There is no disability justice without liberation for all
Welcome to Created By, a digital series by Hollywood Workers for Peace highlighting the stories of Hollywood laborers who are challenging our industry to end its support of state violence and imperialism.
This post has been republished and edited for our series. You can read our previous entry in this series here.
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By Colin Buckingham
Disability is, by its nature, intersectional. People with disabilities exist in every race, ethnicity, age, gender, and sexuality. Anyone has the potential to become disabled due to age, illness, preexisting genetic conditions, or injury.
In Gaza, we’re witnessing thousands of children and adults forced to have amputations, often without anesthesia, due to injuries from IOF bombings and on-the-ground military attacks. Now, Gaza has the largest population of child amputees in the world. These bombings have sometimes used white phosphorus, which has been banned in use against a civilian population, in Gaza and Lebanon. White phosphorus can and has resulted in horrible burns, injuries, and painful death. If people survive all of the above, they are at heightened risk of PTSD, as we’re currently seeing in Gaza with children as young as 5 saying they want to die. All of the above: amputations, burns, chronic pain, and PTSD fall under the definition of disability.
In addition to the above war crimes, an estimated 1/3 Palestinians are now at risk of starvation due to Israel blocking or attacking aid organizations trying to distribute food and medical supplies. Medical supplies that have been banned by Israel from entering the region also include insulin, oxygen tanks, crutches, inflatable water tanks, surgical supplies, anesthetic and field hospital kits. These items are needed and essential for people with disabilities, and without them people are at severe risk of injury and death.
Though the intent to disable or harm disabled people specifically is difficult to prove, the impact of these restrictions and bombings is the disproportionate mass death and erasure of Palestinians with disabilities. Similar impacts have been seen before in various eugenicist actions throughout history.
In the US, Police killed 1,232 people last year. An estimated 30–50% of people killed by police have some sort of disability. Freddie Gray, Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, and Christian Hall all had disabilities and were either killed by cops or died in police custody. An estimated 50% of disabled Black Americans have been arrested by the time they turn 28.
Currently in Atlanta, a “cop city” is in the early stages of being built in Weelaunee forest, one of the largest remaining urban forested areas in the country. This has drawn mass protests, to which the police have responded with brutality, tear gas and flash bangs, and RICO charges. They also killed a protester, Tortuguita, who had their hands raised.
The police training center is going to train cops in “urban warfare,” implying warfare tactics are meant to be used against their own citizens. Many more cop cities are being planned across the US. With the Supreme Court set to rule on whether houseless people can be punished for sleeping in public, and 61% of houseless people in shelters estimated to have some sort of disability, the harm done by police to people with disabilities will likely increase as ordinances and policies alarmingly similar to “ugly laws” of the past become more common. Ugly laws targeted houseless people and people with disabilities, making it illegal for “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” These laws existed in various US cities from 1867–1974.
Both the NYPD and the Atlanta Police department have trained with the IDF, making disability justice, Palestine, and Stop Cop City all the more inexorably connected.
My Celtic ancestors were subject to a genocide and forced starvation by the British occupation. I am a person with a disability witnessing a mass disabling event and mass murder of people with disabilities.
We shouldn’t need to share a demographic with people to care about them and to advocate for their lives.
All of the above systemic atrocities are also disability justice issues. In Palestine and the US, all the above atrocities disproportionately affect people with disabilities and are funded by our tax dollars. Yet, most disability organizations haven’t advocated or spoken up about police brutality or the humanitarian crisis in Palestine. This is the case even though many experts including Raz Segal, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, have agreed that what is happening is a “textbook case of genocide.”
Collective punishment and forced displacement of a civilian population are both classified as war crimes and are actively being committed by Israel’s government and military. An estimated 90% of those killed are civilians, according to the Human Rights Monitor, making it more civilians killed than any conflict in the past century. More than half of Gaza’s population has been forced into Rafah, which is now being bombed.
When the Israeli military orders the evacuation of hospitals and/or bombs hospitals, how can people on life support get to safety? If people with various illnesses who require daily medication to survive can’t access them, what are they supposed to do? When cops kill disabled citizens and get away with it due to qualified immunity, how is this not a grave injustice against the disability community? How are these not our fights as well?
The origins of disability rights are rooted in intersectionality. The 504 sit-in, which eventually led to the Americans with Disabilities Act, would not have been possible without Brad Lomax, a member of both the Black Panthers and the Disability Rights movement. Due to the bridge Brad made between the groups, the Black Panthers supplied the sit-in with food and supplies needed to sustain the action.
If you have the audacity to call yourself a disability organization or advocate while witnessing targeted erasure of people of disabilities and mass murder in Palestine and in the US, there are some things we need to do. We need to demand a ceasefire. We need to demand food and medical aid be allowed in. We need to demand an immediate release of all political prisoners, detained civilians, and hostages. We need to demand the US to end qualified immunity.
If these aren’t your demands, I want you to ask yourself: which people with disabilities deserve your advocacy? If the answer isn’t all of them, I want you to consider the nature of disability. Our origins, our rights, our past; all are inexorably tied to intersectional liberation and solidarity. Our future needs to be as well. Anything else is hypocritical to the nature of disability itself.
Colin Buckingham (he/they) is a filmmaker, writer, actor, and disability advocate based in Brooklyn, NY. He’s the lead organizer of the New York caucus of SAG-AFTRA Members for Ceasefire. His works explore the intersectionality of disability and dwarfism, with the hope of creating and amplifying stories which uplift all historically targeted demographics.
