Accessibility is Not Disability Justice: I’m Tired of Fighting

Light skinned man with hand out. Man is labeled “social justice organizations”, Butterfly near the man’s hand is labeled “basic accessibility measures”, caption on the bottom of the picture says “is this disability justice?”

Accessibility is not disability justice.

(Wait, what?)

ACCESSIBILITY IS NOT DISABILITY JUSTICE. This may sound jarring because literally every disability activist I know (myself included) spends so much time on basic accessibility. But it’s important to understand that accessibility is actually just a small part of disability justice. It is necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. It just gets us in the door (literally), but disability justice is what happens after we are all in the room together (metaphorically).

There is so much fucked up stuff going on in the world right now, we need all hands on deck. Disability justice recognizes that all people have unique and valuable skills, talents, and contributions that are applicable to all kinds of activism. Yet, almost all the amazing disability justice activists I know are basically forced into only disability specific organizing because it is too exhausting to make other kinds of work accessible. Basically, we drain ourselves just fighting for the accommodations that we need to be there and have nothing left for the actual work.

I’m angry about how much we have to give up just to be part of organizing and activism. We are forced to spend so much time, energy, (and often money) to be included in the conversation…