About this anthology and essay: Written by Talila A. Lewis, Esq., this essay was originally published in October 2020 in Abolition for the People, an online peer-reviewed anthology that brought together thirty essays from political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by anti-Black/Indigenous policing/prison systems. On October 12, 2021, Kaepernick Publishing published this essay along side more than thirty others in its first printed book, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing & Prisons,. The book features cover art designed by the inimitable Emory Douglas, and was edited by Colin Kaepernick, alongside Professors Connie Wun and Christopher Petrella. You will find this essay alongside essays from Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, Robin D. G. Kelley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruha Benjamin, Naomi Murakawa, Dylan Rodríguez, Russell "Maroon" Shoatz, Kenyon Farrow, Tamara K. Nopper, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Derecka Purnell, Marlon Peterson, Rukia Lumumba, and many others. Learn more about this project here; review versions of many of the essays online here. The online hashtag archive is at least partially available at #AbolitionForThePeople. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce, harvest, or "use" this essay in any way without requesting and receiving express and explicit consent from both the author and publisher.  Image of this essay, pg. 66, of the text, Abolition for the People. While it is well known that policing in the united states was originally developed and later honed to control Black and Indigenous people’s lives (these are not mutually exclusive groups) — our movement, labor, speech, ownership, family, and more — most are unaware that disabled people (and those labeled disabled) have always been primary among the carceral machine’s intended targets. In fact, there is evidence disabled people have the most frequent and catastrophic encounters with carceral systems, and ableism has long been central to the nation’s economic, political, legal, and social anatomy. Indeed, no social justice issue, including abolition, can be properly addressed without intentionally centering disability and ableism — and no social justice movement can be successful without disability justice at its heart. Understanding Disability, Ableism, Policing, and Incarceration Most of society has come to understand disability through a lens of whiteness, wealth, and other privileges that actively exclude the experiences of Black/Indigenous and low- and no-income people. Importantly, disabled people are disproportionately impacted by deprivation, violence and/or precarity. These environmental factors and socioeconomic experiences are a cause, complicator, and even consequence of all manner of disability. More importantly, one does not have to be disabled to experience ableism. Rather, ableism is a systemic oppression that allows social systems and individuals to assign value to people based on their appearance and their ability to re/produce, excel, and behave, among other things. Ableism evaluates people on their divergence (whether actual or perceived) from constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, and productivity. In the united states, these constructions are necessarily rooted, as is the country itself, in anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, misogyny, eugenics, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. For example, enslavers, scientists and doctors, economists, religious leaders, and others claimed that Black people were less intelligent, capable, and sentient and therefore naturally suited for slave labor. To this day, Black/Indigenous people and low and no income people--regardless of their disability status--are depicted as biologically inferior, less capable of making societal contributions, and more likely to be dependent on others. These ableist ideas are used to justify violence, discrimination and oppression including medical rationing, labor exploitation, incarceration and institutionalization, family regulation, deprivation of resources, and more. Still, most people in social justice movements are unable to recognize ableism, and are unaware of just how ordinary yet lethal it is. But, policing, incarceration and institutionalization, labor exploitation and impoverishment, forced familial separation and deprivation of resources, climate and environmental injustice, and other state and corporate violence disproportionately affect disabled and other marginalized people while creating and exacerbating disabilities. Disability justice is a requisite for abolition because carceral systems medicalize, pathologize, criminalize, and commodify survival, divergence, and resistance. The past and present connections between disability and all forms of carceral violence are overt and overwhelming. Disabled/neurodivergent people comprise just 26% of the united states population — but represent up to half of the people killed by police, over 50% of the incarcerated adult prison population, up to 85% of the incarcerated youth population, and a significant number of those incarcerated in medicalized carceral spaces like nursing facilities, group facilities, and civil commitment, “treatment” facilities, and “hospitals.” Whether under the pretense of “care” or “corrections,” disabled people are highly represented in all carceral populations. History explains this phenomenon. The united states government and corporations have always used constructed ideas about disability and criminality alongside constructed ideas about class and race to classify, criminalize, cage, and disappear its “undesirables.” In this way, those in positions of power maintain the white supremacist status quo and create an exploitable labor pool while sowing discord within and across marginalized communities. For instance, mainstream doctors and scientists diagnosed Black enslaved people who engaged in work stoppages, “property” destruction, or “theft” with dysaesthesia aethiopica, or “rascality.” Similarly, mere thoughts of escaping enslavement was dubbed drapetomania. In both cases, these purported mental illnesses could only be had by Black people, and could only be “cured” by yet more unpaid hard labor and insufferable violence. These legitimate acts of resistance to enslavement (one of the first forms of incarceration) were not only labeled as mental illnesses, but they were simultaneously deemed criminal/delinquent. Or take the 1880 census’ “3D schedule,” which described the so-called “dependent, defective, and delinquent classes” using terms rooted in eugenics — now considered disability slurs — to label people as: “idiots; insane inhabitants; deaf and dumb; blind; homeless children; inhabitants in prisons; paupers and indigent inhabitants in institutions, poor houses or asylums, or boarded at public expense in private houses.” Forced institutionalization/incarceration and sterilization of people in all of these “classes” was not uncommon, and continues to this day. Carceral classifications premised on sex assigned at birth operate as a form of eugenics where people labeled deviant, disabled, and/or dependent are confined in conditions that rob them their ability to conceive during their most fertile years. If this is not evidence enough, disenfranchisement of people with felony records and people with disabilities can often be found within the same section of many laws. Many felon-disabled disenfranchisement laws were enacted in the years immediately following the 1840 U.S. Census. This census falsely claimed that Black people had higher incidences of “idiocy” and “insanity” than white people, and that free Black people had even higher incidences of these disabilities than enslaved Black people. Supporters of enslavement were committed to proving that Black people could not handle freedom. White doctors and scientists were interested in honing eugenics theories and practices to prevent Black/Indigenous people and others labeled “dependent, delinquent and defective” from reproducing and freely moving in and around “civilized” society. All the while, white legislators used the same ableist-racist-classist arguments to justify civic, social, economic deprivation to the same groups of people. Legislators crafted false narratives of laziness, ignorance, and uncivility to collectively disqualify people labelled “idiots” or “insane” or felons from voting. What many now call collateral consequences of incarceration — being barred from voting or holding public office, even after release — are often still called “civil disabilities.” Modern coronavirus criminalization, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct laws, and police officers and unions together with the medical-carceral industrial complex using pseudoscience diagnoses like excited delirium--a modern pseudoscience diagnosis that is used as legal justification for unjustifiable law enforcement murders of mostly multiply marginalized people--all help illuminate the unbroken chain between past and present carceral logics. These warped and circular rationales are used to justify horrific exploitation, experimentation, and extermination. They also quell public outcry over what otherwise would be deemed indefensible theft of dignity, life, and liberty. The goal of criminal and medical incarceration has always been civic, social, economic, and physical marginalization and death of people who society deems unfit. The categories of what constitutes “unworthy” are intentionally broad and intersected as to be endlessly applicable. The nimble, timeless, and comprehensive nature of structural and systemic oppression demonstrates that power holders deeply appreciate how identities intersect and illustrate why intentionally intersectional responses to state violence are necessary. When abolitionists do not have a strong disability justice analysis, systems of incarceration simply recategorize and redistribute people into other violent carceral institutions for other manufactured reasons — often based on purported health concerns, criminality, and vulnerability. Knowing this, we are left no choice but to view carcerality much more broadly, through a disability justice lens. If we fail to fill this gap in our collective consciousness, ableism will continue to be used as an excuse for inflicting violence upon marginalized people under the guise of care, treatment, and rehabilitation. The Difference Between Disability Rights and Disability Justice Whereas disability rights seeks to change social conditions for some disabled people via law and policy, disability justice moves beyond law and policy. Disability Justice seeks to radically transform social conditions and norms in order to affirm and support all people’s inherent right to live and thrive. All social justice movements, then, must put the needs of disabled people — especially those at the margins of the margins — front and center. This work begins with unearthing and understanding the inextricable links between ableism and other systems of oppression. Abolitionist movements must contend with how disability and ableism interact with carceral-medical systems. These movements must be committed to abolishing all spaces to which marginalized people are disappeared. Disability rights communities must begin to practice disability justice and disability solidarity. Both of these frameworks demand a radical reorientation of our collective understanding of systems of oppression especially as related to disability, inter/dependence, and carcerality. Advocates for any other form of social justice, especially racial, environmental, and economic justice must work to understand how ableism interacts with other oppressions and violence to create, perpetuate, and exacerbate inequities. Such a comprehensive approach would challenge carcerality at its core. No longer could arbitrary concepts of class, criminality, or disability serve as a wedge between disability and abolitionists’ struggles — for they are one and the same. Similar to transformative justice and abolition frameworks, disability justice fundamentally alters our approach to everything we think and do. It provides meaningful and necessary context for marginalized people’s responses to their lived experiences. It helps us politicize our disabilities, love ourselves and others more fully, creatively dismantle oppression, and uplift people who are perpetually marginalized within our own communities and movements. It honors Black/Indigenous disabled wisdom, builds strong care networks, and develops community/cultural health and healing workers. It helps foreground the necessity of harm reduction, healing and transformative justice, and supplants punitive responses that find refuge in carceral logics and spaces. And it develops the requisite relationships, knowledge, and tools to help us practice accountable advocacy across identities, communities, and movements. Abolition depends on racial, economic, and healing justice — all of which depend on disability justice. We have an opportunity to bring to the fore experiences and connections that have largely been invisibilized in the abolition movement. Now is the time to challenge dominant narratives about disability, ableism, policing, and incarceration — to invite people to revisit everything they think they know about interlocking systems of oppression, and to commit themselves to disability justice. Successful abolition strategies will weave communities together by highlighting the ties between oppressions that lead to seemingly intractable structural and systemic inequity.  October 2020 Abolition For The People online release schedule from Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL. Police & Policing - Week of Oct 6 Colin Kaepernick, Dr. Angela Davis, Dr. Simone Browne, Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Kiese Laymon / Gwendolyn Woods, Dr. Stuart Schrader, Talila "TL" Lewis, Dr. kihana ross, Kimberlé Crenshaw | Prisons & Carcerality - Week of Oct 12 Morning Star Gali, Dr. Ameer Hassan Loggins, Dr. Jody D. Armour, Russel Maroon Shoatz, III and Russell Maroon Shoatz Jr., Dean Spade, Kenyon Farrow, Cristina Jimenez and Cynthia Garcia | Fuck Reform - Week of Oct 19 Dr. Dylan Rodríguez, Darrick Hamilton, Dr. Naomi Murakawa, Bree Newsome Bass, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Derecka Purnell | Abolition Now - Week of Oct 26 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley, Marlon Peterson, Rukia Lumumba, Dr. Dan Berger and Dr. David Stein, Andrea J. Ritchie, Frieda Afary & Lara al-Kateb, Mariame Kaba
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 American University Washington College of Law post-commencement. 18 May 2014. Washington, DC. L to R: My Great Uncle (may he rest); my Grandfather, Me, my Father, The Original T.A.L. "Double Eagle," is what they call those of us who find it in ourselves to graduate from American University twice. My first American University commencement came almost 20 years ago, on Sunday, May 13, 2007. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science while working multiple jobs and externships; experiencing housing insecurity; and while investigating wrongful conviction cases of disabled/deaf people who had been incarcerated for years, or decades, in some instances. Seven years later, on Sunday, May 18, 2014, I graduated from American University Washington College of Law ("WCL"). While in law school, I served as director of WCL's National Lawyers Guild chapter; co-founded WCL's Disability Law Society; and served as volunteer director of HEARD, the all-volunteer organization I brought into being in February 2011 and poured my heart, hands, resources into (alongside dozens of others). HEARD became the nation's first cross-disability abolitionist organization. I joined the faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf upon graduation from law school and continued serving as volunteer director of HEARD for nearly a decade in addition to my professorial duties, and a great deal more unpaid liberatory labor. There is much more; but for now, I will close this post, as my goal today is simply to mark time, offer gratitude, and sit in this place of reflection and reverence. Here are some photos from My Archive of my graduation twelve years ago, today. I was flanked then, as I am now, by kin, loved ones, educators, co-strugglers, youth, Elders, Ancestors & Unborn. Humble thanks to Creator for this life time heart vessel. May all that I do and all that I am honor Us. [Video description: Me, Talila A. Lewis, a dark brown-skinned Black young-looking almost-forty year old wearing a white linen loose-fitting stand collar button up shirt. I am wearing dangling multi-colored teardrop earrings, a geometric multi-colored beaded Guna Yala pulseras/bracelet on one arm and a silver bracelet with a heart dangling on the other arm. I am wearing a coblat/Frida Kahlo Blue durag with a creme pinchfront cowboy hat. I am seated in front of a white wall.] I was deeply honored to have been invited to share a few words during Patty Berne's Celebration of Life today. I will share more as time progresses and look forward to supporting with Patty's Legacy Work. For now, I just want to share this video as a form of respect for and to my Elder, now Ancestor, Patricia "Patty" Berne. Presente. "WE HONOR US." - PATTY BERNE Humble thanks to all the people who worked so hard to ensure that Patty's Celebration of Life was so memorable and special. Sending my deepest condolences, comfort, and compassion to Patty's families, loved ones, and all of our communities. Eternal gratitude to Patty for their offerings, love, care, encouragement and support. To learn more about Patty and to review some of Patty's heartwork, please see the resources below this transcript. ROUGH TRANSCRIPT, COMMENTS FROM TALILA A. LEWIS: [tips hat] Talila A. Lewis here. I bring greetings from The Deep South, El Negro Sur, of what is colonially known as the united states. I feel very honored to have been invited by Patty's families--families plural--communities, organizations, to share just a few minutes of words, just a few minutes! [chuckles gently]. Um . . . this has been very difficult; and I just feel very honored. I've had . . . Well, first giving honor, honor to The Divine Creator Spirit Ancestors who are the head of my life; honor to my family and everyone who has poured into me, including Patty, to ensure that I can be WHO I am, WHERE I am, AS I am. [deep exhale] I've had the privilege and honor of sitting at the wheels of Patty and learning with and from Patty, organizing with Patty in various formations over a span of more than a decade in different contexts. And it has been truly an honor and privilege. I can say with certainty that I would not be who I am without Patty’s love and encouragement and support and care. [signs *back in time* then pauses] I don’t want to tell too many stories. I was gonna tell y’all about the last time I was with Patty, but I wanna…I’ll hold that…for now. One of my first interactions with Patty: Patty reached out to me over a decade ago after I created an offering and put it out into the world. Patty's work and offerings were a huge influence to this offering. And Patty reached out; and I was so shocked because I studied Patty's work and knew who Patty was, but certainly didn't think that I would ever just have a random reach out from Patty. And they reached out and said…they offered gratitude and encouragement. And I said, “you honor me,” or something to that effect; and Patty wrote back: “We honor Us.” And, I really . . . I certainly was raised in that Tradition [signs concept *generational/tradition*] without, without those specific words; and to have those specific words put to the practice of honoring one another has been something that's really stayed with me for all of these years. And it's the story I tell to most people about Patty when I'm first talking to folks about what I'm rooted in and what Patty was rooted in. It was not performance. It was praxis. And in a time of great performance, one thing that I can say about Patty is that Patty embodied--praxised [chuckles], practiced what they preached. Loved so deeply so generously so freely; wanting nothing in return, except that we honor one another--that we honor and take care of one another. And I'm just so grateful to have shared timespace with Patty in this realm. I'm grateful that I will be able to call upon Patty for guidance as time progresses. And as my time nears an end . . . [smiles noting wanting to say more] I just want to offer heartfelt condolences to Patty's family and loved ones and to our communities. And I want to call us back to our humanity, to ourselves, to our communities, and call us into our power in this time--call us back into our collective power in this time. Thank you and I look forward to more conversation.  Image of Patty Berne in an off the shoulder vestido huipil blanco with red orange green flowers. Patty's jet black curly hair covers her shoulders, and she is wearing silver necklace and bracelet hammered metal. The headrest of Patty's wheelchair can be seen a bit in the background with the quote below. “Disability justice was a reaction to the ways that the U.S. disability rights movement “invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression – disabled people of color, immigrants with disabilities, queers with disabilities, trans and gender non-conforming people with disabilities, people with disabilities who are houseless, people with disabilities who are incarcerated, people with disabilities who have had their ancestral lands stolen, amongst others.”
-Patricia “Patty” Berne, Co-Founder, Executive & ArtisticDirector of Sins Invalid |
Author's NoteI dream incessantly of justice. Hoping to calm my mind & stir yours through this freedom space. Archives
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