Becoming a Disabled Multitude

by Shaya French

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I was in a room of disabled people painting political and heartfelt messages onto banners that we’d march with at any of a dozen of upcoming marches for health care, for immigration justice, to resist authoritarianism.

My disability-justice-community-builder-extroidonaire friend introduced me to one of their friends, saying, “You’ll really like them, they think about a lot of the same things you do, disability and spirituality, I think you’ll really get along.”

I asked how they connected disability and spirituality. And they told me that disability really wasn’t core to how they saw themselves. 

I looked around the room at this group of people brought together around the idea that disabled people can make political change. I wanted to say, “But it’s not just about you and how you see yourself, it’s about so much more.” But in that moment I didn’t have the words to define the “so much more” so I didn’t say much in response and I’ve been thinking about what I’d want to say ever since. 

Claiming disability as a political identity category was a deliberate move by disability rights leaders in the 1970s and onwards to establish disability as a civil rights category. They had been told their whole lives that the problem was their disabled bodies or minds and they rejected that and said “No, society isn’t set up for us. Society disables us when there aren’t ramps or curb cuts or a lift to get on the bus.”

Their organizing and claiming disability as a political identity brought us 504 legislation and meant that the federal government was responsible for creating appropriate education for every child. It gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act and recognized ASL as a language that needed to be accommodated for in health care settings. It gave us the Fair Housing Act that sets accessibility standards so wheelchair users have buildings that are built accessible, at least some of the time. 

And this use of disability as identity continues into the disability justice movement–a movement focused on BIPOC and LGBTQ disabled people and the cultural changes we need to survive. Often disability justice movement workers replace the word disability with the spicier “crip” but both disabled and crip are political identities. When Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance organization, puts on a dance performance that has a cry out for crips to never leave each other behind in climate apocalypse they are calling on the power of this political identity. When Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha talks about the critical work of building Crip Care Networks where one person helps someone get out of bed one day and they help with some necessary spreadsheeting the next, Leah is referencing our collective identity. 

My disability has brought me pain (physical and emotional) and I have had to reckon with that. But ultimately, identifying with disability for me is not about that. It’s also not about how disabled I am on a given day, month or year. It’s about who I align myself with. It’s about saying disabled people are my people and I will fight for us. I will fight for the rights and existence of other disabled people because I recognize them as kindred. 

And there are people for whom whether or not they call themself disabled is hardly a choice. Everyone else is going to look at them and call them disabled. And those are the people who need me to say I see them as my community the most.

My willingness to connect with other disabled people and prioritize and fight for the needs of us as a disabled collective, over my individual needs, is where this fire, this political identity, and this deep community is formed. 

So when I read this passage, Lech Lecha, where God says, “I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted.” I think about what this means in a disability context. What does it mean to be a multitude, to be that powerful? I imagine as many people as the dust on the Earth holding this political identity, how powerful would we be then? Is there a way for that to happen that doesn’t dilute its meaning entirely? What does it mean to feel kinship that’s not based on blood?

I’ve created a sense of belonging and a lot of meaning for myself off of my identity based communities. I love being queer and being connected to so many queer ancestors and queer people living now who have created compelling art, fought for our rights, and created a whole culture. I have developed a sense of deep acceptance for my body by participating in disabled and fat communities. And I didn’t do this by escaping my disability or fatness but instead being taught by dozens of people better ways to navigate the world in the body I have that mainstream culture sure as hell wasn’t teaching. 

I think back to my own disability political awakening. It started with talking to another disabled person, recognizing our shared experiences of medicalization for our physical disabilities. Questioning if this amount of surgery or physical therapy made sense to do when our bodies would never achieve able bodied normalcy, particularly when all of the interactions with medical professionals who believed our bodies were the problem were so emotionally painful. And then I read Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, a book of beautiful writing that weaves personal experience and disability history and political theory that located the problem outside of my and other disabled people’s body-minds. It helped me understand my experiences were shared by multitudes of people and there were people who benefited from us feeling alone and not fighting for what could be ours. And eventually, in 2017, I found my way to an organizing effort at my local independent living center and joined fights to keep the Affordable Care Act so no one could be denied health care for a pre-existing condition and to preserve door-to-door transportation for disabled people (paratransit). And with those experiences, I began to see myself as part of a community, part of a multitude. 

What does it mean for God to promise you multitudes? What would it mean for God to promise us multitudes right here and now when our movement is small…. There is no lack of disabled people in this country. But there is a lack of disabled people who identify as such. We don’t need more people to become disabled. We need more people to get political about it. To see that they have a stake in these fights. To talk to other disabled people. To believe that coming together around a common cause can change things. That there can be billions more in Medicaid money, there can be more housing that works for our bodyminds, there can be improvements in the education resources and strategies used, there can be helpful, non-coercive mental health care. 

Finding the multitude is not always simple. We don’t have disability organizing efforts in every town and city. But the ones we do have started with everyday people talking with other disabled people, realizing they had shared needs and organizing to get those needs met whether it was about petitioning the Public Works office and City Council to provide a longer pedestrian walk signal at a dangerous intersection or holding a vigil when a Black disabled person was killed by police and demanding a police accountability task force. Who are the disabled people in your life who might want to talk with you about disability? Are there spaces online you can tap into? 

Returning to the parasha, this project of creating powerful disabled multitudes does seem like a project of the God of Abraham. This is a God who cares about whether people know their lineage*, know who they’re from, that they hold the identity of “Chosen people.” 

Does that mean God is with me in every one on one organizing meeting where I invite someone else into being politically disabled? Is God with us when we go as a group and take up the whole Statehouse hallway and say we are disabled to Congressperson after Congressperson? Is God with us when we take the streets? Because perhaps God has already made our multitudes and it is up to us to find them.

*To understand our disabled lineage I recommend reading books like Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha’s The Future is Disabled, Corbett O’tool’s Fading Scars or watching Crip Camp.

Shaya French is the Director of Organizing at Senior and Disability Action in the Bay Area, CA. Ze works on campaigns related to transportation, housing and health care for seniors and disabled people. In hir free time, ze enjoys writing visionary fiction about what the world will look like when our social movements win and being part of the Or Shalom synagogue.