“The Future is Disabled.”
This is the title of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha book on how when you center disability the future is more expansive than we imagined. As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to justice work as a practice of our values. As Dr. Cornel West reminds us, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” However, in our justice seeking work we still have much room to widen the circle. Disability is one of these justice issues that we often forget, and as a result, our disabled beloveds are being left behind.
As I write this reflection, I do from a humble place as someone who is newly disabled. I’m coming to learn what it means to live in a Black femme fat body that is also disabled. From the loss of doing the things I once loved to navigating ableist systems, I’ve come to understand that to be disabled in the U.S. is to live in a state of grief, anger, frustration, and alienation. This world was not built with us in mind, and we’re reminded of that reality every day.
Before I started using my own mobility device, I had a supervisor that was a motorized wheelchair user. She was a UCC minister and someone I turned to for guidance on navigating faith spaces in the Bay Area. There were moments throughout my time at the organization where she named her needs like requesting masking in the office and calling ahead to venues to see if they were wheelchair accessible. At the time, these were all new considerations for me. As an able-bodied person, I took my ability to move freely through the world for granted. As our relationship deepened and I began experiencing the beginnings of my current disability, I started noticing things. I noticed how an uber driver expressed impatience when my supervisor needed more time to get into his vehicle. We were customers and he had nowhere to be, but somehow her disability was agitating him. I noticed how people in a group would walk far ahead of someone that was moving at a slower pace without any awareness of manners. I noticed when there was a broken elevator in the building we were phone banking at and my supervisor — who took two buses to get there — couldn’t enter the space and had to turn around and go home. I started noticing everything. And when I did, I got angry.
The late and fabulous Alice Wong called this “disabled rage.” The rage at not just the lack of consideration given to disabled people, but the rage at our ableist society’s insistence that we do need to be considered at all. Even before this current regime’s rollbacks of disability protections and outright hostility and aggression toward disabled people, this society has been rooted in eugenics. The United States has been invested in creating a society that is free of disabled people under the guise of promoting health and prosperity. Unfortunately, so many of us are buying into it.
A disabled elder said once at a talk that everyone has the potential to become disabled. I think about this when I think about the world I’m building. If we structured our justice work around the idea that everyone had the potential to become disabled, what would the world look like? What would our congregations look like? What would our communities look like? What would our relationships look like? What would our environment look like?
Yes, the future is disabled, and it comes with practices of care.
An old friend of mine’s father was disabled and he was recalling a tense moment with his dad. My friend was having an interpersonal issue with his partner and he was ready to leave, but his dad commented saying “I don’t understand how you able-bodied people are so quick to throw in the towel.” I couldn’t agree more because for disabled folks, we need people. Some of us need people for basic survival. To understand that needing people does not make you needy is the key to unlearning hyper individualism and hyper independence. If we all operated with the principle that we need each other to survive, we could develop communities of care where no one was discarded, no one was alienated, no one was made to feel like a burden.
Black feminist warrior poet, Audre Lorde, who died from cancer said in an essay that, “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”
I want to extend an invitation to my able and disabled beloveds, to lean into our differences, and find the creative potential that exists between and among us to build a future that is just, a future that is holy, and a future that is disabled.
Amen. Ase. Blessed be.
Ronnie Boyd (she/they)
Seminarian and Organizer
