Developing a Collective Vision of a More Inclusive Future for Disabled People

Disabled people in this country deserve solidarity and liberation. Instead, the Disability Community (DisCo) faces a modern age of eugenics amid rising fascism in the US—with many of the threats coming from the nation’s highest seat of power.

It started on Donald Trump’s first day in office, with an executive order making cuts to disabled children’s education under the banner of attacks on “wasteful” diversity, equity, and inclusion. It wasn’t long before he signed the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of our nation, threatening healthcare access to the 4.5 million disabled people whose home and community-based services are funded by the medical insurance program. Many of us have since lost that critical care as a result. Just this summer, the administration moved federal responsibility for educating disabled children from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services, positioning our community as a thing to be cured rather than included or accommodated, and setting the stage for segregating disabled students from our abled peers.

Add in an attempt to reduce or completely end the Supplemental Security Income benefits of about 400,000 disabled adults living with low-income parents, a push to expand the government’s ability to institutionalize people with mental illnesses or substance use disabilities who are unhoused, sustained attacks on our immigrant neighbors that have led to increased disability and death, and a recent Department of Justice memo challenging disabled people’s right to live in our own communities. From the above examples, it’s clear that the federal government is waging a targeted attack against our community.

Threats to our lives and dignity are not new. From colonization to enslavement, the United States is built on White supremacist, eugenic, disabling violence that continues today. But for us at the Disability Culture Lab (DCL), it is especially concerning to see the current administration echo the history and founding of the United States, even as it tries to sanitize its creation story, while using eugenic rhetoric and policy, institutionalization, tear gas, guns, and violent arrests as part of its strategy to delegitimize, disappear, mass-disable, and kill disabled people—especially multi-marginalized disabled people such as immigrants, trans folks, and Black folks.