Welcome to the Neighborhood North Link!

gUniversity Friends Meeting website

To Go to Meeting from the Station

To celebrate the October 2 opening of the University District Light Rail station, and in appreciate of a minute some time ago embracing all the changes coming with the opening of the Light Rail as part of the fight against #Climate catastrophe, RantWoman offers the following transportation related commentary  

RantWoman invites readers to use their own dang search engines to find info about all the opening day festivities at the different stations. RantWoman thinks it would have been AWESOME for Friends to consider some kind of opening day event; RantWoman will not comment about reception of this and many other suggestions.

RantWoman is due to host a blind people Zoom meetup and is unclear whether that will be compatible with in-person appearance. As a public service though for anyone who might be curious about Quakers and want to come to UFM on the train RantWoman offers the following very  imperfectly blind-person friendly commentary:

RantWoman's suggested pedestrian routing from the University Station to UFM.:

--Turn R on NE 43rd as you exit the station. RantWoman is unsure of blind person landmarks around the station. RantWoman walked through the area recently and RantWoman respectfully hopes many elements of pedestrian mess will be cleaned up by opening day.

Walk W on NE 43rd to Roosevelt which is one-way going South. Do not try to cross Roosevelt here, Instead turn L and walk S on Roosevelt to NE 42nd St. There is an accessible pedestrian signal and newish curb cuts well delineated with tactile elements including yellow domes. Cross Roosevelt at the light . RantWoman prefers crossing on the N side of 42nd.  (Thought question: why? Hint: NE 42nd sort of dead-ends at Roosevelt so if the walk signal is on to cross Roosevelt, there may be cars turning L onto Roosevelt.) For extra pedestrian fun, there is a bike lane on the W side of Roosevelt.

Once you cross Roosevelt, continue S. There is a building with a courtyard set back from the street. Then there is a parking garage driveway. Then more building and finally a one-car length parking lot facing the rest of NE 42nd St. (Yes, NE 42nd has a discontinuity. RantWoman had nothing to do with naming the streets and encourages readers just to savor this moment of Seattle esoterica.

There is a traffic signal at NE 42nd but it is not an APS. There are yellow domes along the rounded corner but the corner is not well delineated in relation to the street. Sometimes there are cars turning R with the traffic signal but most of the traffic is southbound.

Once you are across 42nd, you have two choices. 

Turn R. Walk along the S side of NE 42nd St to 9th Ave NE. There will be one parking garage exit on the left midblock. Turn L and walk S. Stay on the E side of 9th because it has better trees and better sidewalk. Stay there until you get to the end of the second building. There are driveway exits on the left out of both buildings. When you get past the buildings, you should find the same street crossing described below to cross 9th NE and enter the Meeting.

OR

Continue S on Roosevelt along a building with very new sidewalk. The sidewalk curves around the building. If you follow the building eventually there will be a few stairs to your left back up to the main sidewalk. Beyond staying to the Left, RantWoman cannot remember a good landmark to stay on the regular sidewalk. 

Past the stairs, there is shrubbery on the right. There is a semicircle concrete bench and the the SB sidewalk and a street crossing across 9th Ave NE. The street crossing has yellow domes on both sides. The sidewalk on the Meeting side of the street goes past a planted area nd then to the entryway to the Meeting house. If you start to notice a downslope there will be stairs up to the entry.

Google suggestion is to walk S on Brooklyn Ave NE to Campus Parkway. RantWoman does not remember precise street math but thinks this is about 2.5 blocks. Campus Parkway has a boulevard in the middle. If you find the boulevard, back track to the N side of the street.  RantWoman thinks there is a new accessible Ped signal at Brooklyn and campus parkway.  RantWoman has no current info about sidewalk quality but notes past concern. At campus Parkway turn R then follow campus Parkway a couple blocks and around a bend to a crossing of 9th Ave NE. 

There is one block on Campus Parkway where you should bear left in order not to walk up to a parking lot that will be no help as a safe route. As the curve starts there is a wall along the right and sometimes there are blackberries. That crossing has poor curb definition because of an old curb cut. RantWoman also does not like crossing 9th NE there because of her own vision and driver line of sight issues.  But readers who cross there need to walk uphill past a wall and past the stairs. RantWoman also does not like the other crossing option which is to walk along the E side of 9th NE until there is a street coming in from the Right and then cross 9th to the entry to the grounds.

Da Bus

RantWoman's best transit option, the Metro rt 48. will not change. Nor will RantWoman's preferred walking route from the bus, a route different from the one suggested by Google.

The Google suggested walk route is to ride the 48 bus to the 15th Ave NE and Campus Parkway stop which is N of the accessible pedestrian signal needed to cross 15th Ave NE. The signal cycle at that intersection is now what is called a Barnes dance, after the traffic engineer who pioneered it. One part of the cycle pedestrian signal are on in all directions. RantWoman thinks the other parts of the signal cycle handle each direction of the traffic on its own interval but will have to go check. Hopefully the new traffic signal timing has cut down on the count of car vs pedestrian collisions reflected as a large blob on a map of many collision count blobs around the U district. 

RantWoman still does not feel entirely safe eve n with the new signal cycle but at least the streets are orthogonal so one can either immediately walk N to the N side of campus parkway or walk a block or so W and then walk N to Campus Parkway and follow the directions as above. In fact, if RantWoman did not already dislike the street crossing at 15th Ave NE she would definitely walk a block or two West to find better curb cuts and accessible ped signals than the intersection of 15th Ave NE and Campus Parkway needed to cross Campus Parkway.

RantWoman's preferred pedestrian routing is to ride the bus to the last two at 15th Ave NE and NE 4nd, back track to the corner of 42nd and cross 15th NE. There is a low wall along the L (East) side of the sidewalk but RantWoman is not thinking offhand of a good landmark to line up with the crosswalk. Alas, there also are traffic signals but not APS both at 15th Ave NE and at NE 42nd and the Ave..

Travel on the N side of NE 42nd W to Roosevelt. The sidewalk between 12th and 11th NE is currently crumbly because of construction traffic, but the sidewalk is still on the whole better, smoother than on the S side of NE 42nd. There is a traffic signal that is not an APS at 11th NE. The street is one-way northbound. At Roosevelt, follow the directions as above just as if one were comin from the University Station.

Despite the tone of this post, RantWoman wants to hope that visitors will experience the best of what UFM has to offer as a worship space and faith community. RantWoman is also called to be faithful to her light about ways the community might stop embarrassing itself about MANY issues, but RantWoman is doing the best she can to be worshipful and not insufferable about that point.

Accessibility shouldn't require time travel...but when time travel happens anyway.... Disability Awareness Month Seasoned with Do Better Next Time

Take me to your virtual
Quarterly Meeting.
Try, try, try to catch up on sleep

October is National Disabilities Awareness Month or National Disability Employment Awareness Month or several other national awareness months. RantWoman, thanks to some seasonal threads of time travel proposes to devote this year's National Disabilities Awareness Month posts to the theme DO BETTER NEXT TIME

RantWoman may or may not get around to looking up all the Awareness topics swirling around the month of October. But this spell of time travel reflections brought to you by the theme "Do Better Next Time" The theme was already swirling in the air when a random Zoom pairing made RantWoman gulp, tell the other party there are too many "Do better Next Time" themes to tackle one on one, go silent and then listen to a tale of talking to a cherry tomato plant, share meditations elicited by squashes. The cherry tomatoes and squashes get their own post. RantWoman is grateful things worked--even if she did send the voice of the cherry tomato plant a gentle "you missed my point" email about one thread in the conversation..

RantWoman invites readers to reflect on A WHOLE MONTH of DisabilityThemed entries from TEN years ago

Think if it like binge-watching, but don't feel you must read the whole month of entries at once..

What themes arise if you know the stories? 

What themes arise if you are new to the stories? 

Happy Disabilities Awareness Month EVERYONE

Nuclear weapons, African American Liberation, Gandhi

Introduction to Adult Religious Education program at South Seattle Friends Meeting

Sunday October 3, 9:15 am PDT

 Friends have always been solidly grounded in a commitment to peace.  Our peace witness remains constant even when various wars come and go and new weapons are invented.  Since 1945 nuclear weapons have been escalating in danger and cost.  The newest nuclear weapons are designed to be easier to use – and more likely to start a nuclear war that could destroy most life on earth.  The U.S.’s actual policies also have been escalating toward nuclear war, even though most Americans stopped paying attention after the Cold War ended 30 years ago.  The basic realities are easy to understand.  This one-hour session flows smoothly through a few steps of information, silent reflection, and sharing.  This will be informative and helpful regardless of how much background knowledge you have.

 James Lawson wrote:  "Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality." 

• James Lawson is an African American pacifist who resisted the military draft during the Korean war and after serving a federal prison term he went to India and met with people who had worked closely with Gandhi to figure out how to apply the Gandhian nonviolent methodology to liberating African Americans from racial oppression.  He became a Methodist minister and worked closely with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights Movement.  Years later he was still working for principled nonviolence in other parts of the U.S. and on other issues, including the rights of janitors and other low-wage workers in the Los Angeles area.  

 

Glen Anderson (360) 491-9093 glenanderson@integra.net  See my blog – www.parallaxperspectives.org – for information in the blog categories for “Nonviolence” and “Race” and “Organizing” 

 

Topic: Adult Religious Education 

Time: Oct 3, 2021 09:15 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87813071254?pwd=c2UyVmxmbHFCNzBCbGxPR0xQc3dUdz09

Meeting ID: 878 1307 1254

Passcode: 018346

One tap mobile

+12532158782,,87813071254# US (Tacoma)

Have Beach Towel will...Zoom

Take me to your virtual
Quarterly Meeting.
Try, try, try to catch up on sleep

RantWoman celebrates last weekend's 2021 PNQM virtual gathering: The Schedule, preparatory material and.. .

Think Joanna Macy

RantWoman has good intentions about harvesting some resources from the chat streams she has dumped into draft email. That may or may not happen. RantWoman has no idea whether the event links above will linger and is at peace, SORT OF, with the ephemeral nature of much on the internet.

RantWoman is missing the drive out of the city and over the mountains to fresher air and more natural exercise than her new under-the-desk exerciser. RantWoman is pondering whether the planet is asking that we do less travel and more Zoom, what would be the gifts of hybrid gathering, whether we should offer to help grace our beloved gathering site with some tech to support better internet access and / or some electric car charging options. In the latter case, RantWoman wonders whether charging infrastructure is getting ubiquitous enough that Friends might be able to count on charging vehicles in one of the towns on the way to the site. 

RantWoman celebrates the creation of an ad-hoc disabilities committee. RantWoman celebrates the Light and energy of the young Friend called to convene the committee. That is enough for a fast snapshot. Stay tuned for more.

For readers wondering what the beach towel is doing here, RantWoman takes the beach towel to Quarterly Meeting as part of her bring your own bedding practice.

For Fourth Saturday Worship: among other things, is ADON OLAM ad drinking song? - Hampton Synagogue - Thanksgiving Concert 2017

Fourth Saturday worship is not exactly on hiatus for September. It has been swallowed up by virtual Pacific Northwest Quarterly Meeting, with a format shaken up and Friends invited to participate in the whole weekend. So Friends who might want to worship at this time are invited to do so without RantWoman's help. RantWoman is pretty sure you can do it.

The first evening program closed with an invitation to think of living life in a permanent state of gratitude. RantWoman was not quite ready to go all the sort of sarcastic, (sarcastic but true) Bad Friend directions that came to her. Luckily, instead of more videos by Joanna Macy, YouTube served up several variations of the Adon Olom. RantWoman permitted herself not even to try to untangle all the threads of the Wikipedia entry but just to enjoy the music and repeat her occasional musing about gender identity: RantWoman would only ever consider transitioning if she thought she might emerge with a halfway decent low range singing voice.

Adon Olam with a female soloist

Two Items about the file "The Eyes of Tammy Faye." Jessica Chastain: Tammy Faye Wrapped Her Arms Around The LGBTQ Audience

There is a new film out which paints Tammy Faye Bakker, wife of the televangelist Jim Bakker, in a sympathetic light.

Note that Bakker, (pronounced Baker) has two k's.

 

Tammy Faye Bakker helped give a face to the AIDS epidemic. A new biopic honors that legacy.

Full ABCNews Citation for article below

 

How televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker became an unlikely ally in the AIDS crisis

In the new Jessica Chastain-led film, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," Bakker's groundbreaking 1985 interview with a gay Christian pastor living with AIDS takes center stage.

Tammy Faye Messner (formerly Bakker). Burton McNeely / Getty Images file

Sept. 17, 2021, 3:30 AM CDT / Updated Sept. 17, 2021, 5:39 AM CDT

By Alexander Kacala

On Nov. 15, 1985, just two months after President Ronald Reagan finally uttered the word "AIDS" publicly, the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker did something considered bold and fearless at the time: She interviewed a gay man living with HIV on live television and treated him with compassion. 

"How sad that we as Christians - who are to be the salt of the earth, we who are supposed to be able to love everyone - are afraid so badly of an AIDS patient that we will not go up and put our arm around them and tell them that we care," Bakker said tearfully during her 24-minute interview with Steve Pieters (pronounced Peters). 

The conversation aired during "Tammy's House Party" on the Praise the Lord network, a channel that reached 20 million viewers across dozens of countries at the height of its popularity. It is thought to be the first time a televangelist ever talked to someone living with AIDS or HIV on television, and the in-depth interview (too in-depth for some viewers) became an important milestone in AIDS and LGBTQ history 

While Bakker, who died of cancer in 2007 at age 65, has a complicated legacy, muddied by her first husband Jim Bakker's fraud conviction, her record on gay rights, particularly the empathy she showed those living with

HIV and AIDS, has remained clear and was radical for its time.

Bakker's watershed conversation with Pieters took place more than 35 years ago, but it has been thrust back in the spotlight thanks to the new film "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," starring the Oscar-nominated actor Jessica Chastain in the titular role. Based on the RuPaul-narrated 2000 cult

documentary of the same name, the film, which debuts in theaters Friday, prominently features this groundbreaking interview.

"When I saw the documentary and I saw that scene - that incredible moment between Steve Pieters and Tammy Faye - I knew how important it was, because my knowledge of Tammy was just what the media had fed me, this sensationalized version that focused on the drama," Chastain, who also was executive producer of the film, told NBC News from the Toronto International Film Festival. "That is not really the true story of who she was, and that blew me away." 

Chastain acquired the rights to Bakker's story nearly a decade ago and has been working to bring the film to the big screen ever since. 

Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye Bakker in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."SearchLight Pictures

"For me, that interview was the reason I had to make the film; it was the

most important scene," she said. "Steve Pieters is phenomenal, al  of his

answers were so loving and beautiful, and Tammy Faye, she had all these little naive questions. I'm convinced they saved lives with that interview, because many in the conservative evangelical world were disowning their

children who are coming out to them.

When Bakker learned, during that interview, that Pieters' parents accepted him when he came out to them, she got visibly emotional. 

"Thank God for a mom and dad who will stand with a young person," she said. "They're still your boy, they're still your girl, no matter what happens in their life, and I think it's so important that we as mom and dads love

through anything, and that's the way with Jesus, you know. Jesus loves us through anything."

To which Pieters responded: "Jesus loves me just the way I am, I really believe. Jesus loves the way I love."

The empathy of a survivor

While Bakker won't get to see herself portrayed on the big screen, Pieters - who was given eight months to live in 1984 - is still alive today. A Los Angeles resident and now 69, Pieters said he is happy to see his interview

with Bakker portrayed in the film and reaching a new generation that may not be aware of the horror and stigma those living with HIV and AIDS faced in the early years of the epidemic. 

"I don't really know why I've survived what killed so many other people,"Pieters told NBC News. "I was legally blind for a time, I was paralyzed on the left side of my body and my adrenal glands blew out. It very nearly killed me a couple of times, but they pulled me back from the brink, and I am here to tell the tale. Is it a miracle? Is it an anomaly? I don't know."

"The Eyes Of Tammy Faye" New York Premiere

Jessica Chastain and Steve Pieters attend the New York premiere of "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" at SVA Theater in New York on Sept. 14, 2021. Taylor Hill / WireImage

Pieters came "roaring out of the closet" in the 1970s and became an activist and pastor in a gay-affirming church, he said. In 1982, he got sick with what was then known as GRID, or gay-related immunodeficiency.  It would later be renamed AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. 

"I was terribly sick over the next few years, finally diagnosed with stage four lymphoma and Kaposi's sarcoma in April of '84 ," he said. "And I managed to survive that prognosis." 

"My doctor, God bless her, told me when I was first diagnosed terminal that not everybody was going to die from AIDS. She said, 'If there is one in a million survivors, why not believe you're that one in a million?'"

In 1985, Pieters said, he was the first patient to be given one of the first drugs scientists ever tried against HIV, an antiviral agent called suramin. About six weeks into the treatment, he said the cancers ignited by the virus

were in complete remission and disappeared. The drug, however, was extremely toxic, making him sick. Every other person in the trial died but one, he said.

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner signs her book "I Will Survive... And You Can Too." Mark Sullivan / WireImage file

Like Pieters, Bakker considered herself a survivor, and that survivor status is what connected her to so many people, according to those who knew her. She even wrote a book titled "I Will Survive . And You Will, Too" in 2003 that recounted her various struggles, including her divorce, her first bout with cancer and how she coped with addiction and depression. 

And like many people who survived the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Pieters said he has had to reconcile complex feelings about being a survivor. 

"What I discovered about that over the years is that I can't be fully alive if I allow the survivor's guilt to rule my life," he said. "I have to find the joy in life, each and every day."

"None of us have any guarantees about tomorrow," he added. "So I'm here now feeling joy in spite of whatever may be going on in my life or in the world, and that to me is what's really important. Joy, I've discovered, is not the absence of suffering, but the presence of faith and hope and love, and I

have tried to live that."

'The fearlessness of a drag queen'

It was during that deadly drug trial that Pieters sat down for an interview with Bakker via satellite from California. Bakker was broadcasting from the Praise the Lord studios in Charlotte, North Carolina. She claimed during their interview the reason Pieters wasn't able to travel to the studio was because of his chemotherapy treatments, but Pieters said there was more to the story. 

"I later found out that  - while Jim and Tammy would have been very hospitable towards me  - they were afraid that [their employes] might not treat me well, and that indeed the camera crew might not work if I was in

the studio," he said. "So I think it was a combination of them wanting to be careful for my health, but also to make sure that I wasn't treated badly by other employees."

Some critics of the interview have pointed to the invasiveness and even offensiveness of Bakker's questions - which included queries about Pieters' sex life, if gays could turn their kids straight and why Pieters had "nohope . to be straight"  - but Pieters said even though some of her questions left him speechless, he was happy she asked them.

"I've had a number of people who've seen the interview tell me over theyears, 'Well, she asked a lot of really kind of silly questions, especially about being gay,'" Pieters said. "But they were the right questions for the audience, and I knew that at the time - even though I was kind of flabbergasted when she asked me if I've ever had a sexual experience with a woman. But, you know, they were the right questions for her audience, and  took it as an opportunity to educate them."

Pieters also said he believes her questions about his sexuality had a more personal reason as well. "It has been said that in questioning me so closely about why I had to be gay, she was grappling with issues of her own

marriage," he said. 

In the late 1980s, fellow televangelist Jerry Falwell accused Jim Bakker of having sexual relationships with other men, including a Praise the Lord official, who revealed his alleged relationship with Bakker to a federal

grand jury convened to determine if ministry money was paid for sexual favors. Jim Bakker denied those allegations but was convicted of 28 counts of fraud and conspiracy in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was paroled in 1994 after serving just under five years. He has been married to his second wife for over two decades.

Whatever Bakker's intentions may have been, her interview with Pieters shook the Christian world and was seen as an act of defiance against the church and conservative political values. 

"It was powerful and it was radical, and she got in a lot of trouble for it," Pieters said of the backlash.

Tammy Sue Bakker at a taping of "The Sally Jesse Raphael Show" at Sea World

in San Diego, California, in 1990.Jim Smeal / Ron Galella Collection via

Getty Images file

Bakker's daughter, Tammy Sue Bakker, also uses the word "radical" when describing her mother, particularly the acceptance she said her mother showed to people who were ostracized by other high-profile Christians at the time. 

"I was not raised with judgment; that just was not in our house," she told NBC News in her first interview in 17 years. "It was always a beautiful thing, and it was always meaningful as far as that goes and just accepting. My best friend in high school was gay and that was the school we had at Heritage. Everybody was kind and loving to him, even at our church."

Tammy Sue Bakker was 15 when her mother interviewed Pieters, but she said she remembers it clearly. 

"I knew that when mother did the interview, that it was groundbreaking and that people were going to be angry, because Christians didn't understand it," she said. "I was proud of her for doing it."

"Her love was on display that day, and she was not ashamed of it," she added. "She didn't have that fear of what people were going to think. She wore makeup, she wore her wigs, she had her big boobs, she wore her crazy clothes and her big earrings and sang the way she sang. She had a book called 'I Gotta Be Me,' and that's her. That's the way she was."

In the 2000 documentary - which premiered when federally recognized same-sex marriage was just a pipe dream and gay sex was still criminalized in many states across the country - Tammy Faye Bakker was asked about her attitude toward gay rights. She notably replied, "We're all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn't make any junk." It's also a line used in the Chastain film.

Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, center, speaks with drag queens Jolene Sugarbaker, right, and Lady Bunny, left, before a Tammy Faye look alike contest in Cobalt, Washington, on June 8, 2002.Marvin Joseph / The

Washington Post via Getty Images file

Bakker's boldness and her refusal to conform was something that struck Chastain - and inspired her to draw a perhaps fitting comparison, as Bakker evolved into a gay icon of sorts and even served as inspiration for

gender-bending performers. 

"She had the fearlessness of a drag queen," Chastain said. "There was something about her, people talk about drag like a mask or her makeup is a mask, and for me, I saw it as a way that she was expressing how she felt

inside. It wasn't a mask; she wasn't hiding - it was truthful. She was being creative, she was being artistic. It was a beautiful thing about her."

Principles of Disability Justice

Stash a Resource right off the bat

Terminology for Critical Disability Studies Collective

The CIV Perspective: Understanding Cortical Visual Impairment from the inside out

RantWoman talks to herself

RantWoman, you SHOULD allow your readers to form their own opinions.

They can still form their own opinions. RantWoman is just called to HELP them.

RantWoman, you complain all the time about help that is not help. 

Yes. And anyone who thinks there is an oversupply here is invited to speak up.  

RantWoman are you SURE this isn't some weird personal thing or allergy to someone who is too smiley. 

Wanting dialogue is not MEANT to be the same thing as scary, but no. I'm not sure. Canwe please just give that problem to God for now?

God? Huh?

Disability hypervigilance? Allyship? Antagonism? Spiritual Accompaniment. Pure Argumentativeness

RantWoman is muddling about which strands of disability hypervigilance are most on point as an introduction to parts 2 and 3 of a piece on Principles of Disability Justice.

Several points are getting in the way of RantWoman fully appreciating this piece.

Who says I gotta hate capitalism to have disability justice?  RantWoman can bitch about corporate logos all over the T-shirts for a national convention. OR RantWoman can talk about equality in the workplace, equality in the marketplace, when we mean equality and when we mean equity and the world of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

But RantWoman, maybe the problem is you're just allergic to people who are too smiley?

Yep, sure. Maybe the problem IS RantWoman. Maybe, but the POINT of disability Justice, like all kinds of other aspirational frameworks is that no person is intrinsically a problem and there are many paths past difficulties.

Plus, on Planet RantWoman, SOMETIMES RantWoman interprets the ability to crank out large volumes of text implies either ability or willingness to have further dialogue. RantWoman has come to wonder what she is perhaps misinterpreting.

Now please enjoy the actual articles.

The Principles of Disability Justice (Part 2 of 3)

Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge

In June’s Gleamings I wrote about the first four principles of Disability Justice: Intersectionality, Leadership of Those Most Impacted, Anti-Capitalism and Cross-Movement Solidarity.

These principles were first articulated in 2005 by queer disabled women of color: Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milburn, who were soon joined by Leroy Moore, Eli Clare and Sebastian Margaret. Disability Justice work now happens all over, and it’s analogous to environmental justice and reproductive justice movements with its holistic and anti-racist approach.

This month I’ll talk about the next five principles, leaving the final principle for the September issue of Gleamings.

white supremacy culture. Friends’ practices fit well into this understanding of transformation.

7. Commitment to cross-disability solidarity: We value and honor the insights and participation of all of our community members, even and especially those who are most often left out of political conversations. We are building a movement that breaks down isolation between people with physical impairments, people who are sick or chronically ill, psych[iatric] survivors and people with mental health disabilities, neurodiverse people, people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, Deaf people, Blind people, people with environmental injuries and chemical sensitivities, and all others who experience ableism and isolation that undermines our collective liberation.

Disability is so diverse, and many of us have internalized ableism that gets in the way of being in solidarity with one another. How many non-developmentally-disabled folks have tried to convince people to see our humanity by saying, “I’m disabled, not stupid!”? But creating a hierarchy of disability is ableist and ultimately hurts us all.

8. Interdependence: Before the massive colonial project of Western European expansion, we understood the nature of interdependence within our communities. We see the liberation of all living systems and the land as integral to the liberation of our own communities, as we all share one planet. We work to meet each other’s needs as we build toward liberation, without always reaching for state solutions which inevitably extend state control further into our lives.

Caring for one another is part of being human, as is needing care. We don’t make all our own food, clothes, shelter, or medicine. We know too intimately how much we crave

5. Recognizing wholeness: Each person is full of history and life experience. Each person has an internal experience composed of our own thoughts, sensations, emotions, sexual fantasies, perceptions, and quirks. Disabled people are whole people.

I don’t know if I can communicate how meaningful this principle is to me. Disabled people are not fundamentally broken or incomplete or lacking.

We are whole.

We are enough.

6. Sustainability: We learn to pace ourselves, individually and collectively, to be sustained long-term. We value the teachings of our bodies and experiences, and use them as a critica/guide and reference point to help us move away from urgency and into a deep, slow, transformative, unstoppable wave of justice and liberation.

This principle is essential—and challenging. Urgency surrounds us all, both based on material circumstances and as a part of 3

connection with others. Wealthy, abled people’s needs are almost always met immediately and without a fuss, whereas poor and disabled folks’ needs are often stigmatized. Stigmatized needs usually only get met with strings attached: shame, control, surveillance, enforced poverty, etc.

9. Collective Access: As Black and brown and queer crips, we bring flexibility and creative nuance to our engagement with each other. We create and explore ways of doing things that go beyond able-bodied and neurotypical norms. Access needs aren’t shameful — we all function differently depending on context and environment. Access needs can be articulated and met privately, through a collective, or in community, depending upon an individual’s needs, desires, and the capacity of the group. We can share responsibility for our access needs, we can ask that our needs be met without compromising our integrity, we can balance autonomy while being in community, we can be unafraid of our vulnerabilities, knowing our strengths are respected. [Note: “crip” is a reclaimed slur that should not be used to describe others without their permission.]

I’m still learning to ask for what I need. Watching disabled friends assert their rights has been so powerful for me to watch; I want to be that inspiration for another disabled person. The process of making access requests always feels tender, but little by little, we create a culture where we all work to shamelessly meet everyone’s access needs.

Full text of the 10 principles: https://tinyurl.com/ DJ10Principles

 

The Principles of Disability Justice

Part 3 of 3

Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge

In June, I wrote about the first four principles of Disability Justice: Intersectionality, Leadership of Those Most Impacted, Anti-Capitalism and Cross-Movement Solidarity. Last month I wrote about the next five principles: Wholeness, Sustainability, Cross-Disability Solidarity, Interdependence and Collective Access. This article is about the tenth and final principle: Collective Liberation.

Collective liberation is so much bigger and broader than rights-based discourse. It’s not about the bare minimum that is required for surviving and participating in this society—it’s about creating a new and different society without systemic oppression.

Aurora Levins Morales, in her book Kindling, explains: “There is no neutral body from which our bodies deviate. Society has written deep into each strand of tissue of every living person on earth. What it writes into the heart muscles of five star generals is distinct from what it writes in the pancreatic tissue and intestinal tracts of Black single mothers in Detroit, of Mexicana migrants in Fresno, but no body stands outside the consequences of injustice and inequality […] What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies.”

Thinking about disability calls us into our bodies. Disability is profoundly practical, physical, emotional and messy in the most human sense. Being kind to our disabled selves requires humility and grace—and it also should be grounded in an analysis that reaches beyond any one body.

Patty Berne, one of the founders of Disability Justice, continues: “Disability Justice activists, organizers, cultural workers understand that able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to intersecting systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. We cannot comprehend ableism without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, each system co-creating an ideal bodymind built upon the exclusion and elimination of a subjugated ‘other’ from whom profits and status are extracted. 500+ years of violence against black and brown communities includes 500+ years of bodies and minds deemed dangerous by being non-normative— again, not simply within able-bodied normativity, but within the violence of heteronormativity, white supremacy, gender normativity, within which our various bodies and multiple communities have been deemed ‘deviant,’ ‘unproductive,’ ‘invalid.’”

Transphobia is, among other things, colonial: colonizers attempted to erase the many non-cis genders that have existed for thousands of years outside of Europe. Similarly, colonialism is misogynist, misogyny is fatphobic, fatphobia is racist, racism is classist, and on and on. These major forms of oppression are deeply interwoven, and to completely undo any one, we must undo all of them. This is the beginning of the final principle of Disability Justice:

10. Collective Liberation: We move together as people with mixed abilities, multiracial, multi-gendered, mixed class, across the sexual spectrum, with a vision that leaves no bodymind behind. 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.

Patty Berne expands on this principle: “Disability Justice holds a vision born out of 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, 4

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.”

Disability Justice is always inherent anti-racist, anti-colonial and opposed to all forms of oppression. Because we get free together, or not at all.

 Full Text of 10 Principles of disability Justice (PDF)

Patty Berne quotes