Rev Left Radio - Disability Justice and Liberation w/ Lateef McLeod

Episode Date: August 11, 2018

Lateef McLeod is building his career as a scholar and an author. He has earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and a MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. He is now a student in the Anthropology and Social Change Doctoral program at California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. He published his first poetry book entitled A Declaration Of A Body Of Love in 2010 chronicling his life as a black man with a disability and tackling various topics on family, dating, religion, spirituality, his national heritage and sexuality. He currently is writing a novel tentatively entitled The Third Eye Is Crying. He was in the 2007 annual theater performance of Sins Invalid and also their artist-in-residence performance in 2011 entitled Residence Alien. He currently completing another poetry book entitled Whispers of Krip Love, Shouts of Krip Revolution. Some of his recent community service work includes being the co-chair of the Persons with Disabilities Ministry at Allen Temple Baptist Church and being the chair of the Lead committee and executive board member of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. More of his writings, as well as contact info for Lateef, are available on his website: www.Lateefhmcleod.com Also, here is his Huffington Post blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lateef-mcleod/ Listen to and support Lateef's music here: https://soundcloud.com/lateef-mcleod Support Revolutionary Left Radio and get exclusive bonus content here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Rate and Review us on iTunes to increase our reach! This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, the Omaha GDC, and the Marxist Center. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

Hello everyone and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and Comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Lateef McLeod to talk about disability justice and the intersections of race, disability, and capitalism. I'm really excited about this interview. It's the first of its type that we've ever done here on RevLeft Radio. It is going to be a shorter episode based on Lateef having cerebral palsy. to type out the answers to the questions beforehand. I wasn't sure how long that was going to take,

but it's a very interesting, shorter episode, and I'm very, very proud to put it out. I hope people take this episode seriously and internalize it and incorporate some of its lessons into their organizing efforts. And at the very end of this episode, the song is by our guest, Lateef, and it is called I Am a Worker. We'll link to his SoundCloud in the show notes as well

so people can go check him out. He also mentions that on August 18th, in the Bay Area, there's going to be a disability resource fair. People who are interested in that, go ahead and Google it, look it up, or reach out to Latif. And finally, if you enjoy Revolutionary Left Radio and you'd like to support us, you can always go to patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio. There's bonus content I put out a Q&A episode for patrons every month. And we also release episodes early on our Patreon.

And sometimes we have interviews that you can't find anywhere else exclusively for those who donate their hard-earned money to keep Revolutionary. Left Radio going. So if you like the show, if you want to get bonus content, go ahead and check that out. We just put up an episode on anarcho-communism and militant anti-fascism. So if you're interested in that, for $1, you have access to everything on our Patreon. So thank you for the support. Thanks to Lateef for coming on the show and doing this wonderful episode. Now let's go ahead and get to the interview. Today we have on Latif McLeod to talk about disability justice, capitalism, and a bunch of other

topics. I'm very excited to have Lateef on. Latif, would you like to introduce yourself and say a bit about your background? Well, in my youth, I was a left-leaning liberal, and I was heavily influenced by my dad, who was a PhD graduate from Stanford. I get my moral compass from both him and my mom. Then when I went to college at UC Berkeley, I was introduced to leftist politics in my classes and we had a bookstore right off campus called Revolution Books, which had a lot of leftist material. Also, while I was there, I took June Jordan's poetry for the people in June believed heavily with the personal is political.

Although June didn't teach the class when I took it, I learned to articulate my personal politics and my writing through that class. Then after grad school, I had the chance to work with the artist's collective sins and doubted, which was one of the first places that promoted the Disability Justice Framework. Also around this time, I started listening to this radio station called FAA, which introduced me to intellectuals like Richard Wolfe, Chris Hedges, Corna West, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report, and I started reading their work. I just grew as a leftist from there. Wonderful. Yeah, it's incredibly interesting.

I guess you touched on it a little bit, but what initially got you in, I guess you talked about what got you into radical politics, but how do you identify politically today? That is a good question. Well, I am in between deciding being a communist and because I have not decided fully. Okay. Well, interesting. I think there's lots of people out there really interested to get into this topic. And again, I thank you very much for coming on. So let's just go ahead and dive into the first question.

First and foremost, in what ways does capitalism and the culture it gives rise to? devalue, dismiss, or denigrate those with disabilities? And what psychological effect does this have on people who have disabilities living in this culture, especially when it comes to identity formation? Capitalism made having an able body a priority in the laboring class. This meant for those who do not have an able body or mind after the rise of the Industrial Revolution

were forced into seclusion and institutions by the mainstream society. Even though we mostly do not put people with disabilities and institutions anymore, We have accessible buildings and transportation now the mainstream culture has not acclimated itself to having people with disabilities in society. Most people are taught to believe that disability is a personal tragedy, which leaves many people with disabilities to hate their disability. Disability theorists call this the medical model, where the goal is to get a person with disability to act as able-bodied as possible through medical procedures and treatment. In contrast, theorists and disability studies propose the social. model of disability that says that it is society that is supposed to accommodate and adapt to the bodies and minds of people with disabilities to make our communities more inclusive.

People with disabilities also combat the devaluing of their identity by forming our own culture, with our own poetry, art, movies, and novels to illustrate that disability is a normal part of life and you can have joy and pride in a disability identity. So we not only live in a society that devalues those with disabilities, but we also live in a society rooted in white supremacy. So in what ways do the intersections of race and disability amplify and intensify the marginalization of people of color with disabilities? How have you personally struggled with this over your life? Racism and ableism definitely feed off each other to intensify the oppression for people of color with disabilities. I know as a black man with cerebral palsy I encountered a few people that questioned if I had a severe intellectual disability, which is definitely not the case.

Anyone who is a chance to have a conversation with me can figure that out. But the compounded oppressive experience on ableism and racism has a profound effect on people as intellectuals like Normala Aerevels and Christopher M. Bell write about in their work. People of color with disabilities also have to contend with ableism in their own ethnic, communities as well. Since capitalism is so pervasive in our culture, the devaluing of the lives of people with disabilities has influenced all aspects of society, even in ethnic minority communities in this community. I know in the African American communities there is some need from our education about disability issues as needs to happen in all communities. I try to do some of this work with the persons with disabilities ministry I am in at my church, Allen Temple Baptist Church. We are organizing a Disability Resource Fair next week on Saturday, August 18th, where many disability organizations will be there talking about how they serve the disability community. If people are in the Bay Area, I invite you to come by. Wonderful, and we'll make sure to put that in the show notes so people in that area can come out

and support and contribute to that. But next question, in what ways do revolutionary anti-capitalist liberation movements replicate some of the broader culture stigmas and ignorance surrounding disabilities, in your opinion? Well, the broader leaven that would include the revolutionary and the capitalist liberalist movements, in my opinion, have not adequately tackled and analyzed disability politics in a way that address disability issues within the area of struggle or actively campaigned to recruit people with disabilities as part of their movements. The reason for this is partly due to the fact of what I explained earlier with the rise of capitalism and the industrial, Revolution, there was the seclusion of people with disabilities and institutions until the 1960s.

During that time, the American populace became used to not see people with disabilities not in the public sphere. So the community was not thought of as a source of organization for the older new left movements. Since that time, starting in the late 60s and stretching through the 70s and 80s, there was the disability rights movement starting in Berkeley with students with disabilities at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, which fought for the of people with disabilities in all aspects of life. This culminating in the passing of the American Disability Act, which mandated that all public facilities should be accessible for people with disabilities. This happened simultaneously with the independent living movement in which people with disabilities organized for the in-home support

to live independently in their homes and not in institutions. So people with disabilities are in our community living their lives, but I think they are still sometimes looked over in left and left and looked over in leftist organizing because of fear and ignorance of disability in general and a misconceived notion that disability is not a political issue, which by now should be obvious that it is false. There is also a fear that some people have of how to approach us, which is real simple, just come up to us and start a conversation with us.

Even with people like me who use AAC devices to speak, it is also simple to come and talk to us. We will just type our responses into our AAC devices and speak them and you will hear our digital voices and respond. It is that simple. So the left can organize in the disability community, and they should because people with disabilities are feeling the real brunt of this capitalist system. Yeah, I could not agree more.

And there are lots of organizers that listen to this show, and I hope people really take that into account. This is a crucial block for any liberation movement, and it's an absolutely necessary, you know, chunk of the population that we should absolutely focus on and dedicate as much time as we can because all of our liberations are tied up with everyone else's liberation. But in our email exchanges leading up to this interview, Latif, you talked about how a disability justice praxis needs to be seen as a crucial part of a pathway to liberation.

Can you talk about what you mean when you say disability justice praxis and what that could or should look like in revolutionary organizing or even in socialist societies? Disability justice needs to be a part of any plan for liberation because it ensures the inclusion of mostly everyone regardless of ability, gender, race, sexuality, or class. It is an intersectional approach to liberation that try to not leave anyone out. The practice originated from activists of color with disabilities who saw that the gains of the Disability Rights Movement and the Americans with Disability Act did not address all the concerns that they had being people of color with disabilities whether it was economic

issues or racial issues or issues with the police. Things that were not addressed with the main disability rights movements. So these activists came together created the framework of disability justice, which breaks down to 10 principles. The first principle being one of intersectionality which states that each person has intersecting identities that might be a source of their oppression or privilege, whatever the case may be. This principle was popularized first, I believe, by the Kambahee River Collective who were a black, queer, feminist, intellectual group in the 70s who saw that they had to combat oppression at multiple fronts, whether it was homophobia, sexism, or racism. So they acknowledged that all their forms of oppression needed to be dismantled for them to gain their freedom. The disability community has every other demographic within it, so we are not only fighting for the end of ableism, but all other types of oppression because we are affected by the other forms of oppression.

The disability community has a multitude of people with different identities and acknowledging privilege and oppression is essential in organizing efforts. The second principle is leadership of the most impacted, meaning that the most oppressed must take leadership of the liberation efforts. In other words, the people who has the foot of the system the most on their net should be heard the most of how we all are going to free them at us. The third principle states that disability justice has none the capitalist politic, because, Because the capitalist system does not value the bodies of people with disabilities. The fourth principle is cross-movement solidarity, which expresses the need for disability justice to network with other social justice movements in order to develop more of a critique against ableism within those movements.

The fifth principle in recognizing wholeness meaning that people are intrinsically valuable for who they are and not because of their level of productivity that they can give to their capitalist system. Number 6 is a commitment to sustainability, which acknowledges that the bodies and environment of people with disabilities need to be preserved and their level of productivity has to ratify both. The seventh principle is the commitment to cross-disability solidarity, which is a dedication to fight against the many levels of oblige oppression that people with disabilities face.

Principle number eight deals with interdependence which states that we all need each other to survive and all in some since participate in the local communism of meeting everyone's needs in our community. Number nine is the principle of collective access, which states that everyone has access needs that should be addressed so we all can have a stronger community with each other. Finally, the 10th principle is collective liberation, which attempts to build a movement toward liberation in which we work toward everyone's freedom from oppression. With these 10 principles, one can see how disability justice has to be at the core of any economy that hopes to free the disability community from the marginalization they now

experience currently. With these 10 principles, we think we can start help push communities to be more welcome to people with disabilities, which will benefit everyone in the long haul because we all can be disabled at some point of our lives. And wouldn't we want to live in a society that accepts us as whole human beings, regardless of our physical or mental abilities? Yeah. Wonderfully said, absolutely important. You know, one of the points was, you mentioned that disability community has every other demographic and identity with, within it and that anybody can become disabled at any point in their life. And I think that's extremely important to a sentiment to echo to people listening out

there, that that's something that absolutely is important. I'm going to try to get those 10 points and post them in the show notes so people can review them and keep them in mind. But Lateef, you've written a paper entitled The Promise of Social Ecology and Disability Justice in Making a New Society in which you explore the connections between Murray Bookchin's theory of social ecology. and disability justice. Can you remind listeners what social ecology is and what your main arguments in that paper are?

Social ecology is a social theory developed by Murray Bookchin that advocates for a society that is sustainable and more harmonious with its ecological surroundings and tries to dismantle's forms of hierarchy among the members of its community. I was attracted to it as a philosophy because of its commitment to being against hierarchy in all forms of oppression, and that is why I thought it worked well. with the philosophy of disability justice. Also, as we remember from the question earlier, sustainability is the sixth principle of disability justice,

so it too has a commitment to preserving the environment and living within ecological limits. Both philosophies are also both and the capitalist, and if a focus in mutual aid, and as a result, I thought the meshing the two was a natural thing to do. I also think we can think about prospective socialist societies without thinking about disability politics. So that is why I wanted to write this paper.

I wrote this paper after being in the Social Ecology Intensive that the Institute of Social Ecology does every year when they came to my school, California Institute of Integral Studies. And I learned a lot during that workshop and it influenced my thinking of how to think about constructing alternative systems. Definitely. That's super fascinating to kind of mix those two ideas up and kind of pull from Murray Bookchin's theories and incorporated into disability justice frameworks.

I do want to touch on the notion of fascism because with the insurgents of fascism around the world and especially here in the U.S., and given the realities of how fascist regimes in the past not only treated marginalized ethnicities but also the disabled, how do you think about anti-fascism broadly and what are some things that anti-fascist organizers of all stripes should keep in mind when it comes to defending and caring

for our disabled comrades. Confronting fascism is critical at this time and the work that in the fascists are doing at this time is critical to stop the spread of this evil ideology. Let's us remember that people with disabilities were one of the first groups to be murdered in Nazi Germany. So the fight against fascism is crucial for the members of the disability community. I belong to the collective entitled Bay Area Disability Community Rising and Protest in Power a Bad Crip, and we collectively wrote a speech that one of our members was. supposed to read at the anti-fascist demonstration in Berkeley this past Sunday, I am unsure but either the police didn't let that happen. But people with disabilities are consciously making

a constant effort to be part of the movement and contribute in a ways that we can. Even though going to an anti-fascist demonstration can be dice for someone with a physical disability when there is physical confrontation with fascists, so I have reservations with that. Yeah, completely understandable. But it's very important that we think about how fascism threatens those with disabilities because that's, you know, we often hear about the marginalized people that fascists focus on and disabled folks historically and presently are absolutely extra vulnerable to the violence and barbarism of fascism. So I think that's very important. Now, that's all the questions I had for today. I wasn't sure how to spread out the questions based on the time and the fact that

you had to type them into your computer system. So this will be a shorter episode, but let's absolutely do this again. I think now that we've kind of given this a shot, we can do this again. And I can create more questions and have like almost a part two to this discussion because there's so much more that we can talk about and discuss. So before I let you go, where can listeners find you in your work online, Latif? And what recommendations would you offer to anyone who wants to learn more about what we discuss today. People can go on my website later from cloud.com to see some of my writings. I also have

my first book selling on the Jeff Bezos fiefdom Amazon.com entitled The Declaration of a Body of Love. Don't judge me. You can also like my Facebook page under my name, Lateef McLeod, poet, novelist, columnist. I also have a song on SoundCloud called I am a worker that everyone to check out at this link, https slash slash soundcloud.com slash latif dash McLeod slash I am a dash worker dash clianish dash feet dash lady. Also I encourage people to go to the Sinsenvalid website at Sinsengallad.org to see what they're doing on the disability justice front. And my good friend Leroymore does a lot of work at the intersections of raised in disability and his website is cripopnagin.com.

all right brother thank you so much for coming on we will link to all of that in the show notes and we will absolutely have another episode where we dive into even more questions thank you so much for putting in the work to come on today and inform our audience about some of these very very important issues let's absolutely do it again love and solidarity forever okay and i want to shout out my boy andrew for putting me on to rev left radio and i also love what you and dr bones are doing on the guillity thank you yeah shout out to and i'll absolutely let Dr. Bones know that you gave kind words of praise to him as well. Thanks Latif. Let's keep in contact. Have a good day. You too breath. I'm a worker. I'm a worker. I genuine disabled, hardworking

worker. Even though the bosses won't recognize us or even hire us, you can't have no movement without us. Before capitalists tried to shut us away in nursing homes and aside. Now we butt the system, shocking you out of your doldrums. Too long you have shamed us out because of our bodies. Stating that our misfortune was because we were the blame. All of this was gold game. Because the real culprit of our oppression was the system, man. Stop judging us on our productivity because what we need now is unity.

When the workers finally get control of our system, get control of this nation we need disability justice for full emancipation we are also workers we are workers i'm not white i'm not black i'm not asian i'm not wag i'm a worker man i'm a worker i'm a worker bruh i'm a worker i'm a worker bruh i'm a worker i'm not Brown. I'm not yellow. I'm not a lady or a fellow. I'm a worker, man. I'm a worker. I'm a worker. I'm a worker.