10 Principles of Disability Justice

There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with disability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to reach out. People need to be lifted up.

Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century
photo by Eoin Greally

Savage Craic intimately understands disability and recognises that all bodies are unique and essential — we all have strengths and needs that must be met.

We are powerful, not despite the complexities of our bodies and minds, but because of them.

[See “What is Disability Justice”]

A core part of our mission, to advocate for health autonomy, is informed by disability justice — we use the Principles crafted by Sins Invalid to help map our queer futures.

The full, expanded version, is available in pdf, with other resources on our Free Zines & Papers page.

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1. INTERSECTIONALITY “We do not live single issue lives” –Audre Lorde. Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world “invalid.”

2. LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED “We are led by those who most know these systems.” –Aurora Levins Morales

3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITICS In an economy that sees land and humans as components of profit, we are anti-capitalist by the nature of having non-conforming body/minds.

4. CROSS-MOVEMENT SOLIDARITY Shifting how social justice movements understand disability and contextualize ableism, disability justice lends itself to politics of alliance.

5. RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.

6. SUSTAINABILITY We pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long term. Our embodied experiences guide us toward ongoing justice and liberation.

7. COMMITMENT TO CROSS-DISABILITY SOLIDARITY We honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, knowing that isolation undermines collective liberation.

8. INTERDEPENDENCE We meet each others’ needs as we build toward liberation, knowing that state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives.

9. COLLECTIVE ACCESS As brown, black and queer-bodied disabled people we bring flexibility and creative nuance that go beyond able-bodied/minded normativity, to be in community with each other.

10. COLLECTIVE LIBERATION No body or mind can be left behind – only moving together can we accomplish the revolution we require.

photo by Eoin Greally

This is disability justice. We honor the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies and minds will not conform. Disability justice is not yet a broad based popular movement. Disability justice is a vision and practice of what is yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great-grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful. — Sins Invalid

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