip-Hop studies accountable. Without strong community roots, we are today seeing the twisting of what DJ is taught by people who don’t look like the community and have little knowledge of DJ. Making sure that DJ completes its work in the community, especially the Black and Brown community is the only way to make sure that we are in control of the narrative of disability justice as black and POC people of disabilities.

Unfortunately I continue to see and read by Disability Justice activists talking about Disability Justice and its ten principles that came out of a San Francisco Bay Area Black and Brown queer, transgender and straight performance organization called Sins Invalid but not seeing that there has to be a special process for the Black families and community to get to Disability Justice.

Unfortunately today from my view we can’t skip over that work to slap on the ten principles of Disability Justice. My ongoing question is what can Disability Justice look like after we go through the painful process of confronting decades upon decades of Black ableism and to go through the stages of erasure, pity, overcoming, a sense of overcoming to awareness, inclusion to the ultimate goal of empowerment, to awareness to seeing oneself as historical, political and culturally disabled landing on what I call Black Krip liberation.

One must develop a political and analytical view that invites questioning of how mainstream society defines and represents us. We shouldn’t be satisfied with inclusion and need to agitate for liberation, transformation and revolution. We must also lean on our Black disabled ancestors who offered and made visible for us, paths to liberation.

As we more fully inhabit this stage, we are creating new theories, terminology, art, music for not only for ourselves, but for generations to come. At this stage We must leverage all tools at our disposal to stay united and to bring others into Black Krip Radicalization.

We also should always be aware that education, awareness and openness especially Black and Brown people starts at home. For example when I was in my preteens my mother turned on the Black opera, Porgy & Bess, she was giving that mirror of myself and when I saw my father’s records collection with Black blind and disabled musicians that too was my first self education about myself that all happened in the home. This is why I break “the home” down in small pieces so the first individual can start in the home to grow into the community. In the home (especially now with social media) having open communication of histories of Black ableism that was place among us in slavery and how the system and movements, theories and the structure of our organizations has separated us and at the same time this conversation also needs the layout the contributions of Black/Brown disabled ancestors to today.

A brief look on how Black disabled people were separated from their non-disabled family members from slavery to Jim Crow to up to today national non-profit organizations. The story of The Dozens explains how Black disabled bodies were looked at. The Dozens were Black disabled people and youth who were separated from their families even before they stepped on those slave ships and this separation continued when slavery ended and most Black disabled slaves were forced to continue to work and live on plantations according to many disability academic scholars. Of course under Jim Crow laws once again disabled Black individuals were separated in education to health services all and so much more separated Black people from their Black disabled family members and of course separated from White people and White disabled people. Up to today Black and disabled non-profit organizations are separated like Black national organizations still have little knowledge about Black disability issues and still today disability organizations who get the majority of grants aimed for people with disability are mostly White run.

In the twenty- first century we can update our needs and how we can come back home to the

Black community and expand the notion of home by using social media. Knowing that today that especially people with disabilities have met and got inspired by disabled people on social media and have found a different kind of family that shares their disability experience than it make sense to expand our physical home with Black disabled older activists online who have years of experiences of providing tools and resources to deal with ableism and at the same time being a place to heal open wounds of Black/Brown ableism. These Black disabled older activists will not only be a place of refuge but will also provide research, articles, videos, art of Black/Brown disabled people in history and to pick out a disability lens in the radical history of Black/Brown people in the US and worldwide. There is no time limit in this first stage.

Now that the home is stripping their outdated views on disability knowing once again this is ongoing and it’s being measured then we go into the second stage that is to leaving the home to go into a small community gathering with people that you don’t know but not alone but in pairs going back to the social network of Black disabled older activists to continue to provide research, articles, videos, art of Black/Brown disabled people but at this stage you are dealing with people that you don’t know compare to the family/home. In this public environment, you come with confidence because your home education and the strong relationship with your online Black disabled family to help you prepare for the community lack of knowing of disability issues, history etc. and also realizing that you are becoming a public educator of how Black people with disabilities were apart of Black/Brown movements but couldn’t be easily recognized during that time period.

This two step process must happen over and over again but at the same time we are not only healing the wounds from Black/Brown ableism, we also are gently and lovingly pushing our Black/Brown communities to see disability as a cultural, historical, political and international identity, movement and a person that contributes to the social fabric of not only to their community existence but the world as a whole. Then and only then we can really put the Disability Justice’s ten principles knowing that these Disability Justice’s principals have to be shaped and come out differently according to the culture they are wrapped in. Just like we need to realize that there can’t be only one disability culture and it’s up to us to bring the term, disability culture, into our two step process then come out with our own disability culture as Black/Brown disabled people and our Black/Brown communities.

Another problem that I have witnessed at disability lectures, in books, reports and elsewhere when it is focused on the Black disabled experiences has been starting with a deficit framework and leaving the audience there..I’ve witnessed when many scholars talk about the intersectionality of race and disability most of the time begins with the oppression and the lack of need of people of color with disability meaning that Black disabled people are mainly seen as lacking access to services, health benefits and high rates of unemployment and not in higher educational arenas. By mainly looking at disability through the above viewpoints is like only looking through our oppressor’s perspective to get this intersection, which is another reason why disability is constantly looked at only through a stigma viewpoint that continues to reject disability as an identity in the Black community.

I push back on that by proposing a more empowering way to view the “intersectionality” (my writing here, the reality) of Black people with disabilities by starting with the culture like music, resistance of Black disabled people and creativity that came out of oppression and surviving. I look at times of raw discrimination that forced a lot of Black disabled people to come up with creative artistic solutions to make money, to help others to escape oppression and used their writings to get attention from people in power. I wrote my explanation and back up my argument in my 2023 Masters Thesis on page twenty-six that was entitled, Krip-Hop Nation:

Community-Based Education at the Intersection of Blackness & Disability as follows:

“I have leaned towards the academic work of Dr. Tommy J. Curry, who is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017) and has written about Black men with disabilities also Dr. Tamari Kitossa who invited me to co-write a chapter, “A Krip-Hop Theory of Disabled Black Men: Challenging the Disabling of Black America.”

Kitossa and Moore also resists the killing and erasure through the arts and self-empowerment in his 2022 book, Appealing Because He Is Appalling: Black Masculinities,Colonialism, and Erotic Racism, and theorizes how the Black community can rethink disability.

“From the perspective of a Krip-Hop theory of disabilities, we think PTSS (Post-traumatic stress syndrome) is important for helping us to think about disabilities differently in the African American context. Rather than disabilities being seen as a sign of a moral stigma (Goffman, 1963) or a signifier of the projected anxieties and fears that able-bodied people project onto people with disabilities, a Krip-Hop theory says that African Americans should place disabilities at the heart of our economic, cultural, social, and political life (Moore & Kitossa, 2021, p.214-215).”

I look at Black disabled people like Elias Hill, Cecil Ivory, and Al Hibbler, all three helped to

lead Black people in their times and in their own ways. Not only individually, we can look at the activism of Rahsaan Roland Kirk who was a Black blind Jazz musician and he led the Jazz & People’s Movement that was pushing for more Black musicians to be on Television, especially night talk shows. By using this cultural empowering “intersectionality” of Black and disability gives an opportunity to erase the stigma of being related to disability, it tells our own activism and culture making history going through oppression with Black disability historical lens with a mission to build on Black disability history, cultural expression and Black disabled long story of activism.Most of the times when disability academic scholars say that race and disability are linked together they would start with our oppression but don’t look at what was created during that oppression thus leaving the reader in the hands of the oppressors. In my argument this approach leave Black community and more importantly Black people with disabilities seen as a deficit and always being oppressed aka not in an empowering role increasing the stigma and never getting to seeing disability as a historical, political, cultural artistic identity that holds power, and critical advancements that deserve to be studied, pass down to upcoming generations of Black & Black disabled people and communities.

My argument once again goes back to what I have pointed out in my masters’ thesis, the work of Gloria Ladson-Billings where I quote:

“I did not realize it at the time, but I was asking a fundamentally different kind of question. Instead of constantly asking what was wrong with poor, Black children, I wanted to know what was “right” with poor, Black children and what happens in classrooms where teachers help them succeed on a regular basis” (Ladson-Billings, 2009).

Learning from Billings, for myself, instead of constantly reading and hearing the oppression of Black disabled people, I want to know the contributions of Black disabled people during and coming out of our oppression in our communities, throughout history and what happens in the classrooms and in the community where teachers, parents and community leaders help succeed on a regular basis. To put my argument into action it would take a blending many theories into steps like the blending of Gloria Ladson-Billings’ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Relevant and Culturally Sustaining Hip Hop Pedagogies, Disability Rights’ Models, Disability Justice, Black Men Studies and Poverty Scholarship all wrapped up in Krip-Hop Theory. What would that look like? Would that be helpful? And how would I/We Black Krip these theories without losing our own identity and radical politics?