Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
In the last couple of decades, disability studies has begun to acknowledge the white biases and assumptions within the field. Yet even as disability studies has become more attentive to intersectional and inclusive ideas of race (or of queerness, or of postcolonialism), there has persisted a critical orientation and genealogy that places white activists and writers as foundational. Recent revisionary histories have often been treated as second or third waves to a still foundational white disability activism. In her groundbreaking Black Disability Politics, Sami Schalk, in contrast, contends that such narratives about the development of the field misrecognize—and more importantly, fail to incorporate and validate—alternative lineages of Black disability politics that developed their own theories, ways of thinking about and approaching disability justice that do not coincide with a privileged liberal rights-based politics of visibility and inclusion. In its recovery work Schalk's Black Disability Politics starts an important conversation for the field of disability studies. At the same time, it also traces out critical tactics for scholars who want to engage in a richer analysis of nonwhite disability histories, of alternative aesthetic and [End Page 736] social justice practices, and of imagined equitable futures. It should be essential reading.
In the introduction of Black Disability Politics Schalk starts by "good-troubling" the tired-worn truism in the field that Black cultural workers avoided engaging disability representations because they feared that such visibility would reinforce the pathologizing of Black bodyminds and compromise an assimilationist respectability politics. Instead, for the Black activists that Schalk recovers, the claiming of a specific disability identity—and a single-issue disability politics—was often less important than the goal of bodymind liberation, transformative justice, and care for all, regardless of ability. As a result, Schalk elucidates, disability has long been a political issue within Black liberation struggles, even if Black activists did not always center a disabled identity or foreground a language of disability rights and liberal accommodations, especially since such state-sanctioned rights largely benefit those already privileged in terms of race, sexuality, or citizenship.
Although the Black disability politics that Schalk centers shares mainstream disability movements' social model of disability, it has four distinctive qualities. First, Black disability politics has been "intersectional but race centered" (12). As TL Lewis, one contemporary Black disabled activist whom Schalk interviews, notes, "There is no racism without ableism. There is no ableism without racism" (145). Thus, Black liberation struggles have often included anti-ableism as part of their larger concern for racial equity and justice. Second, and relatedly, Black disability politics emphasizes historical contextualization in relation to white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriachy, and capitalism. Within the long history of disability activism, Schalk contends, race has shaped what is (and is not) a disability and what laws and policies are said to be needed to remedy disability-based injustices. Not surprisingly, then, a Black disability activism frequently emerges in response to the state-sanctioned disablement of Black people. In recent years some disability activists have raised concerns that recognition of such racialized biopolitics of debilitation might reduce proud disability identities to regrettable or stigmatized tragedies. For Schalk, however, liberatory expressions of Black disability politics denounced the violence rather than the potential disability and simultaneously fought for concrete and structural support for those who were disabled.
Third, a Black disability politics has also not necessarily been "based in disability identity" (155). Like other radical crip-of-color disability scholars, Schalk highlights the importance of employing [End Page 737] disability as an analytic and not just an identity. White identity-based disability movements have frequently tied themselves to calls for social inclusion and legislative protections against discrimination, while ignoring Black cultural activists' demands for social and political transformation rather than "access to" racial capitalism. Fourth, Schalk argues, a Black disability politics is "holistic," for it incorporates an attention to the physical, psychological, and emotional needs—and even spiritual healing practices—of the bodymind. As a part of this holistic approach, Black disability politics has recognized that individual self-care and survival (often reductively dismissed as neoliberal) have been as important as, and equally necessary for, collective systematic change.
After this initial survey of Black disability politics, Schalk turns in the book's chapters to the reclaiming of several key lineages of Black disability politics. In chapters 1 and 2 Schalk examines the disability politics of the Black Panther Party, particularly as expressed in the Black Panther, the weekly newspaper the Black Panther Party published between 1967–1980. Although previous histories of the Black Panther Party largely focused on the early years when the Black Panther Party was at its height, Schalk shifts attention to the years after 1972 when Black women assumed prominent leadership roles and turned the organization's focus from community self-defense to survivalist work around the health and welfare of women, children, the disabled, and the elderly. In chapter 1, Schalk examines the Black Panthers' role in the 1977 504 sit-in of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) regional offices in San Francisco as well as the Panthers' founding of the Oakland Community School, a tuition-free, community-organized child development and elementary school. In chapter 2, Schalk deepens her analysis of the Black Panther Party's disability politics by recovering their focus on the racial politics of intertwined mental and carceral institutions. In the pages of the Black Panther, the party questioned the power of the psychiatric medical industrial complex and its violent coercive practices in relation to poor, racialized, and incarcerated populations.
While the first section's two chapters focus on the Black Panther Party, chapters 3 and 4 examine the Black disability politics of the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP), which started in 1981 as an initiative within the National Women's Health Network before becoming an independent nonprofit based in Atlanta in 1984. Through a close textual analysis of stories that ran in the organization's quarterly newsletter (later magazine), Vital Signs, Schalk traces out how the NBWHP, though not specifically a disability rights organization, operated in solidarity with disabled people. Although [End Page 738] initially encouraging a self-help philosophy, the NBWHP increasingly took a political approach to health that historicized and contextualized Black women's health within US racism, sexism, and classicism. In chapter 4, Schalk focuses on the NBWHP's organizing around public health education and support for Black Women with HIV/AIDS. The NBWHP was one of the earliest organizations to mobilize around HIV/AIDS and to approach the HIV/AIDs epidemic as a political concern tied to "racial and gender identities, experiences, and norms" (115). In its public health work, the NBWHP framed issues of prevention within the Black community's cultural norms regarding sex, gender, drug use, and interactions with medical professions.
In this short review I can hardly do justice to all the nuances and layers of Schalk's argument. Throughout her project, however, Schalk highlights the ways that disabilities have been defined socially, medically, legally, and politically based on the experiences of white disabled people and the ways that theories and practices based on those experiences have offered limited strategies for inclusion. In chapter 5, therefore, Schalk shifts from examining the legacy of Black disability activism to surveying contemporary Black disabled activists and cultural workers. In doing so, she maps out how they are imagining and altering the landscape for a radical disability politics committed to social transformation.
Since the transatlantic slave trade, white supremacy has argued that Black people lacked some "capacity"—cranial, intellectual, temperamental, physical—for full humanity and citizenship or had some incapacity/disability that justified their incarceration, educational exclusion, or medical neglect. Racialization is, thus, embedded in logics of disability as well as disablement, for systematic anti-Black violence has predisposed Black bodies to heightened vulnerabilities and injury. This is a key paradigm-shifting starting point of Schalk's book and of the Black disability politics she recovers. It means, as Schalk perceptively notes and meticulously traces out, that disability has long been a political issue within Black liberation struggles, even if Black activists did not always center a disabled identity or foreground a language of disability rights and liberal inclusion. Although a Black disability politics is often treated as a recently emergent subfield within disability studies, as Schalk proves, it has a past, it has a lineage, it has specific political and cultural practices, and it has radical dreams for a liberated future that we all should listen to. [End Page 739]
