Demos Journal: Why the fight against racism and ableism must be shared

I am learning, through Ben-Moshe’s genealogy of carceral locales in Decarcerating Disability, that the idea of ableism is political in itself.

This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarcerationI am learning, through Ben-Moshe’s genealogy of carceral locales in Decarcerating Disability, that the idea of ableism is political in itself (Ben-Moshe, 2020). It reminded me of reading James Baldwin, who detailed how whiteness was dependent on blackness, meaningless without the fabrication of blackness. While I knew that whiteness was not neutral, I had not yet connected the dots that ‘ability’ was not neutral either. In the very first pages of Decarcerating Disability, Ben-Moshe makes clear the importance of “race-ability” and the intimate connection between ‘race’ and ‘ability’:

By race-ability, I am referring to the ways race and disability, and racism, sanism, and ableism as intersecting oppressions, are mutually constitutive and cannot be separated, in their genealogy (eugenics, for example), current iterations of resistance (in the form of disability justice, for example), or oppression (incarceration and police killing, for example). 

Full article at Demos Journal.