I have a particular \u201cwe\u201d in mind here: white academics who are securely employed, straight and cis people, nondisabled people, <\/span>especially<\/b> some combination of those.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We need to check ourselves.<\/span><\/p>\n April 2007: I was sitting in Sisters Chapel at Spelman College, an HBCU for women in Atlanta. The college president, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, told the story of conversing with a white ally. This person said to her, \u201cBut I don\u2019t have a prejudiced bone in my body.\u201d She replied, \u201cCheck again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I didn\u2019t understand how to apply Dr. Tatum\u2019s wisdom when I came to Spelman as a brand-new faculty member in 2004, a white genderqueer femme, full of fear and arrogance. At that time, I didn\u2019t want to be a racist, and so I assumed I wasn\u2019t. I was likely to understand \u201ccheck\u201d in terms of a checklist\u2013checking something off. I didn\u2019t realize that Dr. Tatum meant \u201ccheck\u201d in terms of <\/span>stop<\/b>. I hadn\u2019t yet learned that I might not know what <\/span>listen<\/b> meant. Nor had I learned the difference between intentions, impact, and practice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When we say \u201cjustice,\u201d what are we really talking about?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Disability justice is now well-known in academe, especially in the U.S. and other Western countries. It\u2019s cited constantly in academic work from disability studies, medical humanities, queer studies, feminist studies, and other disciplines. It pops up in countless calls for papers. But the citations are selective, partial; for example, they often take up \u201cInterdependence,\u201d but rarely mention \u201cAnti-capitalist politic.\u201d Let\u2019s go back to the <\/span>\u201c10 Principles of Disability Justice\u201d<\/span><\/a> by Patty Berne, first published in 2015 on the Sins Invalid website:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Which of these principles fit comfortably with your academic work? Which don\u2019t? Which ones do we tend to skim over as some of us\u00a0 proudly claim to be disability justice scholars? What does \u2018disability justice scholar’ actually mean?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I can\u2019t speak for all academics, especially not in this moment of global horror, genocide, lack of health care, lack of adequate pay and jobs, and slow death for almost everyone in academe. You might be reading this and thinking, \u201cMy position is precarious as <\/span>fuck<\/b>.\u201d I get it; it probably is. And I get that people grounded in Disability Justice may also be part of academe in all sorts of capacities\u2014students, instructors, visiting scholars, workshop leaders, invited speakers, authors, artists. I can\u2019t draw any neat lines here. What I am able to do is ask you to check again.<\/span><\/p>\n Checking yourself doesn\u2019t just feel \u201cuncomfortable.\u201d It usually feels like shit. It\u2019s embarrassing and confusing. Being checked by someone else often feels \u2026 <\/span>unjust<\/b>. It\u2019s especially tough if you\u2019re someone, like me, who came into this world with a boatload of racial and economic privilege. I was raised specifically to assume I should feel comfortable in all situations. And here\u2019s the most frustrating part: checking yourself doesn\u2019t necessarily <\/span>do<\/span><\/i> anything. Not right away. Or in ways you can perceive.<\/span><\/p>\n In the rest of this essay, I focus on two of the Disability Justice principles and tell a story about learning that principle. Not just reading it, but <\/span>really<\/b> learning it, over time and with difficulty. I\u2019m not done; this is only where I am now.<\/span><\/p>\n October 2004: I had been teaching at Spelman for all of two months. I felt very white and very queer. I also felt indignant. Some of my queer students had told me that they felt ostracized\u2014by their fellow students, by the campus at large. I decided to send an all-campus email.<\/span><\/p>\n I no longer have access to that email, thankfully, but it went something like this: \u201cI am QUEER, I am HERE, and Spelman is NOT DOING ENOUGH for its LGBTQ students and I would like to CALL THAT TO EVERYONE\u2019S ATTENTION.\u201d I hit the send button. Then silence fell.<\/span><\/p>\n Generally, the building that housed my office was not quiet. It includes the Departments of English and Comparative Women\u2019s Studies; the Audre Lorde Archives; the Fine Arts Museum; and miscellaneous meeting rooms, digital-media spaces, and a large auditorium. But as I sat in my office that day, after sending my email, it felt very quiet. Uncomfortably quiet.<\/span><\/p>\n Around three o\u2019clock, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall came by my office and asked if I would come down to the Women\u2019s Research and Resource Center (WRRC) for a cup of tea or coffee with her.<\/span><\/p>\n It was a calm, genial talk. Dr. Guy-Sheftall asked how I was getting along, showed me around the WRRC, and told me about some upcoming events. Just as I began to wonder why I was there (except that I could tell I had definitely fucked up), she began telling me about the history of LGBTQ organizing at Spelman. It went back decades. Much of it was situated in the WRRC. She was working on a new grant project aimed specifically at this issue, and there were new initiatives to come. She asked if I wanted to help with the new grant project.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At no point did Dr. Guy-Sheftall say any of these things, but I slowly understood them:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Your voice doesn\u2019t need to be the center of this.<\/b><\/p>\n You may not perceive everything that\u2019s happening here.<\/b><\/p>\n Not everything here is about you.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Not everything here is for you.<\/b><\/p>\n One of the usual items on an \u201cAnti-Racism\u201d or \u201cAnti-Ableism\u201d checklist is the directive <\/span>Listen<\/span><\/i>. Rarely is there more information about what it means to listen. In my experience, it doesn\u2019t simply mean to comprehend what another person is saying. And it doesn\u2019t mean listening once. It means something more akin to <\/span>stop<\/b>. Stop thinking about your response, stop thinking about what you meant. Stop moving, stop suggesting. Just stop. Wait.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s something that took me a couple of years to pause and notice: Dr. Guy-Sheftall gave me an enormous gift that day. It required her time, her labor, her expertise, and especially her grace. I didn\u2019t deserve her wisdom that day. She gave it anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n Academics love to make a mark. We love to start things, take credit for things, be the first at something. But it\u2019s not possible to see who else is <\/span>already<\/b> leading if we don\u2019t become quiet. If we don\u2019t stop, listen, and remember that there are actions already underway that we don\u2019t know about, and didn\u2019t try to know about.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n OK, you know this part already: we are all ensnared in late capitalism and there\u2019s no ethical consumption under capitalism. Academics who understand that truth are not exempt from it. Being minoritized doesn\u2019t exempt us; loudly critiquing the system doesn\u2019t exempt us; doing community-based work, having crappy job security, stating our principles on social media, none of those things exempt us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So what does that mean in terms of claiming disability justice? It means check yourself, especially if you are a white person. Are you working in service to anti-capitalist principles, or are you merely citing them while most of the material benefits of a project flow back to academe? What is your work costing you and what are you gaining? What are the impacts of your work? Your relations? What does your work cost others? Do you know who they are?<\/span><\/p>\n What do you think are your <\/span>contributions to community<\/b>?<\/span><\/p>\n December 2015: With a group of friends, I planned to attend the Cultural Rhetorics Conference at Michigan State University. At that time, Akemi Nishida was a newly hired tenure-track faculty member, Charone Pagett was (and still is) a community organizer, Ashley Volion was a graduate student, and Karen Nakamura and I were (and still are) tenured faculty members. Our workshop proposal was accepted, and we started figuring out how to get to East Lansing, Michigan and eat and sleep for a few days together.<\/span><\/p>\n Akemi suggested that we could create a shared pool of resources, including travel reimbursements and paid-for hotel rooms from those who had them. Akemi is an experienced activist and scholar, and has been part of numerous care collectives. I had read Mia Mingus\u2019s famous blog post <\/span>\u201cReflections on an Opening,\u201d<\/span><\/a> but at the time of that 2016 conference, I had never been part of an organized conference pod that shared all needed resources\u2014transportation, food, space, a place to sleep, knowledge, and energy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The pod itself worked as we\u2019d hoped. I was surprised that it turned out to be fairly simple while we were at the conference: we slept, we ate, we arranged rides to and from the airport, and we checked in periodically throughout the days and evenings. The conference itself had a fairly good access plan, including a quiet room; comfortable seating; no stairs to get into or move around the conference space; and snacks throughout each day. I noticed, as I moved through the three days with the other folks in our impromptu pod, that I felt freer than usual to rest or ask for help.<\/span><\/p>\n However, pushing against the academic system and my own assumptions was more difficult. An academic reimbursement system is set up not only to keep you from stealing resources, but also to keep you from <\/span>sharing<\/b> those resources. Folks with funding had to work around academic systems of surveillance, which include demanding itemized receipts in order to check how many people are using a hotel room, or how many meals went on one restaurant tab. And, more embarrassing but probably more relevant, this was the first time I had thought of the travel fund provided by my employer as anything other than <\/span>mine<\/b>. At the time, I was 46 years old and had been working in disability studies for over 20 years. I was still learning what it meant to <\/span>practice<\/b> the principles that I said I believed in. I\u2019m still learning now.<\/span><\/p>\n Academics probably won\u2019t be much use to the disability justice movement until we\u2019re willing to stop grabbing and claiming it, and until we\u2019re willing to truly understand and practice it in our everyday lives. Disability justice is not a thing to possess. Here are some questions to consider: If a project claims to use disability justice principles, who\u2019s going to benefit from it? Who thought of the research questions, or the main argument of the paper? Who takes the lead?\u00a0 Who is the audience? Do you know who\u2019s being harmed?<\/span><\/p>\n My own work was deeply changed when I read Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq and Breeanne Matheson\u2019s \u201c<\/span>Decolonizing Decoloniality<\/span><\/a>.\u201d In their article, Itchuaqiyaq and Matheson argue that work can operate <\/span>in the service of <\/span><\/i>decoloniality while not necessarily being, itself, decolonial. We might consider the same for academic work that engages disability justice.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What would it mean to work <\/span>in service to<\/span><\/i> disability justice rather than claiming that you are personally doing disability justice? What would it mean to consider all the principles of disability justice, rather than just a select few, when writing a new article or organizing a new project?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What might we do?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Margaret Price<\/span><\/a> is an Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric & Composition) at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as Director of the Disability Studies Program and a member of the <\/span>Transformative Access Project<\/span><\/a>. A white, genderqueer femme, Margaret\u2019s research focuses on analyzing insitutional cultures and fostering dialogues about care and accountability. Her book<\/span> Crip Spacetime<\/span><\/i><\/a> was published in April 2024 by Duke University Press and is available open-source.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\nCheck\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
Check again<\/b><\/h4>\n
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Leadership of those most impacted<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n
Anti-capitalist politic<\/b><\/h4>\n
Practice<\/b><\/h4>\n
ABOUT\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"Margaret](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/disabilityvisibilityproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Price-photograph.jpg?resize=859%2C1024&ssl=1\")
Support Disability Media and Culture<\/b><\/h3>\n
DONATE<\/b><\/a>\u00a0to the Disability Visibility Project\u00ae<\/b><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"