How to Survive Horrible Things Part 2: Enduring Eugenics
In 1867, San Francisco passed a law making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.” Such “Ugly Laws”—in place all over the country until an intolerably recent 1974—were simply one more knot in the rope that’s been strangling disabled folks since Capital first decreed that any body that can’t create wealth for the bosses is unworthy of existence.
One might be excused from believing that the Nazi concept of a “life unworthy of life” left our world splattered across Eva Braun’s armband along with the Fuhrer's gray matter, were not the insidious echoes of eugenical thought still screaming in our ears. It ricochets from the ableist algorithm that withheld care during COVID based on a psychotic assumption linking ability and human worth, to a Canadian suicide law that coerces non-terminally ill undesirables to self-deport out of existence rather than face an unassailable scarcity of care. As Derek Beres put it in a recent Guardian article,
“When (Health Secretary Robert F.) Kennedy claims that autism is worse than Covid-19 because the latter only kills 'old people' and 'metabolically healthy' people don’t die from it, or when a Maha associate claims that measles is 'an essential rite of passage, immunologically', you’re hearing the language of soft eugenics. Don’t let vaccines protect everyone, instead let the infirm and weak be culled so that the strong will survive and perpetuate.”
Because the sky will most definitely fall if an 80 year-old-man recently hired by 81 million people exercises the humility it takes to use a mobility device in public, "Aides reportedly conceded that it was politically untenable to have the U.S. president in a wheelchair," and so conspired to prevent President Joe Biden from using one. We couldn't have a sane, rational and responsible conversation about this oldest of presidents' eventual senescence in part because so many people couldn't stand to—or trust their neighbors to—contemplate, let alone contend with, the complexities of collective responsibility among and to the aging, and the fact that the privileged are mostly the ones who get to do it.
Only in a eugenical society, where even an essential service provider like Planned Parenthood must navigate the dark words of its beatified founder—the avowed eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who once wrote that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective”—can we truly appreciate the imperfect miracle known as Medicaid (MediCal in California). This chronically underfunded federal program that provides life-saving health care to impoverished Americans with all the panache of a bobbing log after a shipwreck—was suggested by a President famous for hiding his disability (FDR) and signed into law by another who worked from the toilet (LBJ -- perhaps the Crippest thing we’ve ever heard).
Like all true miracles, Capital's begrudging acquiesence to Medicaid has a secular explanation—a boring one about compromise and compassion and Federalism in a serendipitous moment where good was painstakingly chiseled from a bedrock of fear, bias and paternalism. And it is that exact secular miracle that keeps me (Brian) alive today, sucking air through one tube while I piss out another, living not for the bosses, but for the aspirational Jeffersonian promise at the heart of any argument for American greatness. This very promise of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness is ignored by a current regime hellbent on stripping so many of so much so a few can have a little more.
Choosing Interdependence Over Eradication
The life-saving log of Medicaid/MediCal isn't enough for all the human flotsam floating in the wreckage created by Capital's abuse of our bodies. Disability justice is how we—Crips, freaks, sick & mad people, neurodivergents, institutional survivors, casualties of state violence and imperial wars, Deaf and hard of hearing people, the deformed and the despairing, and those who hate us (starting the day they too are confronted with the unsparing reality that their own bodyminds are fragile, ephemeral, golden and sacred but don't actually work mechanistically like industrial cogs in a profit-fetishest's wheel)—survive the crushing reality that Capital is entirely happy to kill anyone not harvestable for material gain. We do disability justice because we know we are broken, like the split husk from which every raw green seedling emerges, and we do disability justice because we know we are whole, as part of the intricate web of life in all its diversity and complexity and unexpected magic, which continues to confound and inspire and rally us all at our best. The way we do disability justice is together. It's the only way it can be done.
Interdependence is the crux of our movement. Interdependence—a solidarity borne out of recognition of our innate vulnerabilities—is how we keep us alive and die trying. As Patty Berne, one of creators of this queer & BIPOC movement, put it:
“Disability Justice holds a vision born out of a collective struggle, drawing upon the legacies of cultural and spiritual resistance within a thousand underground paths, igniting small persistent fires of rebellion in everyday life. Disabled people of the global majority—black and brown people—share common ground confronting and subverting colonial powers in our struggle for life and justice. There has always been resistance to all forms of oppression, as we know through our bones that there have simultaneously been disabled people visioning a world where we flourish, that values and celebrates us in all our myriad beauty.”
Solidarity among and with disabled people is not optional if the working class is to out-survive and defeat capitalism and its currently rabid fascism. Abled people are ill-equipped to survive this antifascist fight without us. They may have never been in a situation where all of the normative rules for human existence are inverted in their own flesh and blood lives, and political inversion on a massive scale is what we are all undergoing together now. Disabled people have already had to learn how to create community out of extreme isolation, have had to muster the courage to show up in public knowing that our very presence will inspire contempt, rancor and worse. People who haven't been marginalized don't have these skills. The survival craft. They haven't cultivated the pluck that it takes to pick yourself up, again and again, day after day, when all the alarms are sounding and the doors won't open and the lights make your brain melt and your limbs are in shattering pain and you are dealing with voices that tell you to just shrivel up and die. Not as an apex existential crisis with soaring soundtracks and fabulous makeup, not as a one-off you can tie up neatly with a bow, but every. Single. Day. They haven't faced that.
But we, the quarter of the population who have nonconforming bodyminds, live this oppression constantly, and are undeterred by its current iteration. The surreality of our embodiment in an economic hegemony that hates us for being is the air that we have adapted to breathe. We have learned to stare into the slobbering maw of economic and state and corporate and institutional violence every day, everywhere we live, across the generations and say: fuck you. We exist. We remain alive out of defiance and the defiant and limitless expanse of our love for ourselves and each other. That is our politics. The rest is details.
Natural Comrades
Disabled people are uniquely primed for socialist organizing, and it is self-defeating not to prioritize us in every DSA chapter, in every action, and in every member recruitment drive. We are more than a quarter of the population, are overwhelmingly working class (typically, poor), we are intersectional, we are where most people end up at some point during, if not the end, of their lives, and we are already excluded in large numbers even from labor organizing, because we are often unable to conform to the productivity fetish of Capital. In an articulation of the Third Principle of Disability Justice offered by Berne in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice:
“3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC. We are anti-capitalist, as the very nature of our mind/bodies often resists conforming to a capitalist 'normative' level of production. We don’t believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of 'labor' as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.”
Disabled people know in our bones what abled people often fear and temporarily elude facing:
Only once we acknowledge the challenges of our shared dependence, along with our irreducible differences, can we fully value the skills and resources necessary to promote the capabilities of everyone, whatever our distinct needs, whether as carers or cared for, noting the frequent reciprocity of these positions. Recognizing our needs both to give and to receive care not only provides us with a sense of our common humanity, but enables us to confront our shared fears of human frailty, rather than project them onto those we label as 'dependent.'“
In this we hold the keys to create the "caring economy" of our dreams, as articulated in The Care Manifesto.
DSA must have the backs of disabled people, because we are you, we are who you will be, and we are the bodies you will have to step over on your way to doing anything else if you don't. Should we persist as a nation that relegates its most vulnerable members to mass graves? No? Then fight for Medicaid, MediCal in California, which rich politicians want to defund so they can buy more mega-yachts. Fight for SSI. Fight for SNAP, CalFresh in California. Fight for ramps over stairs. Fight for Medicare For All. Fight for a worker's compensation system that refuses to humiliate injured workers. Fight for your neighbor who is too scared to tell you they are sick, to ask for help when they need it, to give you the wisdom they sit in, through long dark nights and blistering days. Fight for access: language access, structural access, online access, transit access. Fight for the person who isn't in the room because of the room.
We can fight hate with rage, or sorrow, or a patient understanding extended to those moving at a different pace, or water bottles on a sweltering picket line, but we fight it best together, interdependently, with sharp tongues and soft hearts, searching for a greatness not lost, but found in every kind word and selfless act, in every tear shed and setback faced, in every impossible possibled and bitter pill swallowed. Only through solidarity can we hold this secular miracle of our mutual survival—including Medicaid—together. It's the way we will win.
Further reading:
Sins Invalid's 10 Principles of Disability Justice is an anchor for our own work and we are grateful for the brilliance of the queer BIPOC people who articulated and exemplify it.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Kakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press. 2018)
The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, by The Care Collective (Verso, 2020)
Matin, B.K., Williamson, H.J., Karyani, A.K. et al. "Barriers in access to healthcare for women with disabilities: a systematic review in qualitative studies." BMC Women's Health 21, 44 (2021).
Sharpe, Jason A et al. “Social Risk Factors Are Associated With Disability Prevalence - Results From 17 States in the 2017 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System.” American Journal of Health Promotion: AJHP vol. 37,4 (2023), pp. 453-463.