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#CoronaAbleism looks like: #thread Tl;dr: disability justice needs to be at the center of our discussions right now:
1. Assuming that you and everyone you know will survive this and return to normal. Vulnerable sick and disabled folks are not making this assumption now or ever. We are trying to get to the future by surviving now.
2. Assuming that coronavirus is an inconvenience to individual people, an issue shaped by having to stay home. Coronavirus is revealing the systematic devaluation/expendability of incarcerated and houseless folks and workers (including primarily disabled POC).
3. Assuming that disability is just a medical issue, that disabled people do not have relevance or power at this moment. I am shocked at the number of activist demands that do not recognize the ongoing work of disability justice on collective access, managing risk, decarceration
4. Not placing elders, disabled, and sick people ar the center of organizing. Devaluing the types of organizing elders, disabled, and sick people to do survive in short and long-term ways.
5. Treating disability as an issue that does not intersect white supremacy and settler colonialism, which makes it impossible to understand that eugenics is once again a guiding force for decisions about life and death during this crisis.
6. Not learning about histories of ableism, institutionalization, eugenics, and fascism and instead insisting that there is nothing wrong with setting up hierarchies or medical decision making based on eugenic categories of productivity, capacity, and bodily size.
7. Not building solidarity with disabled people about abysmally low government support payments and income restrictions that continue despite almost everyone else getting stimulus checks.
8. Delayed non-coronavirus medical treatments, diverted medications and ventilators, default DNR orders, exclusions from care on the basis of age, intellectual disability, BMI
9. The idea that health care scarcity naturally occurring, not the result of a shrinking government safety net.
