Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Kevin Gotkin’s Crip News shows up in my mailbox on Mondays. His principal focus is on English-speaking crip art and artists (like himself), but he inevitably encounters disability policy issues. Today I appreciated:

MLK, Guaranteed Income, & Disability

Guaranteed income (GI) programs offer monthly direct cash transfers to people who need help. And when organizers talk about this work (like Michael Tubbs on NPR in 2021), they often cite MLK’s 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech.

MLK named disability in his case for GI. Black single mothers of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) helped him understand that expanding access to employment was an incomplete approach. For “those at the lowest economic level,” including “the aged and chronically ill,” he said, “we must create incomes.”

But today’s GI movement, which has swelled since 2020, has abandoned the radical legacy MLK helped popularize. The NWRO proposed a Guaranteed Adequate Income. Not a cash supplement. An income that can actually support a family. Most programs across the U.S. today offer several hundred dollars per month (rarely over $1000) for only a short period of time.

This doesn’t just leave disabled people behind - it causes harm. Most often, GI programs force people enrolled in existing public benefit programs, like SNAP and SSI, to choose between accepting the cash payments and experiencing a double cliff (the cash reduces or eliminates other benefits and then disappears itself). Some programs even specifically exclude anyone who receives SSI. And people like Andrew Yang are hijacking the framework to imagine cash transfers as a consolidation or wholesale replacement of public benefit programs.

https://cripnews.substack.com/p/mlk-guaranteed-income-and-disability

Seeing in the Dark: A secular sermon on race, grief, accountability, and change.

A brilliant essay by Breai Mason-Campbell is the centerpiece of the first issue of new political magazine Pipe Wrench.

( 200 word excerpt )

In Uncanny Magazine, Sid Jain explores how Seth Dickinson's Baru Cormorant Masquerade trilogy helped him understand how British imperial rule colonized his thinking and experience as a first-generation American:

Shame washes over a colonized culture in layers: first the shame Indian students were made to feel towards their vernacular in the 19th century, then the shame for their poor English. Finally, the shame we force upon ourselves after becoming too Anglicized. Like with the worst of all colonial exercises: it’s not what it does to you that you should fear, but what it convinces you to do to yourself.

[… snip …]

Shame is unhelpful. Learning is helpful. What I do with the education and the voice it gave me matters. This is part of what I find ironic about the genesis of this essay. Dickinson, while not writing from a colonized perspective, still told this powerful story from an accurate anti-colonial perspective, managing to get the conflicted feelings of a post-colonial youth so right. I imagine it took a lot of learning, curiosity, and humility.

https://uncannymagazine.com/article/seduced-by-the-rulers-gaze-an-indian-perspective-on-seth-dickinsons-masquerade/

( links to analysis of 6 January 2020 insurrection )

You Suck at Cooking Xmas Cookies

You don’t need a cookie cutter! Silly combination of sober instructional voice and pace with surreal language and detailed pictures so it manages to push through the brain case anyway.

( 6-minute uncaptioned embedded video )

Prompts From Your Birth Year

Merriam-Webster hosts a gizmo where you plug in your birth year and get more than 25 words that entered the dictionary at that time.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler/1955 is mine. You don’t have to use their input scheme: just put a four-digit birth year at the end of the link.

I’m thrilled to find words dear to me:

• hidden agenda
• motormouth
• Peking duck
• stir-fry
• wet suit

The Decameron Project

100 short sf stories (and novel excerpts) free to read:

https://www.patreon.com/projectdecameron

Racism As a Public Health Issue

Right2Health was founded by Leslie Gregory, a certified Physician Assistant, navy veteran, Black woman and mother of two. Since 2006, she’s been focused on healing those affected by everyday racism.

Right To Health is about health prevention. It’s about bringing people together to share, care and alleviate the disparities that come with racial injustice and economic inequality. We are a wholly volunteer group with a vision: to create a national network of healthcare providers, researchers, scientists, healers, community leaders, technologists, educators and anyone else committed to alleviating the ills of racism across all ethnic groups, with particular attention to Black Americans.

https://www.right2healthus.org/about-us

Thirty-minute radio interview (no transcript) exploring the evidence for "racism as public health" from 20 years experience:

https://kboo.fm/media/82934-right-health-director-leslie-gregory-campaigns-racism-be-considered-public-health-issue

Black Nerd Comics by Ajuan Mance

These are beautiful, funny, insightful

http://www.ajuanmance.com

https://checkallthatapply.com

8_rock

Found her work through Drawing Power: Women’s Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival. It’s a golden group of excellent creators, although sometimes hard reading.

Jingle-Dress Dancing as Pandemic Medicine

Thanks to nursingclio_feed, a reflective, captioned video tracing the history of Ojibwe jingle-dress dancing as a religious response to the 1919 flu pandemic. Dr Brenda Child, an Ojibwe historian, explains how the jingle-dress and dancing has traveled through her family, and how it can support hope that we will turn the corner.

Content notes: genocide, suicide, school shooting, residential schools.

( Video: Jingle Dress Dancers in the Modern World: Ojibwe People and Pandemics )

Jingle Dress Medicine via Virtual Powwow

Whitney Spears’ words from the video: ( 250 words )

High Country News is a non-profit journalism service covering the Western US, building a regional perspective while addressing environmental and indigenous issues, resource "management" and destruction.

I live in the ancestral home of the Ho-Chunk People, where the University of Wisconsin-Madison now sits on the former sites of sacred burial mounds.

High Country News explains how "land grant" institutions like UW-Madison — often held up as examples of democratic learnings — were funded by stealing indigenous people’s lives and land.

Land-grab universities

( taste these 420 words of excerpt and you’ll want to read the whole thing. )

The Black Language Podcast

by blacklangpod

https://blacklangpod.buzzsprout.com

Creator Anansa Benbow opens my brain to the huge varieties of black language, especially AAVE/Ebonics. The first episode declares: no grammar police and pinged my disability pride when she said, "I stutter. Imma gone make this podcast" and carried on. The second explores the pragmatic function of aight so boom in storytelling. The third episode takes direct aim at the reality that Black creativity drives US culture, including language change, and yet White people valorize White AAVE speakers while excoriating Black AAVE speakers.

She compares the experiences of Rachel Jeantel, star prosecution witness in the George Zimmerman trial whose testimony was simply not understood by white jurors, with Bhad Bhabie, a white rapper who gained fame by disrespecting her mother on Dr Phil:

Language appropriation of Black people is not simply language borrowing, unfortunately, it comes with the erasure of Black people. Again, the push to promote stan/twitter/internet language, instead of recognizing that the language used on social media comes from Black people is an example of that erasure.

Sorry to report no transcripts for this podcast.

Accentricity

by accentricitypod

https://www.accentricity-podcast.com

Sociolinguist Sadie Ryan explores linguistic ideology as applied to Scots. In her words:

This is a podcast about people and how they talk. About accents, and why we care about them. About languages, and how they refuse to be controlled. About why there is no such thing as bad grammar, no language is more important than any other language, and every voice is valid.

I learned that Scots language is scorned as uneducated by many English power brokers. A pair of episodes document kids just learning to talk and how they speak one year later.

I had to listen to the first episodes several times to get accustomed to her accent — sadly, no transcripts. Excellent bedtime listening.

Learned about both of these from the Huge List of Linguistics Podcasts hosted by Lauren Gawne aka superlinguo:

https://www.superlinguo.com/post/158448074588/linguistics-and-language-podcasts

Long-Term by idiopathicsmile

Completely adorkable Good Omens gen fic, POV of a very queer, very UU minister interviewing a couple she calls Bowtie and Sunglasses. Only canon you need to know is that the couple getting married are a demon and an angel who’ve been flirting for 6000 years.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19703515

Reliably, nursingclio_feed expands my knowledge about the intersection of public health and oppressive systems:

Architecting a “New Normal”? Past Pandemics and the Medicine of Urban Planning

by TONY YEBOAH, JENNIFER HART, and NATE PLAGEMAN

We are historians of the West African nation of Ghana, each currently writing a history of urbanism in a different major city (Kumasi, Accra, and Sekondi-Takoradi, respectively). In our research efforts – and in those of many other urban scholars examining African contexts – we’ve repeatedly seen how medical experts and modernist urban planners exploited outbreaks of disease to legitimize their emerging systems of technical expertise and advance white supremacy, global capitalism, and imperial order. ( 200 more words )

http://www.pretty-terrible.com/george-r-r-martin-2020-hugo-awards/

Natalie Luhrs explains why I was SO GLAD I hadn't traveled further than my living room to watch the Hugo presentation.

And it includes the link to the fabulous transformative work of Chelsea anoutlawlife who cut half the running time of the presentation.

The remixed video includes:

• The category announcements
• The finalists names on screen
• The acceptance speeches.

Enjoy this 1:41:52 on YouTube When The Toastmaster Talks Less

It's autocraptioned.

The Crip Camp documentary celebrates a hippie-run summer camp where many disabled people discovered the power of crip community. Audio-described trailer at the end.

As a follow-on, the producers are running the Crip Camp Official Virtual Experience.

Ninety minute online seminars on Sunday afternoons through the end of August, featuring disability justice leaders from all over the US. They’re foregrounding black, indigenous, and people of color. (Commonly abbreviated BIPOC, which I initially read as "bisexual")

The Zoom presentations will have ASL and captioning, and you can address other access needs on the sign up form.

https://cripcamp.com/officialvirtualexperience

There's an accompanying private Facebook group, too.

( click for Crip Camp trailer )