Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled―and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation Building on the work of her game changing book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about disability justice at the end of the world, documenting the many ways disabled people kept and are keeping each other―and the rest of the world―alive during Trump, fascism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Other subjects include crip interdependence, care and mutual aid in real life, disabled community building, and disabled art practice as survival and joy. Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

The Future Is Disabled

Katy Watkins

The second thesis of this book is: We won't be able to survive climate change, the rise of fascism and white supremacy, and unending pandemics, we won't be able to create the just future we all still hope will show up, without disability justice and disabled skills.

The working definition of ableism that Lewis has revised for years, as of January 2022, reads, "A system of assigning value to people's bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression that leads to people and society determining people's value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, 'health/wellness and/or their ability to satisfactorily re/produce, 'excel' and 'behave.' You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism."

The voices on the radio and TV kept saying, "Don't worry, only the elderly and immunocompromised will die." We were the elderly and immunocompromised.

The erasure of the intellectual and activist labor of disability justice activists-particularly disabled BIPOC women and nonbinary people and/or femmes-makes me want to scream. But it also has giant implications for whether the shit works or not. If you don't do mutual aid/ collective care knowing that we invented the term "collective care," because we wanted something radically different than the charity model that was excluding and killing us—something where disabled people could lead and provide and cocreate care, where what care looks like is fundamentally different—you are not only being ableist; you will lose. Our disabled strategies are fundamentally different, and they work better.

The concept of interdependence—that all people have needs, that none of us can get through the world solely on our own, and that having needs was not weak or bad or shameful—was an excitíng and revolutionary part of the work, a break from and add-on to the disability rights movement's ideas of independence.

The work of learning how to give and receive care means being in a practice of knowing what our needs are and what conditions need to be there for us to receive or offer care well.

Learning our own and each other's care needs and access realities is a daily practice that views needs as not fixed, but an open-ended spiral of discovery and experimentation.

Viewing access and care intimacies as learnable and practicable, not automatic, means that disabled people aren't failures or betraying each other when we don't automatically know each other's stuff. It makes room for us to make mistakes, learn, and make repair—which creates space for more resilient disability justice community and movement building, where there's room to come back from a fuck-up instead of feeling forever betrayed because "they were disabled, I thought they would understand." It also makes room for the idea that abled, neurotypical, and hearing people can learn access and care skills too.

When you first go down with your chronic illness, many people around you will tell you they hope you "feel better soon." When you never "get better"—when this is your chronically ill life you have to learn new strategies in how to live it. It's common in sicko communities for people to talk about learning pacing—how to break tasks into small steps, and doing them bit-by-bit, resting in between. I basically don't have abled people in my life anymore (lol), but when I did, I used to get admonished/tsk-tsked when I'd talk about slowly doing email or other work when I was having a flare—finger wagged that I should be "Resting and getting better!" I felt so lonely in those moments. Those people didn't understand that my chronic illness was not a weeklong flu or a daylong migraine (though I have those too), but that I would have flares and fatigue all my life, if I waited until I was "well" to work, I would never get anything done.

“To exist is to resist" is a saying many of us say: all the ways we survive a world that wants to kill us as disabled people is resistance.

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