Like a lot of activists and community organizers, I got into the game to solve my own problems. I had experienced unjust treatment and as part of my healing journey I wanted to create justice by changing things for other people. This is a beautiful impulse, but if you stop there, you’re going to be a crap organizer.
What you’ll discover if you can be open enough to learn from people who are different from you, is that the problem you’re fighting didn’t start with you. If you share a social location with me – white, cis, currently middle class – it’s quite likely you aren’t even the target of the problem. The problems in our society that harm us all come from the same root, and until we get it all out it will keep coming back in new ways.
The root of all of our problems is a society that believes some types of people deserve to be exploited by other types of people. This manifests in all kinds of ways, but all flow downstream to the ocean of racism and eugenics. (There’s a LOT of info on this. I’d recommend starting with Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, and reading literally anything about disability rights or the history of the disability movement. Look up Ugly Laws.)
In America – and probably other places, but America is what I can speak to – we’re taught that a successful adult is an independent adult, capable of meeting all their personal needs independently. But believing that requires ignoring reality. It requires ignoring the human life cycle. It requires pretending that things that are happening aren’t happening. The truth is that humans are not independent at all. We survive in colonies like ants or bees. We’re a species of community builders, because our bodies have a physical need for community.
The dominant culture has worked hard to strip that understanding away. Maslow teaches us that self-actualization is the pinnacle of human development, when the Blackfoot people he stole that pyramid from had that principle as the foundation. In a collectivist culture respect for the self is about autonomy and human dignity, but in a dominant culture it’s about winning.
When I realized that, I became a much more effective organizer. I could be mindful of the conditioning I was bringing in to spaces, and I could learn from – and follow the leadership of – people who were more experienced than I was in collectivist spaces.
Because the thing is, if you want to fight for rights, if you want to change legislations, if you want to affect systems, you can only do that as a collective. They don’t listen to us alone.
When rights are threatened, all rights are threatened. You can’t argue for bodily autonomy for women and pretend that trans rights are somehow different. It is the same fight. You can’t make progress on gun control without recognizing the militarization of police forces. It’s all the same fight. You can’t deal with medical bias denying health care to fat people and women without reckoning with how the medical system treats Black people. It’s all one fight – the fight for human dignity and civil rights.
The history of activism is stuffed with examples of progress made through coalition building. The 504 sit-in is one of my favorite examples. Section 504 is a law protecting the civil rights of disabled people. But for years it was unenforced, unprotected, and was in danger of being stripped entirely. So the ACCD – the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, itself a coalition of all kinds of disabled groups – staged a sit in to get new legislation signed. For 26 days they sat in the San Francisco federal building, demanding they be heard.
The Emergency 504 Coalition sprang up, again uniting people across disabilities, and organized rallies, fundraising, medical care, and outreach. They connected with all kinds of rights groups throughout the area – political radicals, gay rights groups, churches, unions, and more – knowing that the fight for civil rights is one fight. Black Panthers provided meals to the people sitting in the federal building. The International Association of Machinists – a trade union – paid for disabled delegates to fly to Washington DC and rented a UHaul to transport all the wheelchair users once they arrived.
One of the lead organizers of the event, Kitty Cone, wrote, “At every moment, we felt ourselves the descendants of the civil rights movement of the ’60s. We learned about sit ins from the civil rights movement, we sang freedom songs to keep up morale, and consciously show the connection between the two movements.”
The 504 was signed, but that was only the beginning of a fight that continues today. Nevertheless, the organizers and activists succeeded in creating a movement that has been instrumental in creating freedom and opportunity for disabled people in America, and they were only able to do it by uniting with everyone else experiencing discrimination.
The Black Panthers and the Teamsters knew that supporting these disabled activists would benefit their own goals too. Black disabled people experience unique discrimination, and the unsafe working conditions trade unions fought against often created disability. Your liberation is tied up in mine, mine is tied up in yours.
Self care itself came out of civil rights efforts. It’s Audre Lorde writing about navigating healthcare as a Black woman with chronic cancer. Fannie Lou Hamer saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It is all the Black women throughout history who have developed these methods of care and used them to nurture their communities.
Self care is a radical act because it sustains you in the fight against oppressive systems. It recognizes that human bodies have needs and that fact has been politicized by a system that wants to use bodies as capital. That is why self care can never really be about developing good habits, buying the latest trend, or exercising a lot. From its origins it recognizes that we don’t have control over most of the things that impact our health, but through community and solidarity, we can survive, thrive, and unite for liberation.