22 Quotes by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

But our focus is less on civil rights legislation as the only solution to ableism and more on a vision of liberation that understands that the state was built on racist, colonialist ableism and will not save us, because it was created to kill us.

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it’s also a choose-your-own-adventure story.

Me home, the weird older daughter, back in my room. Hanging out with my mother. Taking care of my mother. Bargaining for an evening out now and then. Still no driver’s license. Never leaving. It would be like when I was sixteen, insisting that I was an adult, except that I wasn’t, in some ways. Was I an adult? Or was I something else? Would I ever grow up?

The making of disability justice lives in the realm of thinking and talking and knowledge making, in art and sky. But it also lives in how to rent an accessible porta potty for an accessible-except-the-bathroom event space, how to mix coconut oil and aloe to make a fragrance-free hair lotion that works for curly and kinky BIPOC hair, how to learn to care for each other when everyone is sick, tired, crazy, and brilliant. And neither is possible without the other.

Is understanding that disabled people have a full-time job managing their disabilities and the medical-industrial complex and the world – so regular expectations about work, energy, and life can go right out the window.

As oppressed people, we don’t control a lot of things. But one thing we can sometimes control is the stage. The stage can be prefigurative politics.

People’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse.

In Loree’s care collective, her need for access is posited as something she both needs and deserves, and as a chance to build community, hang out with Loree, and have fun – not as a chore. This is drastically different from most ways care is thought of in the world, as an isolated, begrudgingly done task that is never a site of pleasure, joy, or community building.

It’s not about self-care – it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, more slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home – and these aren’t things we apologize for.