Honoring Disability Pride, Striving for Disability Justice

Disability Justice is a movement that is central to the work of all liberatory movements. The AMP community is grateful and humbled by the work of our Sponsored Project, Conspiracy of Geniuses & RAD Care Mutual Aid Project, who offered their insights on the movement for disability justice, disability justice ancestors, radical care, and disrupting the status quo this July in celebration of the thirty one years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed. 

Conspiracy of Geniuses & RAD Care Mutual Aid Project is working to provide better services to those most disenfranchised by society by creating leadership and economic opportunities. This is an interview completed virtually with smitty buckler and Laila Pathan of Conspiracy of Geniuses (CoG).

Allied Media Projects (AMP): What is disability pride? 

Conspiracy of Geniuses:  Our belief is that Disability Pride must involve the concept of RAD Care, which stands for Radical, Accessible, Decolonizing Care. Our founder, smitty, first used this term in a 2013 research paper, eventually presenting RAD Care at the 2014 Allied Media Conference. It was the answer to our question, ‘how do we create more access and safer spaces to everyone in our communities?’ In defining radical care, everyone is included, especially those who do not find their place in other forms of activism for survivors, BIPOC, or disabled folks. RAD care, above all, is a form of self care for our communities, ending the precedent of unrepresentative allies leading the movements that are meant to fight for us.

AMP: How have disability justice ancestors influenced you? 

Conspiracy of Geniuses: Nothing About Us Without Us is the title of a disability empowerment anthology by James. I. Charlton. Charlton heard this phrase was first used by two South African Disabled activists who quoted an Eastern European who coined it at an international conference in the ‘80s. Our work has also been inspired by the framework and advocacy of Emi Koyama, one of the first intersectional feminists to include advocacy for POC, intersex people, crips, sex workers and survivors. We’re inspired by Emi’s insistence that our communities speak for themselves, and create alternative spaces of activism free from restrictive definitions of identity. Aurora Levins Morales is another influential disabled person, a Puerto Rican Jewish writer and historian who started her work in the ‘70s. After experiencing debilitating brain trauma, Levins Morales studied history and began advocating for an inclusive, ‘medicinal history’ that finally addressed and attempted to heal the traumas of lack of representation and colonial histories. She is one of the first activists to talk about exclusion and colonization as sources of trauma and their effects on the health and abilities of oppressed communities.

AMP: Where do you see the disability justice movement intersecting with other movements disrupting the status quo? 

Conspiracy of Geniuses: RAD Care is a movement that includes multiple subjectivities in its practices, so that Black, Indigenous and People of Color – who might also be disabled, queer, trans, or intersexual – contibute and lead to the fight for justice and inclusion. The pathologization (definition as a medical – usually psychological – problem) of trans, intersex and LGBQ people is an issue that has persisted for more than two centuries and has some overlap with the way people with disabilities are stigmatized.

AMP: How can we make a culture based on radical care?

Conspiracy of Geniuses: The first step is to destigmatize the identities of our constituents and give them the opportunity to partake in the movements that impact them as equals, creating employment for them and ensuring the representativeness of those movements. We must decolonize disability, madness, addiction and sex work. People with these conditions are usually considered incapable of leading or even participating in the work that is meant to liberate them. We achieve RAD care through the principles of harm reduction, transformative justice and trauma-informed organizing (with a definition of trauma that includes systemic and cultural violence, not just sexual, domestic or combat violence), to name just a few. 

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