(article from sept '22)

[Jasbir K. Puar] further distinguishes between disability and debility: disability might be a political-relational identity, while debility is a process. One is debilitated by repeated exposure to harm and violence – a wearing-down of the body and mind throughout one’s life. This could look like the mercury accumulating in the bodies of Indigenous peoples whose water source has been polluted, or panic attacks due to daily encounters with racism in education, health care, and justice systems. What this tells us, Puar says, is that “it can be productive for the settler colonial state to keep some populations alive but in a space of continual, perpetual injury.” And the scale of debility is enormous: in 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that as part of the Syrian war, 30,000 Syrians were being injured each month.

“Disability,” Puar continues, “becomes the [way] institutions exceptionalize injury or the non-capacitation of a body.” This means that institutions view disability as something out of the ordinary instead of the inevitable outcome of living under oppressive conditions, and they place onus on the individual for being disabled, rather than on these oppressive systems for disabling the individual.

Though a minority of disabled people live in the Global North – the wealthy, imperialist countries like the United States, Canada, and those in Western Europe – Puar notes that Global North disability rights advocacy tends to focus on disabled people attaining equality more than halting and holding accountable the systems that produce disability throughout the rest of the world. She writes that disability rights advocacy asserts “that disability should be reclaimed as a valuable difference […] through rights, visibility, and empowerment discourses […] rather than addressing how much debilitation is caused by global injustices and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism.”

In other words, Global North disability rights appeal to the state to protect mostly white and wealthy disabled people. But Puar reminds us that disability and disablement can be a purposeful goal of the state. In contrast, a disability justice framework helps us understand that the safety of some disabled people in the Global North must not come at the expense or production of disabled people in the Global South. Disability justice, a movement founded by racialized people, explicitly denounces imperialism and recognizes that, in the words of disability justice collective Sins Invalid, “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.”