Crip Quotes

Cheer up, Crips, and keep smiling. That’s the thing to do. If you go through life with a smile on your face, you’ll be amazed how many people will come up to you and say ‘What the hell are you grinning about? What’s so funny?’ Make you a lot of new friends.

There were jobs so bor­ing, you’d find ways to crip­ple your­self so you couldn’t work.

Access is complex. It is more than just having a ramp or getting disabled folks/crips into the meeting. Access is a constant process that doesn’t stop. It is hard and even when you have help, it can be impossible to figure out alone.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs. But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have a Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison.

Disability Justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being week or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honoured crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.

Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?

Good shit takes time. Extend time, bend time, crip time.

Crip up or grip up … Criptum vexo vel carpo vex.

Of fortune cookies and tarot cards they have no need: my wheelchair, burn scars, and gnarled hands apparently tell them all they need to know. My future is written on my body.

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get.

People with chronic illness, pain, and fatigue have been among the most critical of this aspect of the social model, rightly noting that social and structural changes will do little to make one's joints stop aching or to alleviate back pain. Nor will changes in architecture and attitude heal diabetes or cancer or fatigue. Focusing exclusively on disabling barriers, as a strict social model seems to do, renders pain and fatigue irrelevant to the project of disability politics.

He came cripping slowly back up the driveway - when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again. His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof. Tears bursting, from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-Earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.

After her three-second celebratory dance on center court at the All England Club, the American media reported, “And there was Serena … Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world…. You couldn’t help but shake your head…. What Serena did was akin to cracking a tasteless, X-rated joke inside a church…. What she did was immature and classless.

I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?

CRIP: I’m a non-conformist, and nothing’s ever easy for me.

For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world.

At the risk of seeming like a Christian, or a Che Guevara poster, love is bigger, huger, more complex, and more ultimate than petty fucked-up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I’ve seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody.

Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?

Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are.

Presenting the cyborg/disability connection in a purely positive light also ignores the fact that, for many people, adaptive technologies can be painful;

Thinking through crip temporalities and futurities requires, then, a grappling with nostalgia, a recognition of the powerful role nostalgia plays in approaches to the body. Indeed, fears about longevity “under any circumstances”—fears of disability, in other words—are often bound up in a kind of compulsory nostalgia for the lost able mind/body, the nostalgic past mind/body that perhaps never was.

James Brown had many guises, many names: Crip, Music Box, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business, Mr. Please Please Please, Butane James, Soul Brother Number One, Skates, The Godfather of Soul...He was His Own Bad Bad Self, the Sex Machine, Black Elvis, the Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, The Original Disco Man, Universal James. But before any of them, he was simply a dancer doing the James Brown.

Right now, up those stairs, the lady behind the door, she's neutral territory. A shrine where you pilgrimage a thousand miles on your knees to pay tribute. Same as Jerusalem or some church. Special to white supremacists and Bloods, Crips, Ninjas, a lady who transcends turf wars for power. Who transcends race and nationality and family. Every man might hate every other man, outside of here we might all kill each other, but we all love her.

The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

it becomes obvious that people with disabilities have experiences, by virtue of their disabilities, which non-disabled people do not have, and which are [or can be] sources of knowledge that is not directly accessible to non-disabled people. Some of this knowledge, for example, how to live with a suffering body, would be of enormous practical help to most people…. Much of it would enrich and expand our culture, and some of it has the potential to change our thinking and our ways of life profoundly.

Futurity has often been framed in curative terms, a time frame that casts disabled people (as) out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress. In our disabled state, we are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured, we play a starring role: the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body.

How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat's hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky® on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name, embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?

Fresno Bulldogs: This gang is one of the few California Hispanic gangs not to claim allegiance to the Surenos or Nortenos. Latin Kings: This Chicago-based group consists of more than 160 cliques in 30 states and has as many as 35,000 members. Mara Salvatrucha (or M.S. 13): This violent Hispanic organization has origins in El Salvador. It has roughly 8,000 members in the United States and another 20,000 outside the United States. Bloods: With its roots in Los Angeles, this African American street gang exists in 123 cities and 33 states. Crips: Also founded in Los Angeles, this African American gang exists in 40 states and has 30,000 to 35,000 members. Gangster Disciples: This Chicago-based African American gang is active in at least 31 states and has more than 25,000 members. Vice Lord Nation: This Chicago-based African American gang has around 30,000 members in 28 states.

Say more about the Crips and the Bloods,” Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order. “To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that’s not where they’re at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I’m saying it has been the case for a long time in T’Rain that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character. And what happened in the last few months was that the F.O.B. types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags. And as long as it’s possible for those two groups to identify each other on sight, each one of them is going to see the other as, well, the Other, and killing people based on that is way more ingrained than killing them on this completely bogus and flimsy fake-Good and fake-Evil dichotomy that we were working with before.” “I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?” “What if it’s true?” Devin shrugged. “Then you’re not doing your fucking job,” Richard said. “Because the world is supposed to have a real story to it. Not just people killing each other over color schemes.” “Maybe you’re not doing yours,” Devin said. “How can I write a story about Good and Evil in a world where those concepts have no real meaning—no consequences?” “What sort of consequences do you have in mind? We can’t send people’s characters to virtual Hell.” “I know. Only Limbo.” They both laughed.

In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

Well, let me see. He’s got a tattoo on his forearm, I saw it when he was drinking my orange juice straight out of the box. It was a crown, like a king’s crown and some letters, CRR or CMM, something like that. And what else? Some numbers. Nineteen hundred?” “The crown is for Prince Street,” Isaiah said, “and it’s seventeen hundred. That’s the block number. The letters are CHH. For Crip Headhunters.” “I just remembered,” Tudor said. “There were some initials too. BK. Yes, I’m sure about that. BK. That should narrow it down some, don’t you think?” “BK means Blood killer,” Isaiah said. “Crips and Bloods are enemies.” “Good

The way my parents see me, more Crip than Kick, I saw I’ve been doing that to myself. Cutting myself down to size before anyone else could do it.” “Protecting yourself.” “Making myself small.

gangs of L.A. Crenshaw was run by the Crips, though at the time, you still had a few Brims—that’s the original name for the Bloods gang. Time magazine called it Fort Crenshaw—it was one of the most violent schools in the U.S. It was a closed campus—once the bells rang, they locked the school down and you couldn’t leave.

We rule over gangs—Crips and Bloods and Trinitarios and Latin Lords. Dominicans Don’t Play, Broad Day Shooters, Gun Clappin’ Goonies, Goons on Deck (seems to be a theme), From Da Zoo, Money Stackin’ High, Mac Baller Brims. Folk Nation, Insane Gangster Crips, Addicted to Cash, Hot Boys, Get Money Boys.

I know more than one genius organizer, usually a Black or brown, sick or disabled woman or non-binary person who doesn't have a ton of disability community, who's casually told me that they'll be dead by the age of fifty. I respect that crip years are like dog years and sometimes we live really huge lives in short amounts of time. But I can't help but think that it doesn't have to be that way. We're soaked since birth in narratives that we will die young, that our lives aren't worth living, and we're up against everything from insurance denials to police trying to kill us who want to do the same damn thing. But as I hear my friends talking about how they're sure they'll die young, I wonder if changing the narratives around care might change their expectations.

Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it. Collective access is revolutionary because disabled people of color (and disabled people in general) choosing each other is revolutionary. And, in many ways access should not be a revolutionary concept. It is the routine, every day part of the work. It is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free. Disabled people are so much more than our access needs; we can’t have a movement without safety and access, and yet there is so much more still waiting for us collectively once we build this skillset of negotiating access needs with each other. Tonight I am taking time to appreciate and enjoy access as a communication of our deepest desires. When my new friend makes their house wheelchair accessible so I can come over, a whole new level of safety and trust opens up. When a love takes initiative to reach out to event organizers to make sure my buds and I can fully participate, that’s thoughtfulness, and also political commitment in practice. When I eat dinner with dear ones and they know which spoon or cup to grab, that’s attunement. When I can ask a friend to move my body, it’s because I know they want me to be comfortable out in the world. When I can do the impairment-related parts of my routine around someone, that’s intimacy, a gift of letting each other into our most private worlds. Feeling thankful for access—and interdependence—as an opportunity for us to show up for one another, and also for crip spaces that give us a taste of what can take place when we have each other. I am so hungry for us to be together. I am so ready for what is around the corner. —STACEY PARK

Girls at Shoreline said Rich looked like L.L. Cool J. They called him Richie D., and around that time, Warren began to call himself Warren G. Erik wore his baseball cap just tilted perfectly to the side and also knew every song by Too $hort and was impressed that Warren knew the lyrics so well. Rich and Erik and D’Arcy beat him into the Crips and, after this initiation by pummeling, they said, “You’re part of the family now.” Though older boys in View Royal may have scoffed at Warren G. and “his whole gangster act,” older boys were unaware of the care and attention he brought to his outfits, which were, perhaps, both costume and disguise. He favored white. The color was distinctly his own, and it set him apart from his fellow gangsters, the members of the CMC (Crip Mafia Cartel). For the members of the CMC, blue was mandatory, red forbidden. White was Warren’s personal choice, and an unlikely one, for black may have better created the look of a badass he aspired to. At 5’4 and 115 pounds, Warren was far from a thug, and in fact could not have been cuter and, despite his knowledge of lewd song lyrics and his tempestuous domestic situation, innocent. Never has a boy looked more as if he wandered out of a fairy tale. His eyes were immense, and his eyelashes were long, and his expression was earnest and longing and always, always hopeful. He was possessed of the certain androgynous beauty that appeals so strongly to girls who have not yet turned sixteen. Like heartthrobs of past and present (that year it was Leonardo DiCaprio), Warren G. appeared neither manly nor mean, and in fact, his soft beauty suggested he might really need to be saved.

In some areas of London and Manchester the gangs were becoming more of a cultural transmission of America’s Crips and Bloods.

Kids that are outside the societal norms look for a place to fit in, a way to be indoctrinated and accepted. Not because they have bad parents, or dysfunctional families, but because humans on a gut level need the traditions, rituals, and myths that used to be a part of primitive culture. We have replaced them with laws, lawyers, and court systems. The modern day thought is that right and wrong are black and white, written in a court document or a book of codes of law set down by the legislature. It is not passed on by accepted norms and ethos.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him—he has known a fear beyond every other.

The “I was just doing my job” was a very narrow focus on the real issues that a cop experienced on a daily basis. It could be extremely comforting for the officer to see his own actions and not the bigger picture. This made him a part of the problem, via apathy, rather than becoming part of the solution.

In the study it was discovered that in almost every situation where someone had achieved a level of world-class excellence in a chosen field, it took approximately ten years of practice.

Don’t mistake my kindness for weakness.

They were businessmen who were worse than any of the Bloods or Crips I ever met—and believe me, I met more than a few of them in my life.

CRIP: LETTING YOU would be agreeing to allow you to come if you asked if you could ... ASKING YOU to come means I wanted you to come, and I asked you, because I wanted you here.

What is the difference between the Crips and the Bloods? Whether they kill over red bandanas or blue bandanas, it’s about which symbols they’re willing to kill for. But if one group was not willing to kill over the symbols (because they were too logical) and the other group was willing, the first group would disappear. Eradicated or absorbed.

Runnin'" Can't keep runnin' away..... [Verse 1: Fat Lip] I must admit on some occasions I went out like a punk and a chump or a sucka or something to that effect Respect I usedto never get when all I got was upset when niggas use to be like 'What's up fool!' and tried to seat a nigga like the Lip for no reason at all I can recall crip niggas throwin' c in my face down the hall I'm kickin' it in the back of the school eatin' chicken at three, wonderin' why is everybody always pickin' on me I tried to talk and tell tham chill I did nothing to deserve this But when it didn't work I wasn't scared just real nervous and unprepared to deal with scrappin' no doubt cuz my pappy never told me how to knock a nigga out But now in 95 I must survive as a man on my own Fuck around with Fatlip yes ya get blown I'm not tryin to show no macho is shown but when it's on, if it's on, then it's on! [Verse 2: Slim Kid Tre] There comes a time in every mans life when he's gotta handle up on his own Can't depend on friends to help you in a sqeeze, please they got problems of their own Down for the count on seven chickens shits don't get to heaven til they faced these fears in these fear zones Used to get jacked back in high school I played it cool just so some real shit won't get full blown Being where I'm from they let the smoke come quicker than an evil red-neck could lynch a helpless colored figure And as a victim I invented low-key til the keyhole itself got lower than me So I stood up and let my free form form free I don't sweat it I let the bullshit blow in the breeze in other words just freeze [Verse 3: Knumbskull #1] It's 1995 now that I'm older stress weighs on my shoulders heavy as boulders but I told ya till the day that I die I still will be a soldier and that's all I told ya and that's all I showed ya and all this calamity is rippin' my sanity Can it be I'm a celebrity whose on the brink of insanity Now don't be wishin's of switchin' any positions with me cuz when you in my position, it ain't never easy to do any type of maintaining cuz all this gaming and famin' from entertainin' is hella straining to the brain and... But I can't keep runnin I just gotta keep keen and cunnin'...

In our disabled state, we are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured, we play a starring role: the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body.

Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk—walk—WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!

Ironside's position on disability, on the other hand, is precisely what generated media coverage, but there, too, the assumption that disability is best met with abortion went largely unchallenged. In a televised debate about abortion, Ironside described the abortion of “a baby [that] is going to be born severely disabled” as the “act of a loving mother”; she then offered that, faced with such “a deeply suffering child,” she would not hesitate to “put a pillow over its face,” as would “any good mother.

The FBL's attention to individual virtue obscures the ableist attitudes inherent in these billboards. Reeve appears strong and “super” to many Americans, and Ali “courageous,” simply by virtue of their living with a disability. In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.

For Hershey, the time of prognosis is a single moment of telling but also an extended, if not indefinite, period of negotiation and identification. During that period, past/present/future become jumbled, inchoate. The present takes on more urgency as the future shrinks; the past becomes a mix of potential causes of one's present illness or a succession of wasted time; the future is marked in increments of treatment and survival even as “the future” becomes more tenuous.

It would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. Army to help the Crips take over Los Angeles--and succeeded.

Doing so, however, reinforces a problematic “we” that discounts those with disabilities by suggesting all of us occupy failed embodiments in some way without an ability to attend to crip/queer materiality’s nuances of experience.

Remember when I said I was a bit scattered? It wasn’t just when it came to jobs. I had a slew of strange ex-boyfriends, too. There was George, who liked to wear my underwear . . . everyday. Not just to prance around in—he wore them under his Levi’s at work. As a construction worker. That didn’t go over well with his co-workers once they found out. He works at Jamba Juice now. I don’t think anyone cares about what kind of underwear he wears at Jamba Juice. Then there was Curtis. He had an irrational fear of El Caminos. Yes, the car. He just hated them so much that he became really fearful of seeing one. He’d say, “I don’t understand, is it a car or a truck?” The confusion would bring him to tears. When we were walking on the street together, I had to lead him like a blind person because he didn’t want to open his eyes and spot an El Camino. If he did, it would completely ruin his day. He would cry out, “There’s another one. Why, God?” And then he would have to blink seven times and say four Hail Marys facing in a southerly direction. I don’t know what happened to Curtis. He’s probably in his house playing video games and collecting disability. After Curtis came Randall, who will never be forgotten. He was an expert sign spinner. You know those people who stand on the corner spinning signs? Randall had made a career of it. He was proud and protective of his title as best spinner in LA. I met him when he was spinning signs for Jesus Christ Bail Bonds on Fifth Street. He was skillfully flipping a giant arrow that said, “Let God Free You!” and his enthusiasm struck me. I smiled at him from the turn lane. He set the sign down, waved me over, and asked for my phone number. We started dating immediately. He called himself an Arrow Advertising executive when people would ask what he did for a living. He could spin, kick, and toss that sign like it weighed nothing. But when he’d put his bright-red Beats by Dre headphones on, he could break, krump, jerk, turf, float, pop, lock, crip-walk, and b-boy around that six-foot arrow like nobody’s business. He was the best around and I really liked him, but he dumped me for Alicia, who worked at Liberty Tax in the same strip mall. She would stand on the opposite corner, wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit, and dance to the National Anthem. They were destined for each other. After Randall was Paul. Ugh, Paul. That, I will admit, was completely my fault.

Chris opens a Twix as he studies the photo. He has his annual medical in two months, and every Monday he convinces himself that this is finally the week he gets back into shape, finally shifts the stone or so that holds him back. The stone or so that gives him cramp. The stone or so that stops him buying new clothes, just in case, and that stops him dating, because who would want this? The stone or so that stands between him and the world. Two one if he's really honest. Those Mondays are usually good. Chris doesn't take the elevator on Mondays. Chris brings food from home on Mondays. Chris does sit-ups in bed on Mondays. But by Tuesdays, or in a good week, Wednesday, the world creeps back in, the stairs seem too daunting, and Chris loses faith in the project. He's aware that the project is himself, and that drags him further down still. So out come the pastries and the crips, the garage lunch, the quick drink after work, the takeaway on the way home from work, the chocolate on the way home from the takeaway. The eating, the numbing, the release, the shame, and then repeat. But there was always next Monday, and one of these Mondays there would be salvation. That stone would drop off, followed by the other stone that was lurking.

Crip time asks us to think about time as variable and changing with our embodiments.

Warren tried hard to please the Crips, selling a little weed on the side and acting the tough badass around Erik and those guys so they would like him. And sometimes he felt like he was living a double life, but not a false life, since the innocent schoolboy and the badass were both true and part of him.

You know what you did wrong from jump and that was use that ‘blood’ terminology in here. This crip, nigga.

queer crip of color writers were creating space for sick and disabled queer and trans people of color to name ourselves as disabled, our kind of disabled, for the first time, and talk about the shit we’d only whispered before.

Don’t trip, crip. I’m ‘bout to show Ms. Thickumz how to get dicked down properly without me having to make her play with her clit just so she can nut while the dick inside.

Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopo- litical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride. The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world. -Harriet McBryde Johnson Taking up space as a disabled person is always revolutionary. -Sandy Ho There is so much that able-bodied people could learn from the wisdom that often comes with dis- ability. But space needs to be made. Hands need to be reached out. People need to be lifted up. -A. H. Reaume Disability justice exists every place two disabled people meet-at a kitchen table, on heating pads in bed talking to our loves. -Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Omar explained that Crips was anacronym for Community Revolution in Progress (...) They were first meant to offer guardianship and community to counter crime and violence. (...) Incidentally, the Bloods rose up for the same reason in 1972, except they were meant to provide protection from the Crips. So it was a self-perpetuating cycle of attack and defense.

Most importantly for me, historical accuracy also meant this could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men. Crips, queers, women and other genders, and people of colour are an integral part of the history of Britain—we are embedded at every level of society, present during every change, and part of every problem and its solution. We are here now; we were there then. So we are in this story.

the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular bodies, minds, and ways of being.

Impaired people are disabled by their environments

children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows, all warm and fuzzy in their Li’l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.

Toast up with the gang and focus more on getting more money stop chasing bitches.

Disability justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn’t me being weak or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honored crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand

Crip emotional intelligence is not taking it personally when someone cancels and continuing to invite them to things. To not forget them.

When I think about access, I think about love. I think that crip solidarity, and solidarity between crips and non(yet)-crips is a powerful act of love and I-got-your-back. It’s in big things, but it’s also in the little things we do moment by moment to ensure that we all—in all our individual bodies—get to be present fiercely as we make change.

Embedded in this is a giant paradigm shift. Our crip bodies aren’t seen as liabilities, something that limits us and brings pity, or something to nobly transcend, ’cause I’m just like you. Our crip bodies are gifts, brilliant, fierce, skilled, valuable. Assets that teach us things that are relevant and vital to ourselves, our communities, our movements, the whole goddamn planet.

It’s also a revolution to reclaim what it looks like to be a crip healer, a parenting healer, a sex-working healer, a poor/working-class healer. Healing can happen in corners of rooms or on Skype, can start late, can cancel because of a flare. Can be sick, weird, curse, happen in a corner of the BLM encampment in a drizzle. Can be a haircut, a blow job, an accessible dance party, a Reiki treatment—or all four at once.

No matter how much shit I post on Instagram about it, they seem to remain ignorant of the fact that we have histories and cultures and skills and visions, and that if we’re going to survive the Trumpocalypse and make the new world emerge, our work needs to be cripped the fuck out. Our work needs to center disability justice and the activists at the core of it, where being sick, disabled, mad, neurodivergent/autistic and/or Deaf is at the heart of our radicalism.

When I see disability justice flourishing, it comes from years of relationship building and building trust, from fucking up, making repair, learning from mistakes, and showing up for each other. In Toronto, hearing disabled people and Deaf people built relationships with each other for years, including creating community-controlled queer ASL classes so hearing crips could communicate with D(d)eaf and Hard of Hearing queers, resulting in powerful community connections. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because disabled and Deaf people organized together, showed up at each other’s protests. When hearing disabled people learn ASL so they can communicate with Deaf folks, we are creating the rock-bottom tools we need to talk, laugh, hang out, disagree, organize, break isolation, and fall in love. And that is the opposite of a well-meaning but relationshipless access provision.

If these care webs are going to keep working, a paradigm shift needs to occur in those friends’ heads. They need to see the disabled people they’ve blanked out on listening to for years when we’ve been trying to talk about access or our lives. (An apology might be cool, too.) They need to understand that their friend isn’t a special cripple, cooler than the rest—that the problems they’re facing aren’t individual ones but systemic struggles that face all crips and need collective solutions. They need to ask themselves why they have systematically refused to value or take in what disabled folks around them have been and are saying. They need to listen and learn from the care work and skills disability communities have been doing for years—and maybe offer some compensation for that knowledge. Or at least say thank you.

Andrea Smith explains that “the pro-life versus pro-choice paradigm reifies and masks the structures of white supremacy and capitalism that undergird the reproductive choices that women make.” As Smith and other activists and scholars detail, the language of choice presents women more as consumers than citizens, opening the door for some women to be cast as bad decision makers and for some choices to be deemed bad or inappropriate. Moreover, the language of choice fails to take into account how different women have different access to different choices; it removes from analysis the conditions under which women and families make decisions about reproduction.

Continuing to accept disability as the reason to keep abortion legal, and casting abortion as the only reasonable choice when dealing with disability, is a narrowing of both abortion rights and the terms of debate. So, too, is the assumption that the meaning of “suffering” or “quality of life” is self-evident and monolithic; rather than using these concepts as if they “obviously” led us to only one conclusion, we could attend instead to their shifts in meanings across different registers, contexts, or bodies/minds.

As a wheelchair user, I can easily tell when I have rolled into a poor, undervalued neighborhood: The sidewalk becomes cracked and curb cuts get increasingly precarious or disappear altogether.

Despite the rise of disability studies in the United States, and decades of disability rights activism, disability continues to be seen primarily as a personal problem afflicting individual people, a problem best solved through strength of character and resolve

The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms. In this framework, the proper approach to disability is to “‘treat’ the condition and the person with the condition rather than ‘treating' the social processes and policies that constrict disabled people's lives.” Although this framing of disability is called the “medical” model, it's important to note that its use isn't limited to doctors and other service providers; what characterizes the medical model isn't the position of the person (or institution) using it, but the positioning of disability as an exclusively medical problem and, especially, the conceptualization of such positioning as both objective fact and common sense.

[T]he definitional shift away from the medical/individual model makes room for new understandings of how best to solve the “problem” of disability. In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being. For example, under the medical/individual model, wheelchair users suffer from impairments that restrict their mobility. These impairments are best addressed through medical interventions and cures; failing that, individuals must make the best of a bad situation, relying on friends and family members to negotiate inaccessible spaces for them. Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

Although I agree that we need to attend to the social, asserting a sharp divide between impairment and disability fails to recognize that both impairment and disability are social; simply trying to determine what constitutes impairment makes clear that impairment doesn't exist apart from social meanings and understandings. Susan Wendell illustrates this problem when she queries how far one must be able to walk to be considered able-bodied; the answer to that question, she explains, has much to do with the economic and geographic context in which it is addressed.

A political/relational model of disability, on the other hand, makes room for more activist responses, seeing “disability” as a potential site for collective reimagining. Under this kind of framework, “disability awareness” simulations can be reframed to focus less on the individual experience of disability—or imagined experience of disability—and more on the political experience of disablement. For example, rather than placing nondisabled students in wheelchairs, the Santa Barbara-based organization People in Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms (PISSAR) places them in bathrooms, armed with measuring tapes and clipboards, to track the failures and omissions of the built environment. As my fellow restroom revolutionaries explain in our manifesto, “This switch in focus from the inability of the body to the inaccessibility of the space makes room for activism and change in ways that ‘awareness exercises’ may not.” In creating and disseminating a “restroom checklist,” PISSAR imagines a future of disability activism, one with disability rights activists demanding accessible spaces; contrast that approach with the simulation exercises, in which “awareness” is the future goal, rather than structural or systemic change.

[A] political/relational framework recognizes the difficulty in determining who is included in the term “disabled,” refusing any assumption that it refers to a discrete group of particular people with certain similar essential qualities. On the contrary, the political/relational model of disability sees disability as a site of questions rather than firm definitions: Can it encompass all kinds of impairments—cognitive, psychiatric, sensory, and physical? Do people with chronic illnesses fit under the rubric of disability? Is someone who had cancer years ago but is now in remission disabled? What about people with some forms of multiple sclerosis (MS) who experience different temporary impairments—from vision loss to mobility difficulties—during each recurrence of the disease, but are without functional limitations once the MS moves back into remission? What about people with large birthmarks or other visible differences that have no bearing on their physical capabilities, but that often prompt discriminatory treatment?

Much as feminist activism benefits people who want no part of feminism, disability studies and activism ideally benefit people who are not interested or invested in either.

As many historians of feminism and women's studies have noted, feminism has long been interested in bridging theory with practice. Activists and scholars alike continue to explore the ways in which theory can inform political practice; conversely, feminists often theorize from practice, developing concepts and frameworks based on the strategies, conversations, conflicts, and achievements of feminist activists.

Might it be logically inconsistent, for example, that we claim to value the lives of disabled people even as we create (and mandate) more and more prenatal tests to screen out “undesirable” fetuses? Glossing over these inconsistencies, or pretending that they can be easily and definitively resolved, simplifies the complexities inherent in questions of social justice. The desire for clear answers, free of contradiction and inconsistency, is understandable, but I want to suggest that accessible futures require such ambiguities. Following Puar, I believe that “contradictions and discrepancies…are not to be reconciled or synthesized but held together in tension. They are less a sign of wavering intellectual commitment than symptoms of the political impossibility to be on one side or the other.” Indeed, part of the problem I'm tracing in these pages is the assumption that there is only one side to the question of disability and that we're all already on it.

I argue that decisions about the future of disability and disabled people are political decisions and should be recognized and treated as such. Rather than assume that a “good” future naturally and obviously depends upon the eradication of disability, we must recognize this perspective as colored by histories of ableism and disability oppression.

Disability activists have long railed against a politics of endless deferral that pours economic and cultural resources into “curing” future disabled people (by preventing them from ever coming into existence) while ignoring the needs and experiences of disabled people in the present.

The statistical likelihood that young, black men living in particular Chicago neighborhoods will be paralyzed (if not killed) by gunshot wounds serves to push them out of time, facing a future of no future, and a no future best embodied by a wheelchair. Disability, in other words, becomes the future of no future, with “dead in jail or in a chair” recognized as all the same, all signs of no future. In more mainstream, sentimental accounts of disability (i.e., those not featuring poor people of color living in “bad” neighborhoods), disability is what ends one's future; it is the familiar narrative of disability as tragedy and loss. But for the men Ostrander profiles, disability is the sign that one never had a future in the first place; loss is not the defining frame because there was nothing to “lose.

Living in “prognosis time” is thus a liminal temporality, a casting out of time; rather than a stable, steady progression through the stages of life, time is arrested, stopped. Paradoxically, even as the very notion of “prognosis” sets up the future as known and knowable, futurity itself becomes tenuous, precarious.

We need to be much more vigilant and aware of the risks inherent in touting the importance of family involvement and family care. Too easily, those calls can be reinterpreted to mean that the only care worth supporting is that provided by relatives, inadvertently demonizing and pathologizing the use of paid attendants. This is not to say that family members who provide attendant care for their disabled relatives should not themselves be compensated for their work; indeed, I support consumer-directed attendant services that allow disabled people to hire their own attendants, including family members. But, as Laura Hershey explains, seeing attendant care as something best provided by a family member too easily perpetuates the idea that disability is a private problem concerning the family that has no place in the public sphere. This attitude, in turn, leads to the continued devaluation of caregiving; abysmal wages and working conditions are justified on the basis that family members—almost always women—would be doing this work anyway and therefore any compensation, no matter how meager, is sufficient.

Quality of life” is a familiar refrain in discussions of disability, as the term has often been used as a measure of the worth of disabled people's lives. “Measure” is perhaps too precise a term, as the meaning or criteria of “quality” of life are often taken to be common sense. Many people, regardless of dis/ability, may use the term to examine their own experiences, but disabled people often find their own quality of life described by others as if it were self-evident in their appearance or diagnosis; such discussions almost always include descriptions of the disabled person's (assumed) level of function and pain. Yet accurately evaluating function is not as easy as it might seem. If a disabled person has never been given any kind of adaptive therapy or training, or if someone has no access to adaptive equipment (or only to substandard equipment), then one's function might be much lower than one's ability. Quality of life, then, is affected by one's access to resources and bodies of knowledge rather than a necessary fact of the body/mind. Indeed, descriptions of another's pain and suffering often rely more on assumption than fact, as do presumptions about what level of function is required for a good quality of life.

As illustrated by Woman on the Edge of Time, and as manifested in the furor surrounding McCullough and Duchesneau's reproductive choices, disability is often seen as a difference that has no place in the future. Disability is a problem that must be eliminated, a hindrance to one's future opportunities, a drag on one's quality of life. Speaking directly about the Duchesneau and McCullough case, bioethicist Alta Charo argues, “The question is whether the parents have violated the sacred duty of parenthood, which is to maximize to some reasonable degree the advantages available to their children. I'm loath to say it, but I think it's a shame to set limits on a child's potential.” Similar claims are made in opposition to same-sex parenting; critics argue that children raised in queer households will have a lower quality of life than children raised in heterosexual ones. However, in both of these situations, it is assumed not only that disability and queerness inherently and irreversibly lower one's quality of life but also that there is only one possible understanding of “quality of life” and that everyone knows what “it” is without discussion or elaboration.

To eliminate disability is to eliminate the possibility of discovering alternative ways of being in the world, to foreclose the possibility of recognizing and valuing our interdependence.

By presenting these concepts as apolitical, the Foundation for a Better Life (FBL) renders them natural, accepted, commonsense, and therefore beyond the scope of debate or discussion. The FBL operates on the assumption that we all know and agree what a better life entails, and what values are necessary to achieve it; there is no need for argument or critique. Representations of disability and illness play a large role in this campaign, with a significant number of billboards praising individuals with disabilities for having the strength of character to “overcome” their disabilities. The depoliticization mandated by these billboards and the FBL itself is made possible through reference to the disabled body; in other words, it is not just that the FBL depoliticizes disability, but that it does so in order to depoliticize all the values featured in its campaign. Indeed, the presence of the disabled body is used to render this campaign not as ideology but as common sense.

This focus on personal responsibility precludes any discussion of social, political, or collective responsibility. There are no billboards touting solidarity, or social change, or community development; none of the images celebrate disparate groups coming together to engage in coalition work. There is no recognition of ableism or discrimination or oppression in these materials, only an insistence that individuals take responsibility for their own successes and failures. As a result, disability is depoliticized, presented as a fact of life requiring determination and courage, not as a system marking some bodies, ways of thinking, and patterns of movement as deviant and unworthy.

In the FBL worldview, disabled people thrive not because of civil rights laws and protection from discrimination, but because of their personal integrity, courage, and ability to overcome obstacles.