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For nearly three years, I have been following a content creator by the name of Imani Barbarin — also known as Crutches and Spice — on most of her socials. Barbarin is a disability advocate that hones in on communications and sociopolitical topics through the lens of race and disability.
While watching her content, I’ve begun unlearning a lot of my own internalized ableism and deconstructing the ways in which our society is incredibly inaccessible and discriminatory toward people with disabilities.
Because I’m able-bodied, I’m constantly taking in Barbarin’s content with the sole intention of listening and learning. Whenever I come across a take that elicits a less than receptive reaction, I always try to take a step back and ask myself why her statement made me uncomfortable in the first place.
One of the ways that helped make some of her harder hitting takes more digestible was trying to understand her politics through the lens of anti-Black racism — a form of oppression I encounter much more often in my day-to-day life.
Through that lens, I find myself better comprehending the struggles that disabled people face while living in a society that provides little to nothing in terms of accessibility.
While racism and ableism have many differences regarding the ways they are practiced and perpetuated, there are just as many similarities between the two systems of oppression that are often overlooked. Racism and ableism are interlinked in so many ways, and the ways in which society treats Black and disabled people have a lot of overlap. It is nearly impossible to have a discussion about police brutality without factoring in the insurmountable number of cases involving Black and brown disabled people.
Through a lack of accessibility, disabled people are often shunned out and completely expelled from public spaces. Common examples of this include the refusal to factor in people with mobility struggles when planning evacuation and safety drills, the surprising amount of apartments and living spaces without elevators or ramps, or even something as simple as not implementing ASL into more school curricula.
This is segregation, whether we recognize it as such or not. The lack of accessibility and accommodation — coupled with the stigma toward neurodivergent people and those with intellectual disabilities — in public spaces prevent disabled individuals indirectly convey the message that disabled people don’t deserve a place within our society. This “out of sight, out of mind” mentality bears many similarities to the reconstructionist/Jim Crow era of the American south.
The institution and cultural practice of chattel slavery heavily pushed the idea that Black people were subhuman, and therefore, better suited as another man’s property. This better allowed for those in power to brush them off and cast them aside. They weren’t reserved a place within the rest of society, and once slavery was abolished, it was the first time in American history where white people were faced with the prospect of living among the formerly enslaved rather than writing them off as servants and property.
The Supreme Court upholding Plessy v. Ferguson reinforced racial segregation all throughout the South, in turn allowing for Black people to exist within a different social atmosphere. Being subjected to living in separate neighborhoods and using separate institutions allowed for white people to disregard the existence of Black people and maintain their illusion of a “perfectly functioning” society.
Aside from the actual lack of public accommodation, the act of separating people with disabilities and able-bodied people within our society goes as far as outright institutionalizing and incarcerating those with physical and mental disabilities.
Modern structured facilities and institutions dedicated to hosting those with disabilities have been around as early as the mid-1800s, and have always been plagued with a multitude of horrors ranging from molestation , experimentation, solitary confinement, and various other forms of abuse.
In a similar likeness, the vast majority of incarcerated people have some form of disability. A 2016 study conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that about 38% of state and federal prisoners have at least one disability. Given how this survey is nearly 10 years old, it more than likely underestimates just how much of the prison population is composed of disabled individuals.
On top of the fact that the prison industrial complex very frequently mistreats and dehumanizes incarcerated people, both disabled and able-bodied individuals have to deal with inadequate treatment or outright having their requests for proper medical treatment downplayed and denied.
Black and brown people are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and also make up a considerable amount of the prison population. While there are a multitude of factors that contribute to this, one of the main problems is the higher rates of poverty in Black and brown communities. With more poverty, there is more crime, and as a result there is always going to be an influx of overpolicing and arrests that follow.
What many people also don’t seem to acknowledge is the correlation between race, poverty, and disability, usually disregarding the ways in which a person’s socioeconomic status may lead to developing certain disabilities. A lack of adequate medical treatment, poor living conditions, and lack of access to healthier foods are all byproducts of living in poverty that sometimes leads to the development of certain conditions or worsening of preexisting ones.
And that leads me to how intersectionality plays a huge role in all of this. When analyzing different systems of oppression, most people fall short when it comes time to connect different issues with one another. I remember seeing this quite a bit during the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef last year, where people would comment under videos analyzing the event, saying something along the lines of: “While you guys are obsessing over two random guys, people are dying in this country.” Most of these comments failed to recognize the cultural significance behind an event such as a rap beef between two megastars, especially given the world's history of appropriating and commodifying Black American culture.
It’s as if people can’t conceptualize that you can be invested in multiple different issues at the same time or understand how a lot of them have the same root cause.
It is wild to me that people don’t realize how accommodations for disability would make life easier for everyone, regardless of whether or not you have mobility issues. I’m sure everyone would appreciate stuff like being able to sit down while working a cashier job or having access to better and more efficient public transportation.
In a society that prioritizes independence and bases a person’s worth on how productive they are within the workforce, many disabled and able-bodied people often struggle to work around society's lack of accommodation. Working toward a common goal would prove to be beneficial for everyone, and yet we constantly ignore and disregard the voices of disabled people and activists that have to literally beg to be treated like regular human beings.
Practicing basic empathy is easier said than done in our society, and I think the easiest way to bridge that gap is to evaluate how the systems of oppression that don’t directly affect us mirror the ones that do.
The quicker we as a collective can come to the realization that all of these problems are not only similar to one another but also interlocked, the quicker we can work towards a world that is beneficial for everyone.
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