Racialized Disability Article

[jesse_the_k]

Enabling Whom? Critical Disability Studies Now by Julie Avril Minich

Minich’s essay captures the important idea of disability as a template for oppressive ideologies, while also addressing disability studies as a way of knowledge:

“The continued paucity of work on race and disability is particularly troubling because disability is so highly racialized—both in the sense that disability is disproportionately concentrated within communities of color, which receive unequal health care and experience elevated risk of experiencing workplace injuries, environmental contamination, and state violence, and in the sense that disability is often used rhetorically to reinforce white supremacy (just as it is also used to reinforce heteropatriarchy, transphobia, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation). As Erevelles and Minear argue: “The association of race with disability has been extremely detrimental to people of color in the US—not just in education, but also historically where associations of race with disability have been used to justify the brutality of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism.” (Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4, no. 2 (2010): 129.) The history outlined by Erevelles and Minear has meant that efforts to resist the pathologization of non-normative bodies and minds in communities of color do not always take place under the name of disability scholarship/activism, even as they deploy what I am naming as a critical disability studies methodology.”

published on “Lateral,” the Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Spring 2016

http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5–1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-now-minich/