What many of my fellow activists and thinkers and doers seem to have forgotten is that it’s possible to have complicated, nuanced discussions without compromising our values and what we fight for. It was built on eugenics – a white supremacist science that depends on ableism to decide which brains and bodies are functional, fit, healthy, and worthy – and on genocide, and on rape. (The attackers in this case are Black while the victim is white.) And we’ve witnessed an explosion of response/analysis completely failing at intersectionality – either missing the anti-Blackness or missing the ableism, or both, while the entire history of this country was built on the backs of murdered and brutally displaced Indigenous peoples, and out of the labor of forcibly trafficked and enslaved Black people on much of the same unceded land. Many kinds of people who readily voted for Trump – the ones who believe that being white means they are under attack, the ones who feel that the first Black president was an abject failure essentially because he is Black, the ones who are inexplicably terrified by more open and public discussions about power, privilege, and oppression – have immediately begun to use this attack to further push an anti-Black, racist agenda by blaming it on the Black Lives Matter movement. When 2016 came to an end, 2017 had hardly crept into existence before sensationalist headlines spattered news of a vicious attack on a young disabled person by four fellow young people. This is the reality for those of us doing far more than is theoretically humanly possible, those of us who have no choice about doing the work, those of us who literally cannot stop or turn off our minds.
My comrade Talila Lewis (better known as TL) talks about being at and beyond capacity, constantly. Not for one moment have my friends and comrades rested, because not for one moment have we been able to pause the train wreck. activists on genocide in Aleppo and eugenicist mass murder in Sagamihara. It brought another continual onslaught of violence in the history of the United States, everywhere from the furtherance of horrific state violence against Indigenous peoples in Standing Rock and the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, to the near-silence from U.S. 2016 killed many beloved people, including openly genderfluid, disabled, mad, and other marginalized and oppressed people of color. My partner, my friends, and I kept joking, darkly, between November 8 and the end of 2016 that the dumpster fire that was last year was finally hurtling toward its merciful end to die incinerated in the nuclear fission that is the sun. I’m writing to you, already reeling, in the beginning of 2017. Crip Conversations: Lydia X.Z.(Content/TW: Discussion of racist and ableist violence, mentions of sexual violence)ĭear fellow organizers, activists, rabble-rousers, and rebels,
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