Police Violence Creates Disability; Photojournalist Creates Disability Culture

[jesse_the_k]

Wil Sands is a photojournalist, particularly interested in stories that add nuance and complexity to public discourse. He was reporting from a BLM protest in Washington D.C. on 30 May 2020 when a cop shot him in the eye.

…between May 26 and July 27 of last year, U.S. law enforcement officials shot 115 people in the head with “less lethal weapons.” Of these victims, at least 30 suffered permanent ocular damage.

While I dealt with the aftereffects of my own injury and tried to make sense of what had happened, I came up with a new mission for myself: I set out to meet as many of the other people blinded by the police as I could.

The print version is accompanied by photos of those who’ve lost sight, including people with visibly wounded eyes. Read it
https://narratively.com/the-shot-in-the-eye-squad/

or listen to it
https://narratively-out-loud-3482f937.simplecast.com/episodes/the-shot-in-the-eye-squad

Comments

[peachpai]

I just read a little bit of the beginning and will save the rest for when I'm not so tired. It's so...goddamn. Thanks for sharing!

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah it's grim but still interesting. Disability studies is using the concept "debility" when the state causes impairment. This concept acknowledges the positive valance on "disability" that many of us who have grown up with or grown into the disability justice framing where impairment is something that "just happens."

Of course it's taken decades for disability studies to recognize that outside the college-educated white bubble, there's a lot of debility.

[peachpai]

It took me a lot of days to finish reading it, my attention span is really shit lately.

I'd been wondering if there has been any intersectional criticism of disability as a whole concept, actually! Thanks for telling me about the term, it's really useful.

My understanding of debility is based solely

[jesse_the_k]

...on SDS panel presentations, which means my flaky memory. Here, have some footnotes (and this isn’t homework; I was curious and went down the rabbit hole, no reply needed!)

"Debility" was coined by Jasbir K. Puar in The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, Duke University Press, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372530

Anna Hamilton, who’s been blogging for general audiences for more than a decade, reviews Right to Maim:

https://globalcomment.com/jasbir-puars-right-maim-asks-tough-questions-disability-studies/

Puar hosts the preface, intro, and an excerpt on her site, so one can judge the difficulty of her prose:

http://jasbirkpuar.com/the-right-to-maim/

The opening paragraph:

The intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty-one-day Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the militarized containment of civilians in Ferguson echoed those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson-to-Gaza forums sought to correlate the production of settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black and brown bodies, the demands for justice through transnational solidarities, and the entangled workings of settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The comparisons, linkages, and affective resonances between Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they did not always yield immediate alliances. But these efforts were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and reflected desires for reciprocating, intersectional, and co-constituted assemblages of solidarity.

Re: My understanding of debility is based solely

[peachpai]

Ohh thanks!! I will definitely add this one to my reading list, it sounds fantastic.

[sovay]

Police Violence Creates Disability; Photojournalist Creates Disability Culture

Thank you for sharing this; I hadn't (the word is literal, but feels loaded) seen it.