Longmore Lecture: Context, Clarity & Grounding

This post serves to provide context,  clarity  and grounding for my February 19, 2019 Longmore Lecture at San Francisco State University, Stolen Bodies, Criminalized Minds & Diagnosed Dissent: The Racist, Classist, Ableist Trappings Of The Prison Industrial Complex.
 
Content warning: genocide, enslavement, eugenics, racist/ableist slurs, and various other forms of violence. Please exercise discretion.

By design, most people living on the stolen land known to many as the “United States” have not learned much at all about this nation’s violent and sordid history. Specifically, there is very little, if any, study of or engagement with past or current U.S. genocides, enslavement, wars, institutionalization, incarceration, or other atrocities. True depictions of the horrors that perpetually oppressed and terrorized peoples on this land experience are, for the most part, intentionally discredited, hidden away and undercut. Narratives that surface in their place are much more genteel renditions of the grotesque and irredeemable truth of the history of this nation. This “violence void” makes it difficult for U.S. inhabitants to process information related to U.S. history. In this way, violent U.S. history is invited to continue to form and inform violent U.S. present and future.  

My Longmore Lecture was an attempt to fill this void--to bring U.S. past and present into conversation with one of the oldest, most pervasive, and least understood systemic oppressions the world has ever known, ableism.

Captioned video of my lecture is available here; and the transcript here. Due to the short length of the lecture, there was a great deal that could not be shared or that may be easily taken out of context. This brief article lays out key points and  clarification; and provides important context and takeaways that may have been missed by lecturer, receiver, or both. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list and is not listed in any particular order:

• The root of racism is ableism; and the root of ableism is anti-Blackness. 
• Ableism & racism have always been inextricably linked. Each of these oppressions informs the other and depends on the other to survive and thrive. Therefore, it is impossible to end racism without ending ableism, and impossible to end ableism without ending racism.  Ableism is also at the root of every other oppression. 
• Disability is disproportionately represented in every single marginalized group.
• Disability is traditionally understood through a white, wealth, and otherwise privileged lens, making it difficult for people to see the humanity and disability in marginalized folks.
• Ableism is traditionally understood as being solely related to prejudice, discrimination and oppression against disabled people. This traditional understanding of ableism is not expansive enough. It misunderstands the radical nature of ableism. Here is my working definition of ableism which attempts to address some of the gaps in traditional framing. If you cite to this definition, please always mention that this is a working definition that is grounded in community work and conversation. Conversations and work with Dustin Gibson in particular have been critical in moving this definition to where it is (2020 updated version of the definition found here; and the 2021 updated definition found here):

Image of a black square with white writing in it that says: ABLEISM a·ble·ism \ ˈābə-ˌli-zəm \ noun A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence and excellence. These constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence and excellence are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics and capitalism. This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable or worthy based on people's appearance and/or their ability to satisfactorily produce, excel & “behave.” Importantly, you do not have to be disabled to experience ableism. a working definition by Talila "TL" Lewis

• Ask, “how is disability created?”, as opposed to “what causes disability?”   With this you begin to realize just how easy it is to create disability and how adept this country is at creating disability in those subject to atrocities, ire and violence. You also find that disability is created in large part the same ways that criminality and other social constructs are created. To create disability, among other methods, this country has required particular things then ensured that particular people are kept from accessing these things (e.g., literacy, language, capital, family, food, shelter, health, etc.).
• Violence is a cause and consequence of disability. Violence should be understood broadly. Deprivation of language, food, water, shelter, education, health, economic security, etc., are all forms of violence. In the U.S. context, disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty.
• Scientific racism-ableism is most easily found in how this nation has come to define, require, or understand:

            -Intelligence
            -Education
            -Literacy
            -Standardized Testing
            -Language
            -Achievement Gaps

• There are different kinds of intelligence. All kinds of intelligence should be honored but in the U.S. only particular kinds of intelligence are seen as relevant, important, worthy, valid.
• "Failing" racist, ableist, classist standardized exams is not actually indicative of much of anything. However, when these tests are announced as necessary and important, and youth told again and again that they don’t measure up because they do not perform well on tests that were not created for them, they (and others) begin to believe that they are less intelligent than others. Their futures are directly impacted because these tests are often required for "advancement."
• Use the terms enslavement and enslaved. My ancestors were born free, lived free and died free despite the institution of enslavement. "Slavery" and "slave" are intentionally passive and grossly inaccurate.
• 10 of the first 12 presidents "owned" Black human beings as chattel property.
• Every aspect of enslavement was indescribably violent & disabling.
• Slaveholding interests were constantly attempting to find rationalizations to support enslavement of Black peoples. Preachers, attorneys, legislators, economists, philosophers, scientists, etc., all found ways to justify maintaining enslavement.
• For the vast majority of the history of the “United States,” Black people were not just deemed inferior, but were deprived of the status of human—even after “all men are created equal.” Black people were deemed sub-human; categorized with beasts of the field and domesticated animals including “horses, cattle, asses and other brutes.” Black people were deemed suitable to beat, brand and breed--treated as tradable commodity. One globally popular French anthropologist argued that in such races as the Negro “the cranium closes on the brain like a prison. It is no longer a temple divine…but a sort of helmet for resisting heavy blows.”
• Because racism and ableism are mutually inclusive, dismantling racism requires a deep understanding of disability and disability-based oppressions (sanism, especially). 
• With regard to the creation of disability and its linkages to anti-Blackness, consider: The United States 1840 Census alleged that Black people were more than ten times more likely to be “insane or idiotic” than enslaved Black people.  While this was patently false, this U.S. government funded and published pro-enslavement propaganda was used to try to justify enslavement and white supremacists-ableist ideas and practices for decades to come. Following this census,  argued that enslavement was best for the Negro and a "burden" of the white man. 
• One of the more popular beliefs during enslavement was that “the Negro was doomed by his natural intellectual limitations to a permanent state of enslavement… his brain was so fragile as never to be able to withstand the pressure of civilized responsibility.”
• The U.S. boasts centuries of anti-literacy laws to prevent Black people from gaining access to English literacy, all the while using literacy as a standard metric for purported intelligence.
• The U.S. government, including its legal system is the situs of legislated and adjudicated violence advanced by power holders at the expense of and by and through exploitation of marginalized people. The legal system exists to maintain concentrated power and exert control over resources, including the labor and land of marginalized people. Examples include but certainly are not limited to:

              -Enslavement
              -Black Codes
              -Convict Leasing
              -Jim Crow
              -Fugitive Slave Acts
*Black people were forbade from moving/migrating, reading, writing, assembling, voting, marrying, possessing anything (including their own children), and much more, by law.

• Most know that mainstream doctors and scientists (i.e., eugenicists, phrenologists, ethnologists) put forward ideas of biological inferiority of all races to the so-called "white race," but most do not realize that there was an almost universally accepted belief that Black people and other negatively racialized people were biologically inferior to white people.
• Eugenics informed the global colonial-imperial project. Eugenics was shared among all Europeans and helped inform Nazi Germany's Holocaust, where just 30 years prior to the Holocaust, the German state murdered between 35,000 and 100,000 Black Indigenous Herero and Namaqua peoples. 
• Protest and resistance that was/is completely rational for people experiencing extreme violence was/is labelled criminal (and often simultaneously a mental illness or at least particularly irrational):

                 -escape from enslavement - “drapetomania”
                 -work stoppages by enslaved Black people - “dysatheia atheopica” or “rascality”
                 -Protecting self or another from police brutality - “resisting”/“obstructing"/"interfering"
                 -Resisting restraint and seclusion - “excited delirium”
                 -Protesting murder of our children - “rioting”

• Disability is fluid. The same disability is held and expressed differently by different people and communities. Because the same disability reads different on different people it often goes is invisibilized by those who benefit from not seeing disability within certain people/communities. Every disability can have different affects on the body/mind depending on myriad factors—most of which are socioeconomic in nature (including, race, class, gender, etc.).
• Disability is fluid also in how it is perceived in different bodies by people in positions of power and authority.  How we are perceived determines how we are treated generally, and how we are treated (medically/health-wise), and policed. 
• In Black/Indigenous and negatively racialized peoples, disability is normalized (exist so much that it is often not even acknowledged/named as an additional identity) and erased.
• How expansive are we in allowing Black, Indigenous and negatively racialized people humanity? 
• If you have never experience living as a marginalized person subject to particular forms of violence including enslavement, poverty, institutionalization, incarceration, deprivation, police harassment and violence, etc. you are in no position to sit in judgment of the responses of those who are living through these violences. Even if you are subject to those things, your response is not how others might respond, and that is okay.
• "Normal" is a myth, a problem and a privilege.
• We are all interdependent. Some people have had their dependencies normalized.
• Acknowledgement of Black/Indigenous peoples’ collective complex traumas is critically important. However, in this country, centuries of stolen, swinging, swollen Black/Indigenous bodies is followed by erasure of violence and of our traumas, and of our trauma-induced disabilities.
• There are some things that don’t need to be labeled violence to be experienced as violence by marginalized peoples. Because of their past and present, their mere presence/existence is a form of violence. The sight, smell, taste, sound, touch, or thought of those things causes physiological responses.  A few examples:

            -Enslavement
            -Ships (see quote from Longmore Lecture for context) 
            -Nooses
            -Whips
            -Police
            -Prisons & asylums
            -Shackles & restraint chairs           
            (Each of these violences affect some people in ways that they do not affect others.)

• The ways Black/Indigenous peoples discuss disability are not the same ways in which white people discuss disability. Disability often is so integral to Black/Indigenous experiences that we do not have to name disability. 
• Most of the people killed by law enforcement are disabled people or they were experiencing disability in response to law enforcement’s behavior and/or presence (these people were disproportionately negatively racialized people); and the vast majority of the incarcerated population is disabled.
• Imprisonment and institutionalization are indescribably violent & disabling.
• Carceral racism-ableism is the myriad ways in which carceral systems—prisons as well as “mental health hospitals”— capitalize off of Black/Indigenous Disabled bodies and minds.
• Note that before there were “strange and exotic” animals in our zoos, there were “strange and exotic” people in our zoos and circuses, asylums, prisons. Carceral and medical systems are still set up to commodify the “undesirables,” the “other.” There are connections between enslavement, zoos, circuses, prisons and asylums that I am reserving for another article. 
• Disability rights is not disability justice. Learn about the distinctions between these. This is critically important.
• No one, regardless of deaf or hearing status, disabled or abled identities should be willingly engaging in conversation with law enforcement. Anyone being questioned by law enforcement should demand an attorney and not say one word to law enforcement other than, “I require an attorney and choose to remain silent.” If you are deaf or disabled, you can simply add, I am deaf/disabled. I require and interpreter/accommodation. I require an attorney and I choose to remain silent.” If an interpreter or accommodation is provided, use that accommodation to state, I require and attorney and I choose to remain silent.” Learn more on why no one should talk to police here. This is not legal advice.

Again, these are just some of the key points and important context. I may add other information based on feedback to this post. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share time and space with many wonderful people; and I honor those who were not there physically but whose breath and life have kept and taught me.