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Welcome to the New Site

This site started out as a zine (small independent publication) series which morphed into a website/blog and then spun off into a book – Disability Politics and Theory.

The website title is a riff on “if I can’t dance it ain’t my revolution” which is a common radical phrase which is commonly attributed to Emma Goldman. She never actually said this but it was similar to a really long thing that she said and it fit on a T-shirt.

Disabled people are actively excluded from radical politics. We are ignored and, on occasion, tokenized. Some people on the left consider us lumpen proletariat, some give us a seat at the table in a building with a broken elevator, but rarely are we included, valued, and respected.

You Don't Have to Stand Up to Fight Back! Standard wheelchair symbol with raised fist. Black on Pink.

You Don’t Have to Stand Up to Fight Back! Standard wheelchair symbol but the person has a raised fist. Black on Pink.

“If I can’t dance it ain’t my revolution” is as true today as it ever was. If you can’t dance, you aren’t allowed to participate equally in revolutionary struggle. If you dance cautiously because you are in pain, or “strangely” it isn’t your revolution. If you aren’t dancing because you have been forcibly restrained it isn’t your revolution. If you dance alone because you have been excluded from society because you have an intellectual disability, are psychiatrised, deaf or physically disabled it isn’t your revolution. If you don’t dance you aren’t allowed to participate equally in the struggle, it isn’t your revolution. If you don’t fight, if you don’t organize, it won’t be your revolution and changes implemented will not reflect the diverse needs and perspectives of disabled people.

We all dance in our own ways. We all fight in our own ways. We need to create the space for that to be recognized and we need to fight for change together.

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But Disability is Different…

School Schmool is a great day-timer that is put together by QPIRG McGill and QPIRG Concordia.I wrote this for this year’s planner. A lot of the stuff in it is really interesting and there is always beautiful art. You can check it out by clicking here.

Time and time again, people make the argument that disabled people don’t have to be included in social justice movements because disabled people are ‘different.’ Disabled people, they say, are different from other subordinated groups because we have an ‘intrinsic hardship.’ Disabled people, they say, are different because there is something wrong with us. Disabled people, they say, aren’t entitled to the same kinds of social inclusion and social justice because we simply can’t do certain things – our exclusion is justified.

Maybe you’ve even said this. I know I certainly have – before I dealt with my internalized disablism and educated myself about disability politics. This is one way that disablism works. It convinces us that disabled people are separate and different so there is no need to fight back, no need to be an ally. Indeed widely respected feminists, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, queer liberationists/gay rights activists and trans liberationists/trans rights activists have all said it. To a certain extent, every identity-based movement has worked to distance itself from disability and disabled people – screwing over their own otherwise-disabled members in the process. Indeed women, people of colour, poor and working class people, queer and trans people have all been widely (if not entirely) considered disabled at some point in history.

The argument that those groups were different and simply not a capable as rich-straight-white-men was seen as incontrovertible truth.

Now, we know otherwise. It is important to question: why it is okay to make disabled people an exception? Why it is okay to justify the continued oppression of disabled people – even in social justice movements? Why, when biology is now widely understood to be a social construction and not an acceptable justification for the oppression of other groups, is biology deemed to be neutral in the case of disabled people? Why is it okay to pay lip service to ending only certain kinds of marginalization and oppression for disabled people and leave others intact?

Do we really want to allow entitlement to social justice based on how closely people adhere to arbitrary views of normal?  Is it okay to continue to hold to ideas that justice is only for some, not all? Dig deep. Do you have an answer to these questions that is actually valid or do you just rely on your problematic assumptions about disability to justify disabled people’s oppression? Let’s stop building a world where some people just can’t fit and excluding those people for being who they are. Let’s build a better world.

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You Should Be Afraid: How Cuts to ODSP Will Hurt Us All and Why We Must Fight Back!

The following is a speech I gave at a Parkdale Against Poverty meeting on September 23, 2013. We were asked to speak about the provincial government’s plan to eliminate ODSP and move almost everyone onto welfare. The other speaker was John Clarke. You should also check out his piece in The Bullet: “Austerity Agenda Targets the Disabled”.

Stay informed! Visit the OCAP website regularly.

The Speech:

We are currently being told that these are times of austerity – times of cutbacks in order to ensure a healthy economy. It is important to think about how it is that poor people are hit disproportionately hard and rich people are getting richer. The richest 1% in the world own 95% of the world’s resources. The worlds 1,210 billionaires own more than all of the property that the poorest half of the world owns – 12 hundred people own more than 3 billion people!

People on OW (Ontario Works or welfare) get $376 a month for shelter while those on ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Plan) get $479 – neither are anywhere close the average rent for a bachelor apartment in Toronto ($837 a month). This means that people don’t have enough money for food and rent – if either. But, here and around the world rich people aren’t being told that they have to tighten their belts – they aren’t told they have to live in substandard housing and make choices between food and rent. In Ontario, there are almost a million people on social assistance, nearly half of them on ODSP.

These two systems – welfare and ODSP were started because poor people fought for them. They were put in place very differently because of deeply troubling notions of who was considered the deserving and who was considered not the deserving poor. Disabled people – or at least certain disabled people are considered deserving so they get paid more while other people are depicted as lazy, as free-loaders so they get less money. This has always been a brilliant way of demonizing people on welfare to the general public and dividing different groups of poor people. It is how people on ODSP could say that they didn’t need to worry about the 21.6% cut to OW in 1995 and it is how people on OW can say that they don’t need to worry about getting rid of ODSP. “It doesn’t affect me” both groups can say. It means that we don’t fight together when we should be united because it is the same people – rich members of government acting in the interest of corporations that are attacking us.

The idea that some people are deserving poor people and others are not IS A LIE! Poor people are poor because we live under an economic system that creates poverty and because our government chooses to do things like cut taxes instead of redistribute wealth to the poor. It chooses to privatize services and sell off housing instead of ensuring that the most needy people in this province get what we need. People on welfare aren’t lazy – corporations and the rich are greedy – that is why people have to collect social assistance because they can’t get jobs because capitalism needs unemployment to function.

Those people who are on ODSP are given more benefits and assistance because they are deemed to be unable to work, are viewed as unproductive. Disabled people’s labour and contributions are extremely devalued. Disabled women are the last hired and the first fired. In 2006, half of employed disabled people make less than $15,000 a year in Canada – I can’t give you a more recent statistic because instead of doing something about it the federal government decided to stop keeping track. And although many disabled people contribute a great deal to our communities, we aren’t given accommodation and supports we need to be able to function in the employment market. Getting rid of ODSP isn’t about making things better for disabled people – it is about tweaking the definition of who is considered the deserving poor. It is about attacking the little stability disabled people have and forcing them into precarious and under paid employment in order to drive wages down across the province. The plan is to make those collecting disability benefits far fewer – if they ever report any employment income they would be kicked off and put on welfare. So those few people who are left on disability benefits would forever be unable to do any work – including selling art, performing, or getting paid even the smallest amounts.

Everyone else, according to the government’s plan so far would lose their benefits – this means people currently on ODSP and those on welfare. I am sure there are many people in this room who, like me, have lost a tooth (or maybe more) because they were on welfare and didn’t have proper dental benefits. The government wants to take those benefits away from pretty much everyone when, instead, we should all have basic dental coverage. Things like orthotics and dental coverage are key to people’s quality of life and the Liberals want to take that away.

We have already seen more people becoming homeless because that same government cut the community start-up benefit and special diet. Now they want to cut or totally remove people’s drug benefits. Make no doubt about it, people will die. We already know that poverty leads to serious and often lifelong health problems – now the government is planning on making that worse!

I have been off of social assistance for a year now. I spent more than the last decade on welfare and then ODSP. The difference in my life between the two – both in terms of how I was treated and in terms of income was huge. That is the case for everyone on ODSP who I know. ODSP is still not enough but it is a great deal better than welfare and I think all of us have a responsibility to work to keep it while we fight to raise the rates for everyone.

Now, what I am talking about may be scary for people currently on ODSP or who are hoping to get on ODSP. I don’t want to mislead you – I think you should be afraid. Anyone who is poor or views themselves as an ally to the poor should be afraid right now. However, there is a big difference between fear and hopelessness. Social assistance as we know it was created because people fought for it. People saw their individual and collective misery, were afraid of not keeping their housing, not having food and fought for something better. We know that there is hope. We know that if all of us come together along with everyone else on social assistance and our allies that we can not only keep what we have but we can work to get what we actually need – enough for everyone on social assistance to not only survive (which we still have to win) but also to thrive.

There are times when poor people have no choice but to fight back. This is one of those times. It won’t be easy. It will take all of us doing a lot of work – talking to everyone we know about it, coming out to meetings and most importantly to demonstrations. We must fight back. We must fight to win and we will win.

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In-text citations on this page:

The Bullet: “Austerity Agenda Targets the Disabled”

OCAP