3. Disability and race are both social categories. They have developed in connection with each other over time. People in power have shaped these categories to serve their own interests.

Disability and race are both social categories. They have developed in connection with each other over time. People in power have shaped these categories to serve their own interests.

Race is a social category. It has no basis in biology. Racial categories, like “white,” “Black,” or “Asian,” are malleable, meaning that have changed over time, and people in different societies have defined them differently. People in our society have decided what racial categories are, who fits within them, and who sits above or below in a racial hierarchy. People with economic, political, and social power have shaped racial categories to suit their own interests, including their desire to exercise control over other people’s labor, land, resources, or citizenship. In the United States, white supremacy and anti-blackness, operating in the contexts of settler colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, have been central to the making of racial categories.¹

For some readers, it might be hard to think about disability as a social category. It is helpful first to think of human differences often labeled as disabled as simply that: human differences. They are an integral part of human life. Then, we should think about the crucial question of how people and societies respond to those differences. What do people think of as a “normal” body or a “normal” mind? What human variations or differences are thought of as outside of “normal,” or are thought of as “disabled”? By answering these questions - in different ways in different societies and at different points in time - people have created the social category of disability.² People’s ideas about what is “normal,” and what the consequences are for having a body or mind different than “normal,” has been shaped by white supremacy, misogyny, and heteronormativity as they have existed in the US within the contexts of slavery, capitalism, and empire.³

Categories of disability and race have developed together over time. Ideas about ability and disability have often been part of defining racial categories, and vice versa.⁴ Think of how some stereotypes portray Black people as unusually athletically capable, while the others claim Asian students are academically more competent than others. Sometimes language also relates to ideas of race and disability, as when a student’s use of Spanish leads others to identify them as outside of “normal” communication or intelligence, or assume their racial identity indicates the language they speak.⁵

Disability can also be a consequence of racism. Locating polluting factories or toxic waste facilities close to where Black and Latinx children live, limiting their access to quality schooling or health care, or making only physically dangerous work available to Black and Latinx workers, can disable people in those communities.⁶

Social categories have always had powerful consequences in people’s lives, ranging from enslavement, confinement, exclusion, and death, to privilege, opportunity, community, and life. Racial and disability categories have been used to determine whether a person in the US could be a citizen or not, vote or not, attend school or not, have a job or not, marry or not, travel or not. People of color and Disabled people have historically faced poverty, incarceration, and police violence at rates higher than white and non-disabled people.⁷

While social categories can be used in a destructive manner, they can also be used in affirming and constructive ways. For example, Disabled people fought for recognition of disability as a protected category to help them secure their rights. Disability categories help establish Disabled people’s access to health, personal care, and other services, including accommodations in education.⁸ People often come together within social categories - like Blackness or Latinidad, or disability, or Deafness, as examples - to form supportive communities, celebrate their identities, share pride, and fight together for justice.⁹

Finally, it is crucial to remember that all people simultaneously occupy multiple social categories, creating intersectional experiences. Black people, for example, are Disabled or non-disabled, and of any gender identity. A white person may be cis, trans, or queer. People’s experiences of one identity category are inevitably shaped by others that they also inhabit.¹⁰ Disabled people of color have long fought to have their lives and unique experiences recognized and understood, fighting against policies and political movements that focus on one identity category to the exclusion or erasure of the other.¹¹

Barbara J. Fields and Karen Elise Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Brooklyn: Verso, 2012); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); California Newsreel, the Othering & Belonging Institute, the U.C. Berkeley Library, and the American Cultures Center at U.C. Berkeley; “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” Race: The Power of an Illusion, 2019 https://www.racepowerofanillusion.org/. ↩︎
David J. Connor and Jan Valle, “Rescripting Crips: Reclaiming Disability History from a Disability Studies Perspective within Public School Curriculum,” in Kulture-Geschichte-Behinderug (Culture, History, Disability), ed. O. Musenberg (Humboldt University Press, 2017), 201-220; Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri, “Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCri): Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/ability,” Race, Ethnicity and Education, 16, no. 1 (2013), 1-31, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511 ↩︎
Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); Annamma, Connor, and Ferri, “Dis/ability Critical Race Studies”; Sami Schalk, Body/Minds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Jennifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021). ↩︎
Schalk, Black Disability Politics; Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2022). ↩︎
Jonathan Rosa, Looking Like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Jennifer Phuong and María Cioè-Peña, “Perfect or Mocha: Language Policing and Pathologization,” in DisCrit Expanded: Reverberations, Ruptures, and Inquiries, ed. Subini Annamma, Beth A. Ferri, and David J. Connor (New York: Teachers College Press, 2022), 129-144. ↩︎
Rabia Belt, “The Fat Prisoner’s Dilemma: Slow Violence, Intersectionality, and a Disability Rights Framework for the Future,” Georgetown Law Journal 110, no. 4 (2022): 785-833. ↩︎
Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States; Lydia X. M. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu (eds.), All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism (Lincoln, NE: Dragonbee Press, 2017). ↩︎
Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States. ↩︎
Schalk, Black Disability Politics; Crip Camp, directed by James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham. ↩︎
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241-1299, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039; Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/. ↩︎
Brown et al., All the Weight of Our Dreams. ↩︎