Race and Disability: From Analogy to Intersectionality

Abstract

Sociologists are using intersectional lenses to examine an increasingly wider range of processes and identities, yet the intersection of race and disability remains a particularly neglected area in sociology. Marking an important step toward filling this gap, the authors interrogate how race and disability have been deployed as analogy in both disability rights activism and in critical race discourse. The authors argue that the “minority model” framework of disability rights has been racialized in ways that center the experiences of white, middle-class disabled Americans, even as this framework leans heavily upon analogic work likening ableism to racial oppression. Conversely, the authors examine the use of disability as metaphor in racial justice discourse, interrogating the historic linking of race and disability that gave rise to these language patterns. The authors argue that this analogic work has marginalized the experiences of disabled people of color and has masked the processes by which whiteness and able-bodiedness have been privileged in these respective movements. Finally, the authors argue that centering the positionality of disabled people of color demands not analogy but intersectional analyses that illuminate how racism and ableism intertwine and interact to generate unique forms of inequality and resistance.

Keywords

disability intersectionality analogy

The framework of intersectionality calls attention to how dynamics of inequality are mutually constituted. The term intersectionality was introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991), who sought deeper recognition of how single-axis analyses and legal policies, specifically around dimensions of race and gender, failed to adequately account for the lived experiences and types of discrimination black women often experienced. Crenshaw and other intersectional theorists, including sociologists Collins (2000) and Choo and Ferree (2010), have challenged and interrogated how both feminist and critical race scholars have universalized racial and gendered subjects in their research, leaving white women to represent the category of women and black men to represent the category of black.

Intersectionality has become a prominent research and theoretical paradigm, and scholars are using intersectional lenses to examine an increasingly wider range of processes and identities. Yet disability appears to be an uncharted area in intersectionality research, particularly in the discipline of sociology. This is likely the result of the discipline’s general neglect of disability as a category of inequality altogether (Gerschick and Stevens 2016; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2015). The intersection of race and disability remains a particularly neglected area in sociology (Phelan, Link, and Dovidio 2008). Although a few sociological studies have explored the intersection of gender and disability (Frederick 2017a, 2017b; Hammer 2012), the discipline has not offered much in the way of expansive intersectional analyses of race and disability beyond social determinants of health. This omission is quite stunning, given that racism and ableism are powerful interacting forces in contemporary issues of concern to sociologists, including mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline.¹

Marking an important step toward filling this gap, our research interrogates how race and disability have been deployed as analogy in both disability rights activism and in critical race discourse. We argue that the “minority model” framework of disability rights has been racialized in ways that center the experiences of white, middle-class disabled Americans, even as this framework leans heavily upon analogic work likening ableism to racial oppression. Conversely, we examine the use of disability as metaphor in racial justice discourse, interrogating the historic linking of race and disability that gave rise to these language patterns. We argue that this analogic work has marginalized the experiences of disabled people of color and has masked the processes by which whiteness and able-bodiedness have been privileged in these respective movements. Finally, we argue that centering the positionality of disabled people of color demands not analogy but intersectional analyses that illuminate how racism and ableism intertwine and interact to generate unique forms of inequality and resistance.

The Dis/Ability System

Because disability could arguably be the form of inequality that has received the least attention from sociologists (Gerschick and Stevens 2016; Maroto and Pettinicchio 2015), we begin our analysis by placing disability into view as a political category and an axis of inequality. We regard “disability” as a category of demarcation of people with atypical functioning and/or appearance. The boundaries of disability are maintained against cultural values of normalcy in the binary system of deviance and normalcy, or what is also referred to as the dis/ability system. People with disabilities experience profound forms of inequality. In 2014, only 17 percent of working-age people with disabilities were employed, compared with 65 percent of those without disabilities (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015). Twenty-eight percent of working-age disabled Americans are living at or below the poverty line, which is the highest poverty rate of any group in the United States (Erickson, Lee, and von Schrader 2014; Rivera Drew 2015). Disabled Americans experience other forms of marginalization, including high rates of preventable health disparities (Goode et al. 2014; Gulley and Altman 2008) and incarceration (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014). Serious violent crimes are committed against disabled Americans at three times the rate as for nondisabled Americans (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2015), and disabled people experience unique, yet often hidden, patterns of hate crimes and police brutality (Bagenstos 2016; Sherry 2016). Furthermore, disabled Americans continue to experience serious challenges to their citizenship rights, including the right to basic forms of autonomy (Ben-Moshe et al. 2014; Carey 2009) and the right to parent (Frederick 2017a, 2017b).

Because biomedical understandings of disability pervade the culture, and even social science research, these inequalities are often dismissed as natural consequences of biological deficiencies. The medical model of disability views disability as a problem located in the body of an individual. Thus, the inequalities faced by disabled people are regarded as natural consequences of problematic bodies. Attempts to “solve” the problem center on preventing, curing, and normalizing disabled individuals. By contrast, the social and minority models of disability emphasize how disability experiences are profoundly shaped by social processes. These critical disability frameworks emphasize how disability is created, othered, and exaggerated by social arrangements and discrimination. For example, disability is “created” through social practices and inequalities that damage bodies (Shakespeare 2006; Wendell 1996). Disability is also “created” and “erased” through cultural meanings that delineate differences and define their significance (Blanchett 2010; Carey 2009). And the consequences of disability are exaggerated by social practices, such as the construction of the built environment and adherence to exclusionary institutional arrangements, prejudice, and discrimination (Shakespeare 2006; Wendell 1996).

The dis/ability system is co-constituted with the system of racial stratification. For example, disability is experienced disproportionately by certain minority groups, patterns Nancy Krieger (2012) termed “embodied inequalities.” African Americans and American Indians have the highest rate of experiencing disability in the United States, patterns created by both economic disparities and racial discrimination (Anderson 2012; Krieger 2012; Shifrer, Muller, and Callahan 2011; Turner 2013). Furthermore, disability labels themselves, such as intellectual disability and mental illness, have been bound up with racially charged meanings. Racial minorities have tended to receive more stigmatizing diagnoses and interventions (Metzl 2009), while less stigmatizing disability labels have been created to protect racial and class privilege (Blanchett 2010). For example, the label learning disability was initially created as a means for white, middle-class parents to justify their children’s underperformance. Today, with the labels autism and possibly attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder more common across socially advantaged youth (King and Bearman 2011), scholars argue that the label learning disability (and intellectual disability) is now used largely to relieve schools and teachers of responsibility for the underperformance of racial minorities and economically disadvantaged youth (Blanchett 2010; Ong-Dean 2009; Ramey 2015).

Disability Rights and the Race Analogy

We now turn to an analysis of the “disability is like race” analogy work that has often been performed in the disability rights movement and in critical disability scholarship. Activists and scholars have attempted to articulate how disability inequality operates by establishing “likeness” between disability oppression and the more widely recognized form of inequality, that of racial injustice. To understand how this analogy work became a cornerstone of disability rights, we first provide a brief overview of the origin of the disability rights movement. The dominant origin story of the disability rights movement is that it emerged after the civil rights movement opened doors for other forms of social change (Kornbluh 2011). This narrative is only partially true. Disabled people have resisted their oppression both individually and collectively throughout American history, but they most often did so by organizing solely on the basis of their specific disabilities (Burch 2002; Kornbluh 2011). The 1970s marked a dramatic shift in disability-based organizing, as the disability rights movement cultivated a shared political identity across disability categories. The aims of the disability rights movement centered largely on gaining legal civil rights for disabled Americans. Some of the specific aims of the movement included deinstitutionalization, establishing legal protections against discrimination, and desegregating education for children with disabilities. The greatest successes of the disability rights movement came in sweeping federal legislation, often negotiated without much fanfare, which included Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (Barnartt and Scotch 2001; Scotch 2009; Shapiro 1993). The movement also included goals of cultural change. Activists sought to challenge negative cultural values about disability and insisted that only disabled people themselves could speak on behalf of their communities. For example, one campaign within the movement used public demonstrations to challenge the pity-evoking images of disability charities used in their fund-raising campaigns, most notably the MDA Labor Day Telethon hosted by Jerry Lewis (Longmore 2015). Although profoundly negative images of disability still pervade the culture, discourses of inclusion, access, and accommodation have also become part of our lexicon as the result of these efforts.

The disability rights movement in the United States cultivated the “minority model” framework, which emphasizes discrimination as the primary barrier limiting the life chances of people with disabilities. The minority model was constructed to establish similarity between disability oppression and the prejudice and discrimination experienced by racial and ethnic minority groups, particularly by African Americans. Some of the earliest scholarship upon which the paradigm of the minority model of disability rests drew analogies between the experiences of racial minorities and those with disabilities. In his formative legal essay “The Right to Live in the World,” legal scholar Jacobus tenBroek (1966) argued for the right to equal access to public accommodations for disabled Americans. His argument came on the heels of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, and sex but not disability. In asserting the right of disabled individuals to exercise the full rights of citizenship, tenBroek drew an analogy between disability inequality and racial inequality when he wrote, “As with the Black man, so with the blind. As with the Puerto Rican, so with the post-polio. As with the Indian, so with the indigent disabled.” TenBroek’s legal work, establishing the likeness between disability discrimination and racial discrimination, laid the foundation for federal disability civil rights policy (Bagenstos 2016). Federal civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities would come later than those for other groups, and the language used to develop key civil rights legislation, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, was directly derived from the Civil Rights Act, from which disability was excluded.

The “disability is like race” analogy became the dominant narrative through which activists and critical scholars understood disability inequality and made claims to civil rights. Early scholarship (Gliedman and Roth 1980) and journalistic accounts (Shapiro 1993) both reflected and reinforced the minority model. Furthermore, activists also used this analogy in their organizing tactics. In 1964 a group of disabled student activists at the University of Illinois printed a provocative picture in their student newspaper seeking to highlight the injustice they experienced navigating an inaccessible campus. Campus administrators had failed to act on student demands to make more classrooms accessible for wheelchair users, leaving these students with limited curricular opportunities on the campus. In protest, these student activists printed a picture of campus administrators dressed in Ku Klux Klan attire, holding signs that read “Disabled Keep Out.” The tactic was designed to draw parallels between racism and racial segregation and students’ experiences of segregation on the university campus due to inaccessibility (Patterson 2011).

The use of the race analogy is not unique to the disability rights movement. Social movement scholars find that activists draw from frames that have been successful for other movements, adapting these frames to suit the new claim makers (Barnartt and Scotch 2001; Snow et al. 1986). The success of the civil rights movement propelled analogy-making within other contemporary movements, including second-wave feminism and LGBTQ movements. Drawing analogy to racial discrimination likely played an important role in helping foster a sense of disability pride within the disability rights movement, as the focus on social injustice provided an alternative paradigm that promised to dislodge disability from the clutches of biomedicine. As Schweik (2010) explained,

The heuristic power of these analogies for readers unaccustomed to thinking of disability in political terms was obvious at the time. Analogized to “the race question,” disability could become a “question,” in a logic of equivalence that not only compared but connected the two struggles for equality. (p. 142)

Furthermore, the American legal system has demonstrated a preference for the establishment of civil rights and group protections based on precedent set forth by previous legislation. This all but demands analogous reasoning to establish new rights claims (Jakobsen 2000; Mayeri 2001).

The Minority Model and Disability Essentialism

Despite its obvious benefits, the analogy work performed in the disability rights movement has contributed to a form of “disability essentialism,” which remains embedded in much disability activism and critical disability scholarship (Mollow 2006). Disability essentialism assumes disability discrimination is a monolithic experience that is divorced from other forms of oppression. In other words, disability essentialism assumes that there is a defining essence to disability experience and inequality. Although ostensibly race neutral, the disability essentialism generated through analogizing with race has assumed a white racial identity. It is only from the starting place of a white disabled person’s positionality that parallels can be drawn between the distinct categories of race and disability. In other words, because disabled people of color cannot divide aspects of themselves or their experiences, it is only from a white disabled person’s standpoint that racism and ableism can be segregated and compared (Grillo and Wildman 1991).

Schweik (2010) provided a poignant example of how race, social class, and gender can be rendered invisible under the minority model of disability. Schweik examined the history of ugly laws and the construction of a particular narrative about this set of laws by disability rights activists and scholars. At the turn of the twentieth century, urban city governments passed a series of unsightly beggar ordinances, known as “ugly laws,” that prohibited individuals with visible disabilities or other bodily anomalies from begging on urban streets. For disability activists and scholars, ugly laws came to be a touchstone for disability oppression, serving as a tangible manifestation of the negative cultural values and profound discrimination with which disabled Americans have contended. Schweik argued that the use of the euphemism “ugly laws” to refer to this set of ordinances served an analogous purpose for disability activists, as it linked the discrimination and body policing of disabled people to resistance efforts that were under way in the civil rights, Black power, and feminist movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet Schweik argued that ugly laws and their uneven enforcement were far more complicated a story than a one-dimensional focus on disability suggests. The laws were not enforced against a monolithic group of disabled people, but poor disabled people who occupied locations of suspicion generated at the intersections of race, nativity, gender, and sexuality on urban streets. Thus, by claiming ugly laws as a shared oppression experienced by all disabled people, the disability rights movement and critical disability scholarship have erased the ways these ordinances were constructed and carried out at the intersection of oppressions.

The focus on independence and legal rights, which were hallmarks of the disability rights movement, also reflected the cultural values of middle-class white Americans and emphasized solutions to disability injustice that most benefited those with social class privilege and those with clear-cut experiences of discrimination on the basis of the singular status of disability (Shaw, Chan, and McMahon 2012; Spade 2013). Because legal rights tend to operate around singular-identity statuses, people who experience multiple forms of inequality, and for whom racism and ableism are powerful, interlocking forces in their lives, cannot as easily benefit from the legal rights model, which demands proof of blatant and intentional discrimination directed at an individual on the basis of a singular aspect of the victim’s identity (Bagenstos 2009; Shaw et al. 2012; Spade 2013). According to Spade (2013), movements that prioritize obtaining legal rights tend to use singular-identity models that inevitably draw boundaries between deserving and undeserving members of the marginalized group. Spade distinguished between rights-based movements such as the disability rights movement and justice-based movements such as the disability justice movement, whose intersectional frameworks lead them to make more radical demands for structural change. We will return to the disability justice movement later in this article.

Although analogy work has given way to more intersectional perspectives in recent scholarship within disability studies, these analogies still permeate the cultures of disability communities. For example, in his study exploring how blind people understand race, Obasogie (2014) found that white blind people continue to draw analogies between their experiences of oppression and that of racial minorities, while blind people who are members of racial minority groups do not draw such comparisons. Furthermore, the minority model, predicated on this analogy work, undergirds fundamental tenets of disability activism and critical disability scholarship. For example, the minority model of disability has emphasized prejudice and discrimination leveled against people with disabilities as the central form of political injustice facing disability communities. Yet for communities marginalized at the intersection of racism and economic inequality, the acquisition of disability itself is also a major source of injustice (Mollow 2006). The minority model paradigm has not left room for interrogation of the fact that disabilities are frequently caused by racial and class-based inequalities, including economic injustices, environmental degradation, war, and mass incarceration (Dunhamn et al. 2015; Finley 2011; Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018; Ralph 2012). Erevelles (2014) illuminated this tension when she asked,

What does it mean to say “no more disability” for those “becoming” disabled via violence and then compelled to live in deplorable social conditions? And what do these negations mean for disabled people who have struggled valiantly to convince the world at large that living with a disability is an “ingenious way to live”?

Critical disability perspectives often demand an unequivocal rejection of the medical model. Because the medical model has portrayed disability as an unwanted deficiency, dislodging disability from the clutches of biomedicine has been central to the cultivation of disability pride. Yet this tenet of disability activism masks the tensions that arise when intersections of inequality are considered. People of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have disproportionately experienced the harm that comes from medical coercion and surveillance of disabled people, the very forms of medical injustice that have driven the rejection of the medical model. But these groups also commonly experience lack of access, or denial of access, to quality medical care that middle-class white Americans are less likely to endure (Nelson 2011). In other words, there is a privilege in being able to call for a distancing from the biomedical regime, a privilege not enjoyed by those whose oppression has included denial of medical care.

Mauldin’s (2016) findings from her ethnographic study of a cochlear implant clinic illuminate the ways these multiple forms of inequality operate and converge. Mauldin identified patterns indicative of common critiques of the medical model leveled by deaf and disability activists: the pathologization of deafness and deaf culture, the blame placed on deaf and disabled individuals and their mothers when the promises of biomedicine fail to be realized. Yet Mauldin also found another pattern of inequality. Medical professionals assumed the role of gatekeeper for this technology, and their decisions about which families were “good candidates” for cochlear implantation were largely determined along ethnic and social class lines. Families who were poor and families who spoke multiple languages were deemed to be inadequate candidates for a child’s cochlear implantation.

Living Intersectional Oppression: Junius Wilson

Born out of the U.S. disability rights movement, the minority model sets disability up as a form of inequality analogous to racism. Yet this framework leaves little room for deepened understandings of how racism and ableism interact to shape the lives of people of color with disabilities. Few biographies more powerfully illuminate the complex and devastating interaction between racism and ableism in the United States than that of Junius Wilson, a deaf black man born outside of Wilmington, North Carolina in 1908. Wilson spent much of his childhood at the North Carolina School for the Colored Deaf and Blind, a residential school that segregated deaf and blind children on the basis of both race and disability. With few educational resources and no exposure to American Sign Language, black students and staff members cultivated their own sign language system. As a teenager, Wilson returned home to a community in which he was linguistically isolated from both hearing and deaf people. Accused of the attempted rape of a neighbor, Wilson was committed to the State Hospital for the Colored Insane in 1925, where he was incarcerated for 76 years, castrated, and forced to labor on the institution’s farm. Hospital staff members concealed the fact that the criminal charges against Wilson had been dropped in 1970. Jim Crow segregation, along with profound ableism, generated a context in which Wilson was linguistically isolated for nearly the entirety of his life. These historic forces also led to a denial of due process at multiple points, leading white officials to read his black, gesturing body as particularly dangerous and professionals later to deny him the right to the freedom to which he was legally entitled.

Critical Race and the Disability Metaphor

Although disability activists have used racial oppression as an analogy, writing on racial inequality is replete with disability metaphors. A metaphor is a form of analogy work that uses one term or image as a stand-in for another. Rather than drawing a logical argument establishing similarity between two groups or processes, a metaphor is a figure of speech used to evoke a vivid image and a powerful emotional response. Disability is integral to our lexicon of insults more broadly, and disability metaphors remain powerful rhetorical devices, precisely because they draw from taken-for-granted values that regard disability as a wholly undesirable social status. Yet they are evoked with unique frequency in critical social justice discourse. As Titchkosky (2015) asserted with tongue in cheek,

Still we say color blind, deaf to the call of justice, suffering from historical amnesia, blind to structural oppression, limping under the weight of inequality; an amputated self, simply crazy, subject to colonial aphasia, agnosia, even alexia; nothing but a deformed autonomy made to fit a crippled economy—devastatingly disabled. (p. 1)

Disability metaphors are used quite often in critical race scholarship specifically. The widely popular concept of “color-blind racism” (Bonilla-Silva 2017), along with blindness and paralysis metaphors such as “post-race paralysis” (Valiente-Neighbours 2015) and “paralyzed by white privilege” (Taylor 2007) are frequently used to illuminate how racism persists in the post–civil rights era. Titchkosky argued that these metaphors serve as a vehicle of cultural diagnosis within racial and other social justice writing, as terms from the domain of medicine are appropriated to emphasize the critical nature of a problem. The use of damage imagery within scholarship on race also suggests the urgency of fixing. “Blindness” and “deafness” to racism demand “vision” and “hearing” to identify the problem, acknowledge the pain, and address injustice. Racial paralysis demands its opposite, to “stand” and “march” for justice.

Disability scholars have critiqued disability metaphors on several grounds (Ben-Moshe 2006; May and Ferri 2005; Schalk 2013). First, damage imagery reinforces disability as the ultimate other, what Mitchell and Snyder (2001:3) called the “master trope of human disqualification” against which other groups are compelled to distance themselves. Second, the metaphoric use of disability separates the presumed nondisabled reader from the recognition that the damage imagery used is the lived, embodied reality, and even valued political identity, of deaf and disabled individuals (Schalk 2013; Vidali 2010). As Garland-Thomson (2005) argued, “the always overdetermined metaphoric uses of disability efface and distort the lived experiences of people with disabilities, evacuating the political significances of our lives and mitigating the influence of disability culture” (p. 1565).

In a recent critique of the term color-blindness, Annamma, Jackson, and Morrison (2016) argued that the use of blindness as a metaphor for a dominant racial attitude among whites masks the ways this is an actively oppressive ideology. Because blindness is often equated with passivity, color-blindness presents the false notion that this system of racial ideology is not deliberate. Research, of course, demonstrates the opposite, that the color-blind ideology is strategically deployed by whites to maintain a racial order through disguised means. Thus, Annamma et al. called for us to replace the term color-blindness with color-evasiveness, not only to avoid the problematic ableist metaphor but to emphasize the agency involved in carrying out this ideology.

Our aim here is not merely to provide a critique of the use of ableist metaphor in racial justice rhetoric. Rather, we seek two alternative goals. First, we illuminate the historic forces that placed disability analogy at the center of racial discourse. Second, we consider what this analogy work means in terms of the representation of those who experience both race and disability inequalities.

Whiteness, Normalcy, and the Disability Metaphor

The historic intertwining of whiteness and normalcy play an important role in our overreliance of the disability metaphor in racial discourse. Under the Enlightenment, democratization, and industrialization, notions of the worthy citizen came to be defined against categories of deviance. To protect the fledgling democracy against the dangers of social disorder, white elites made concerted efforts to delineate between legitimate Americans, who were worthy of the rights to full participation in the new democracy, and bad citizens, who threatened the precarious social order (Baynton 2001; Carey 2009; Nielsen 2013; Samuels 2014). Ideals of good citizenship, including independence, rugged individualism, and moral and intellectual competence, were delineated through the othering of bad citizens, those who were defined as dependent, incompetent, and morally depraved. In fact, the word normal in its current meaning entered the English language in the mid-1800s, as the binary between “normalcy” and “deviance” was solidified (Davis 2013). Thus, notions of deviance, disability, and normalcy were imbued into citizenship laws, practices, and cultural values.

Developing notions of race and of disability were inextricably interwoven. White elites relied on imagery of disability and deficiency to argue that African Americans, immigrants, women, and the poor were groups inherently unfit for citizenship rights. Proslavery advocates argued that blacks possessed defective minds, bodies, and moral character, rendering them best suited for a life under slavery (Baynton 2001; Nielsen 2013). Others argued that freed slaves were more susceptible to acquiring debilitating disabilities, including deafness, blindness, and mental illness, as they were not equipped to handle the responsibilities of citizenship (Baynton 2001). Similarly, antisuffragists argued that women were incapable of effectively exercising political rights because they were evolutionarily inferior to men physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Anxieties about disabled people were also intertwined with fears about newly arriving European immigrants during the late 1800s. Immigration policy reflected a deep fear that immigrants possessed inferior genetic makeup and would spread disability if allowed to enter the country. U.S. officials monitoring the influx of European immigrants were charged with identifying immigrants who had, or were suspected to be hiding, physical, sensory, or mental impairments. As newly arriving immigrants sought to enter the country through Ellis Island, officials marked those suspected of having disabilities on their backs with chalk to identify them for more rigorous scrutiny (Baynton 2001; Nielsen 2013). Entire groups of ethnic minorities were also labeled as disabled on the basis of their supposed inferior genetic makeup.

Although racial and ethnic minority groups were attributed with disability labels of deviance and defectiveness, a pattern of unwhitening also occurred for white disabled people. For example, John Langdon Down, who identified the condition now known as Down syndrome, originally conceptualized the disorder in 1866 as marking evolutionary and racial regression of the European children he studied. Down labeled the condition mongolism, likening it to the “mongoloid” racial category of the time. In the paper in which he first identified the condition, Langdon wrote, “It is difficult to realize he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt they represent ethnic degeneration” (cited in Chapman, Carey, and Ben-Moshe 2014:8). Similarly, in the early part of the eugenics movement, poor white women labeled with cognitive disabilities and/or insanity were the targets of eugenic sterilization practices (Isenberg 2017; Wray 2006). The label feeble-minded became a catch-all category for various groups of white women who were defined as “tainted whites” because of poverty, sexual promiscuity, ethnic origin, and disability. The majority of so-called feeble-minded Americans institutionalized and sterilized during the early part of the eugenics movement were white women defined as being a threat to the purity of the white race (Isenberg 2017; Wray 2006). Thus, the category of feeble-mindedness became the signifier of tainted whiteness. In later decades, the focus on controlling poor white women, particularly those labeled as disabled, would give way to a focus on women from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Within this historic context, how did those committed to racial justice both within and outside the academy rely on disability to make claims for racial equality? Discourses emphasizing how “racism is disabling” date back to abolitionism. Abolitionists often emphasized the debilitating consequences of slavery, and freed slave activists and writers emphasized, even displayed, the wounds acquired through slavery and freedom journeys, highlighting how slavery damaged the body (Boster 2013). This discourse continued through the twenty-first century. For example, Wailoo (2001) documented how sickle-cell anemia took on cultural and political meanings in the 1970s and 1980s as the disorder came to symbolize suffering in black American communities. Finally, disabled activists of color have confronted discourses in racial justice activism, which claim that all black people are disabled by racism (Lukin 2013).

Although disability served as a category into which activists and intellectuals would lean to claim the perniciousness of racial injustice—because discourses of defectiveness and damage were used to justify racial/ethnic oppression—disability simultaneously became the category against which racial minority groups had to distance themselves to make claims to citizenship rights (Baynton 2001; Boster 2013). The effort to distance race from disability is particularly pronounced in scholarship on race. This makes sociological sense given the ways previous work in the academy, which established a false association between race and “normalcy,” demanded to be undone (Gould 1996). Yet this legacy has diminished dialogue between race and disability scholarship. Research that should ostensibly sit at the intersection of race and disability has often failed to problematize disability inequality. Thus, scholarship on a variety of topics conveys the message that the problem is simply that racial minorities have been attributed with disability. This has been the case with scholarship on freak shows (Samuels 2011), eugenics (Duster 2000), and the racialization of special education (Connor, Ferri, and Annamma 2015). Scholars have rarely deconstructed the disability tropes used to justify other forms of inequality, even as they critique the ways these tropes have been deployed against other groups. As Baynton (2001) argued,

While many have pointed out the injustice and perniciousness of attributing these qualities to a racial or ethnic group, little has been written about why these attributions are such powerful weapons for inequality, why they were so furiously denied and condemned by their targets, and what this tells us about our attitudes towards disability. (p. 41)

Living the Metaphorical Other

What does the pervasive use of disability metaphor in racial discourse mean for members of racial minority groups who also experience disability? Rowden’s (2009) study of the legacy of black blind musicians in American history provides a compelling illustration. Chapter 2 of his book The Songs of Blind Folk explores the self-presentation strategies of black blind blues singers in the rural American South. To appeal to their audiences, these blind musicians emphasized their blind identities, but only as a metaphor for the suffering black Americans endured. These musicians downplayed their corporeal experiences of blindness, as it was thought to be alienating to their sighted audiences.

A controversy over a statue of Representative Barbara Jordan, erected on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is also illustrative of the ways disability metaphor, used within a conversation about racial justice, can render invisible the embodied lives of people of color with disabilities. Jordan occupies an important place in American history, as the first African American to serve in the Texas Senate since Reconstruction and the first African American woman from the South to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. She was also a disabled American. In 2008, the original design of a statue honoring Jordan was unveiled. The design depicted her sitting on a bench, reflecting the fact that Jordan was a wheelchair user. The representation of Jordan received outrage from the community, as outspoken critics argued that the statue diminished Jordan’s power, particularly in comparison with the erect statues of white men already found throughout the campus. The controversy resulted in a new design being selected, which depicts Jordan standing. One local newspaper headline proudly proclaimed, “Standing Like She Stood Up for the Constitution” (Faires 2007). Two years later, the same reporter began an article with the description: “She stood watch over the Constitution of the United States, and now she’s about to stand watch over the University of Texas.” The article goes on to say, “Barbara Jordan will take up permanent residence under West Campus’ Battle Oaks with the unveiling of a bronze statue in her likeness” (Faires 2009).

The emphasis on disability as metaphor clouds our ability to recognize that the statue does not, in fact, represent Jordan’s “likeness,” as it erases the disabled body she inhabited. The controversy over the representation of Jordan illuminates the ways disability metaphor can render disabled identities invisible. It appears difficult to both hold onto disability metaphor—to emphasize standing as a metaphor for Jordan’s strength and leadership, yet also recognize her as not only a black woman but a disabled black woman. The controversy begs some important questions. How does the use of disability metaphor diminish opportunities to engage with people of color who have “real” disabled bodies? Who claims ownership over representations of those who experience multiple forms of marginalization and who belong to multiple communities?

Resistance at the Intersections

A strong tradition within intersectionality scholarship is to center the experiences of those whose lives are shaped by multiple and interlocking forms of oppression. Indeed, intersectional scholarship has been uniquely insightful in illuminating the forms of agency and resistance individuals exercise as they negotiate interacting forms of inequality. There is still much ground to be laid, however, in developing intersectional scholarship and activism at the nexus of race and disability. Yet in moments when cross-fertilization has occurred, disabled activists of color are found to have played pivotal roles.

One important example of this work was the 25-day sit-in held by disability rights activists who took over the federal Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco in 1977. Through this sit-in, activists successfully demanded federal enforcement of Section 504 regulations of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, the first federal regulations prohibiting discrimination based on disability. The protest, which has come to be known as “504,” marked one of the most important moments in the disability rights movement and one of the most impressive acts of civil disobedience in the late twentieth century (Barnartt and Scotch 2001; Schweik 2013; Shapiro 1993). Activists who lived in the federal building for 25 days were supported by myriad racial justice organizations in the Bay Area, a coalition facilitated by disabled activists of color who worked in both arenas of social justice. Among the coalition of supporters, the Black Panthers fed the protesters a daily dinner, publicly and financially supported the protests, and documented the sit-ins in their newspaper (Schweik 2013; Scotch 2001).

Disability Justice: Challenging Police Brutality at the Intersections

More recently, the disability justice movement has emerged, propelled by local organizing groups in urban areas and by social media activists. Led by disabled people of color and LGBTQ activists, the disability justice movement calls for a more intersectional approach to dismantling disability oppression. These activists challenge the emphasis on independence that was a hallmark of the disability rights movement. They also call for more expansive models for inclusion than the popular, but narrow, focus on legal rights and accommodations. While the goals of the disability rights movement prioritized the interests and perspectives of wheelchair users, the disability justice movement seeks also to center the experiences of people with psychiatric disabilities, chronic illnesses, and other disability groups that have been marginalized in previous disability organizing efforts.

One issue centered by disability justice writers and activists is that of patterns of police brutality, which are generated at the intersection of racism and ableism. It has been widely documented that black men are most likely to experience injury or death at the hands of law enforcement (Hyland, Langton, and Davis 2015; Ross 2015; Roussell et al. forthcoming). Disability also appears to be a high predictor of the likelihood of experiencing police force; however, because disability remains relatively invisible as a demographic category, we lack comprehensive research on patterns of police use of force against civilians with disabilities. Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies are not required to report instances of police violence against civilians with disabilities, and no national database tracks these patterns. And although the discipline of sociology has produced important research on the hypercriminalization of racial minorities, the intersection of race and disability remains largely unexamined in this literature.

A few media outlets have compiled databases tracking police shootings, and this evidence suggest that between one quarter and one half of police shootings involve people with psychiatric disabilities (Perry and Carter-Long 2016; Treatment Advocacy Center 2013). These studies have not tracked other disabilities, however, and they do not include forms of police-on-civilian violence outside of shootings. In the most comprehensive analysis of media coverage of police violence and disability known, Perry and Carter-Long (2016) found that approximately one half of instances of police violence involved civilians with disabilities.

Although law enforcement’s engagement with people with psychiatric disabilities is receiving some public attention, these patterns are not often placed within a broader disability story. Yet evidence suggests people with a surprisingly wide range of impairments are at heightened risk for police brutality (Perry and Carter-Long 2016). Disabled people are also subjected to unique, and particularly brutal, forms of violence at the hands of law enforcement. For example, journalists have called attention to several recent incidents in which law enforcement officers have pushed people from their wheelchairs. In one such case, the officer did so to “prove” that the civilian was faking his disability (Perry and Carter-Long 2016). Incarceration continues to be a profound injustice committed against Americans with disabilities. People with disabilities, particularly those with psychiatric disabilities, are overrepresented in prisons and juvenile detention centers (Binswanger, Krueger, and Steiner 2009). These institutions often breed unique and brutal forms of degradation, including physical, sexual, and emotional violence (Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018). Inhumane treatment within institutions, such as solitary confinement, can also cause permanent impairments and exacerbate the severity of existing medical conditions (Arrigo and Bullock 2008; Nowotny and Kuptsevych-Timmer 2018). Police abuse of people with disabilities, both inside and outside of institutions, also includes denial of accommodations or attention to medical issues.

The complex enmeshment of racism and ableism has been rendered largely invisible not only in scholarship but also in racial justice and disability activism. This issue was not taken up by the disability rights movement, perhaps because it was not central to the lives of middle-class white activists and perhaps because people with psychiatric disabilities have traditionally been marginalized in the disability rights movement (Jones and Lewis Brown 2013; Gossett Zakrajsek et al. 2014). Similarly, the Black Lives Matter movement has largely been silent on the issue of disability, despite their pronounced commitment to intersectionality. Thus, writers and activists of color, who also belong to disability communities, have organized to call out how the intersection of racism and ableism has fallen through the cracks by multiple social justice movements who fail to recognize these patterns. The Harriet Tubman Collective, an organization of black deaf and black disabled organizers, released a statement challenging Black Lives Matter for failing to include disability in its vision statement, even as this platform committed the movement to amplify the voices of “the most marginalized Black people.” Although other intersections of inequality were named, the vision statement of Black Lives Matter did not mention disability once. The Harriet Tubman Collective challenged this erasure, questioning “how a movement whose primary focus is ending police brutality, could outright ignore the violence experienced by Black Disabled and Deaf people.”

Challenging Disability Essentialism

Finally, we turn to two examples of how resistance at the intersection of race and disability can potentially unsettle taken-for-granted tenets of the minority model of disability. Resting upon the race analogy, the minority model locates the “problem” of disability as prejudice and social exclusion and simultaneously seeks to divorce disabled people from the pathologizing gaze of medicine. Consequently, pain, fatigue, and problems relating to “impairment” have been regarded as private matters that should not take up too much space in public conversations about disability. Ralph (2012), however, found that ex-gang members in Chicago who experienced paralysis as the result of gun violence often emphasized, even displayed, the bodily shortcomings and failures they lived with as they spoke to youth about the dangers of gang violence. In doing so, these men defied values and codes of conduct shared in the disability rights movement in service to social justice. As Ralph argued, these men were willing to disempower themselves in order to empower the youth for whom they are committed to reaching:

Disabled ex-gang members are willing to insist on the defectiveness of their bodies in order to highlight the burden that violence creates in communities like Eastwood. Their methods contrast sharply with the aims of the disability rights movement, in which constructing physical difference as an inferior identity is routinely and unequivocally criticized.

Thus, allowing multiple forms of disability-inflected resistance requires a recognition of the ways fundamental tenets of disability studies have been coded white.

Although we have critiqued the unreflective use of disability metaphor in critical race literature, the use of playful disability metaphor and performative disability embodiment within hip-hop begs consideration of the ways analogy can be used to empower at the intersection of race and disability. Language and performative styles within hip-hop both draw from and transform dominant conceptualizations of disability and damage imagery (Bailey 2011; Porco 2014; Rios 2011). Porco (2014) argued, “As vernacular theory and practice, hip-hop flips the script on disability, transforming a physical condition and social stigma into a desirable aesthetic value.” One example of this playfulness is the hyphy movement, which emerged in the Bay Area during the early 2000s. This hip-hop style involves performances termed “going hyphy,” “going dumb,” and “getting retarded” (Rios 2011). In these displays, black and Latino youth intentionally embody deviant identities of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and intellectual disability of which they are disproportionately labeled in schools. In contrast to the ways boys distance themselves from disability identities in other social spaces (Morris 2012; Pascoe 2007), youth in the hyphy movement transform disability into symbols of empowerment and resistance. Going “hyphy” or “retarded” challenges the racialized patterns in which these labels are deployed and simultaneously imbues these symbols with positive social meanings. Although this form of resistance might be unsettling to disability activists who have called for the rejection of the “R” word, intersectionality calls us to sit with the disquieting recognition that our own universal prescriptions are layered with racialized meanings.

Conclusion

Disability and race have most often been taken up together not as intersecting forms of inequality but as analogies used to substantiate the validity of the other. One of the great ironies that emerges in the literature on critical race scholarship is that although we have made disability metaphor central to our discourse, we have rendered disability as an actual analytic category nearly invisible in work on race and intersectionality. A similar critique has also been leveled against the field of disability studies, which some have argued has often silently assumed whiteness (Bell 2006; Lukin 2013). Having the greatest access to leadership roles, white disability activists and critical disability scholars have cultivated understandings of disability on the basis of a presumed white, middle-class identity.

We do not offer prescriptions here for determining appropriate or inappropriate analogizing. We do contend that the deployment of race and disability analogies should be regarded as cultural terrain worthy of sociological investigation. As we have demonstrated, the strategic use of racial analogies by disability activists and scholars has served a valuable purpose in establishing “people with disabilities” as a group who have endured profound injustices and who are deserving of legal protections. Yet the deployment of the “disability is like race” analogy has also served to privilege the interests and perspectives of white, middle-class disabled Americans and marginalized the voices of people of color with disabilities. Furthermore, we have explored how our overreliance on disability metaphor in racial discourse is rooted in a history in which disability and race were deeply intertwined in the construction of notions of the worthy citizen. Out of that history has come an emphasis on distancing racial minority groups from disability. This has meant that negative cultural values about disability remain embedded in progressive racial discourse. Furthermore, the voices, perspectives, and identities of people of color with disabilities have not found a rightful space within critical race scholarship and activism.

We hope that the critique of race and disability analogy work is only the beginning. Important scholarship that centers the interaction between race and disability remains to be generated within American sociology. Indeed, many issues of concern to contemporary sociology are generated at the nexus between racial and disability inequalities, yet they remain underexplored. We have discussed patterns of police brutality that are generated by the interaction of racism and ableism; yet much ground is left to be turned in examining these patterns and their consequences from sociological perspectives. In addition, race, social class, and gender are all deeply implicated in patterns of educational experiences and outcomes of children and youth with disabilities. These patterns deserve more sociological attention using methodological and analytic tools that are truly intersectional. In short, there is much exciting and generative intersectional work to be done at the crossroads of critical race and critical disability scholarship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Angela Frederick is an assistant professor of sociology at The University of Texas at El Paso. Her research focuses on the intersection of disability with other forms of inequality. Her work has appeared in the journals Social Science & Medicine, Gender & Society, and Sociology of Health & Illness.

Dara Shifrer is an assistant professor of sociology at Portland State University. Her research broadly focuses on the effects of inequality outside of schools on processes inside schools and educational outcomes, with recent studies applying this lens to disabilities (e.g., learning disabilities, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), the experience of teaching, and youth’s social psychological health. A CAREER award from the National Science Foundation is supporting her research on the school and teacher factors that reduce disparities by socioeconomic status, race, and disability in adolescents’ math and science progress.

References

Anderson

Kathryn Freeman

. 2013. “Diagnosing Discrimination: Stress from Perceived Racism and the Mental and Physical Health Effects.” Sociological Inquiry 83(1):55–81.

Annamma

Subini Ancy

Jackson

Darrell D.

Morrison

Deb

. 2017. “Conceptualizing Color-evasiveness: Using Dis/ability Critical Race Theory to Expand a Color-blind Racial Ideology in Education and Society.” Race Ethnicity and Education 20(2):147–62.

Arrigo

Bruce A.

Bullock

Jennifer L.

2008. “The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement on Prisoners in Supermax Units: Reviewing What We Know and Recommending What Should Change.” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 52(6):622–40.

Bagenstos

Samuel R.

2009. Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bagenstos

Samuel R.

2016. “From Integrationism to Equal Protection: tenBroek and the Next 25 Years of Disability Rights.” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 13:13.

Bailey

Moya

. 2011. “‘The Illest’: Disability as Metaphor in Hip Hop Music.” Pp. 141–47 in Blackness and Disability: Critical Examinations and Cultural Interventions, edited by Bell

Berlin, Germany: Lit Verlag.

Barnartt

Sharon N.

Scotch

Richard K.

2001. Disability Protests: Contentious Politics 1970–1999. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Baynton

Douglas

. 2001. “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History.” Pp. 33–57 in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Longmore

P. K.

Umansky

New York: New York University Press.

Bell

Chris

. 2006. “Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal.” Pp. 275–82 in The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Davis

L. J.

New York: Routledge.

10.

Ben-Moshe

Liat

. 2006. “Infusing Disability in the Curriculum: The Case of Saramago’s Blindness.” Disability Studies Quarterly 26(2).

11.

Ben-Moshe

Liat

Chapman

Chris

Carey

Allison C.

2014. Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

12.

Binswanger

Ingrid A.

Krueger

Patrick M.

Steiner

John F.

2009. “Prevalence of Chronic Medical Conditions among Jail and Prison Inmates in the USA Compared with the General Population.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 63(11):912–19.

13.

Blanchett

Wanda J.

2010. “Telling It Like It Is: The Role of Race, Class, & Culture in the Perpetuation of Learning Disability as a Privileged Category for the White Middle Class.” Disability Studies Quarterly 30(2).

14.

Bonilla-Silva

Eduardo

. 2017. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

15.

Boster

Dea H.

2013. African American Slavery and Disabilities: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. New York: Routledge.

16.

Burch

Susan

. 2002. Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to World War II. New York: New York University Press.

17.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2015. “Crime against Persons with Disabilities, 2009–2013.” Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

18.

Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2015. “Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics—2014.” USDL-15-1162. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

19.

Carey

Allison C.

2009. On the Margins of Citizenship: Intellectual Disability & Civil Rights in Twentieth-century America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

20.

Chapman

Chris

Carey

Allison C.

Ben-Moshe

Liat

. 2014. “Reconsidering Confinement: Interlocking Locations and Logics of Incarceration.” Pp. 3–24 in Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, edited by Ben-Moshe

Chapman

Carey

A. C.

New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

21.

Choo

Hae Yeon

Ferree

Myra Marx

. 2010. “Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities.” Sociological Theory 28(2):129–49.

22.

Collins

Patricia Hill

. 2002. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

23.

Connor

David J.

Ferri

Beth A.

Annamma

Subini A.

, eds. 2016. DisCrit—Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

24.

Crenshaw

Kimberlé Williams

. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989:139–67.

25.

Crenshaw

Kimberlé Williams

. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43(6):1241–99.

26.

Davis

Lennard J.

2013. “Introduction: Normality, Power and Culture.” Pp. 1–16 in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., edited by Davis

L. J.

New York: Routledge.

27.

Dunhamn

Jane

Harris

Jerome

Jarrett

Shancia

Moore

Leroy

Nishida

Akemi

Price

Margaret

Robinson

Britney

Schalk

Sami

. 2015. “Developing and Reflecting on a Black Disability Studies Pedagogy: Work from the National Black Disability Coalition.” Disability Studies Quarterly 35(2).

28.

Duster

Troy

. 2003. Back Door to Eugenics. New York: Routledge.

29.

Erevelles

Nirmala

. 2014. “Thinking with Disability Studies.” Disability Studies Quarterly 34(2).

30.

Erickson

William

Lee

Camille

von Schrader

Sarah

. 2014. “2012 Disability Status Report: United States.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Employment and Disability Institute.

31.

Faires

Robert

. 2007. “The Barbara Jordan Statue: Standing Like She Stood Up for the Constitution.” Austin Chronicle, July 6, 2007. Retrieved August 4, 2017 (https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2007-07-06/499190/).

32.

Faires

Robert

. 2009. “The Barbara Jordan Statue at UT: A Welcome Return to a Champion of Justice.” Austin Chronicle, April 24, 2009. Retrieved August 14, 2017 (https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2009-04-24/770404/).

33.

Finley

Erin P.

2011. Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

34.

Frederick

Angela

. 2017a. “Risky Mothers and the Normalcy Project: Women with Disabilities Negotiate Scientific Motherhood.” Gender & Society 31(1):74–95.

35.

Frederick

Angela

. 2017b. “Visibility, Respectability, and Disengagement: The Everyday Resistance of Mothers with Disabilities.” Social Science & Medicine 181:131–38.

36.

Garland-Thomson

Rosemarie

. 2005. “Feminist Disability Studies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(2):1557–87.

37.

Gerschick

Thomas J.

Stevens

J. Dalton

. 2016. “Invisibility, Visibility, Vilification, and Near Silence: The Framing of Disability in the Early Years of the American Sociological Society.” Pp. 1–27 in Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know It? edited by Green

Barnartt

S. M.

Bingley, UK: Emerald Group.

38.

Gliedman

John

Roth

William

. 1980. “The Unexpected Minority-handicapped Children in America.” International Journal of Rehabilitation Research 3(4):601–604.

39.

Goode

Tawara D.

Carter-Pokras

Olivia D.

Horner-Johnson

Willi

Yee

Silvia

. 2014. “Parallel Tracks: Reflections on the Need for Collaborative Health Disparities Research on Race/Ethnicity and Disability.” Medical Care 52(10):S3–S8.

40.

Gossett

Zakrajsek

Mansha Mirza

Andrea

Chan

Nathan Kai-Cheong

Wilson

Tom

Karner

Mark

Hammel

Joy

. 2014. “Supporting Institution-to-community Transitions for People with Psychiatric Disabilities: Findings and Implications from a Participatory Action Research Project.” Disability Studies Quarterly 34(4).

41.

Gould

Stephen Jay

. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton.

42.

Grillo

Trina

Wildman

Stephanie M.

1991. “Obscuring the Importance of Race: The Implication of Making Comparisons between Racism and Sexism (or Other-isms).” Duke Law Journal 1991(2):397–412.

43.

Gulley

Stephen P.

Altman

Barbara M.

2008. “Disability in Two Health Care Systems: Access, Quality, Satisfaction, and Physician Contacts among Working-age Canadians and Americans with Disabilities.” Disability and Health Journal 1(4):196–208.

44.

Hammer

Gili

. 2012. “Blind Women’s Appearance Management: Negotiating Normalcy between Discipline and Pleasure.” Gender & Society 26(3):406–32.

45.

Hyland

Shelley

Langton

Lynn

Davis

Elizabeth

. 2015. “Police Use of Nonfatal Force, 2002–11.” Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

46.

Isenberg

Nancy

. 2017. White Trash: A 400-year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Penguin.

47.

Jakobsen

Janet R.

2003. “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics.” Pp. 64–89 in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, edited by Boyarin

Itzkovitz

Pellegrini

New York: Columbia University Press.

48.

Jones

Nev

Brown

Robyn Lewis

. 2013. “The Absence of Psychiatric C/S/X Perspectives in Academic Discourse: Consequences and Implications.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33(1).

49.

King

Marissa D.

Bearman

Peter S.

2011. “Socioeconomic Status and the Increased Prevalence of Autism in California.” American Sociological Review 76(2):320–46.

50.

Kornbluh

Felicia

. 2011. “Disability, Antiprofessionalism, and Civil Rights: The National Federation of the Blind and the ‘Right to Organize’ in the 1950’s.” Journal of American History 97(4):1023–47.

51.

Krieger

Nancy

. 2012. “Methods for the Scientific Study of Discrimination and Health: An Ecosocial Approach.” American Journal of Public Health 102(5):936–44.

52.

Longmore

Paul K.

2015. Telethons: Spectacle, Disability, and the Business of Charity. New York: Oxford University Press.

53.

Lukin

Josh

. 2013. “Disability and Blackness.” Pp. 308–15 in The Disability Studies Reader, 4th ed., edited by Davis

L. J.

New York: Routledge.

54.

Maroto

Michelle

Pettinicchio

David

. 2015. “Twenty-five Years after the ADA: Situating Disability in America’s System of Stratification.” Disability Studies Quarterly 35(3):1–34.

55.

Mauldin

Laura

. 2016. Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

56.

May

Vivian M.

Ferri

Beth A.

2005. “Fixated on Ability: Questioning Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Theories of Resistance.” Prose Studies 27(1–2):120–40.

57.

Mayeri

Serena

. 2001. “‘A Common Fate of Discrimination’: Race-gender Analogies in Legal and Historical Perspective.” Yale Law Journal 110(6):1045–87.

58.

Metzl

Jonathan M.

2010. The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Boston: Beacon.

59.

Mitchell

David T.

Snyder

Sharon L.

2001. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

60.

Mollow

Anna

. 2006. “‘When Black Women Start Going on Prozac’: Race, Gender, and Mental Illness in Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me.” Melus 31(3):67–99.

61.

Morris

Edward W.

2012. Learning the Hard Way: Masculinity, Place, and the Gender Gap in Education. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

62.

Nelson

Alondra

. 2011. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

63.

Nielsen

Kim E.

2013. A Disability History of the United States. Boston: Beacon.

64.

Nowotny

Kathryn M.

Kuptsevych-Timmer

Anastasiia

. 2018. “Health and Justice: Framing Incarceration as a Social Determinant of Health for Black Men in the United States.” Sociology Compass 12(3):1–15.

65.

Obasogie

Osagie

. 2013. Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.

66.

Ong-Dean

Colin

. 2009. Distinguishing Disability: Parents, Privilege, and Special Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

67.

Pascoe

Cheri J.

2011. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

68.

Patterson

Lindsey

. 2012. “Points of Access: Rehabilitation Centers, Summer Camps, and Student Life in the Making of Disability Activism, 1960–1973.” Journal of Social History 46(2):473–99.

69.

Perry

David M.

Carter-Long

Lawrence

. 2016. The Ruderman White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. Boston: Ruderman Family Foundation.

70.

Phelan

Jo C.

Link

Bruce G.

Dovidio

John F.

2008. “Stigma and Prejudice: One Animal or Two?” Social Science & Medicine 67(3):358–67.

71.

Porco

Alex S.

2014. “Throw Yo’ Voice Out: Disability as a Desirable Practice in Hip-hop Vocal Performance.” Disability Studies Quarterly 34(4).

72.

Ralph

Laurence

. 2012. “What Wounds Enable: The Politics of Disability and Violence in Chicago.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32(3).

73.

Ramey

David M.

2015. “The Social Structure of Criminalized and Medicalized School Discipline.” Sociology of Education 88(3):181–201.

74.

Rios

Victor M.

2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. New York: New York University Press.

75.

Rivera Drew

Julia A.

2015. “Disability, Poverty, and Material Hardship since the Passage of the ADA.” Disability Studies Quarterly 35(3):1–15.

76.

Ross

Cody T.

2015. “A Multi-level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-level in the United States, 2011–2014.” PLoS ONE 10(11):1–34.

77.

Roussell

Aaron

Henne

Kathryn

Glover

Karen S.

Willits

Dale

. Forthcoming. “Impossibility of a ‘Reverse Racism’ Effect: A Rejoinder to James, James, and Vila.” Criminology & Public Policy.

78.

Rowden

Terry

. 2009. The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

79.

Samuels

Ellen J.

2011. “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 37(1):53–61.

80.

Samuels

Ellen J.

2014. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York University Press.

81.

Schalk

Sami

. 2013. “Metaphorically Speaking: Ableist Metaphors in Feminist Writing.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33(4).

82.

Schweik

Susan M.

2013. “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504.” Pp. 105–23 in Foundations of Disability Studies, edited by Wappett

Arndt

New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

83.

Schweik

Susan M.

2010. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press.

84.

Scotch

Richard K.

2009. From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

85.

Scotch

Richard K.

2001. “American Disability Policy in the Twentieth Century.” Pp. 375–95 in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, edited by Longmore

P. K.

Umansky

New York: New York University Press.

86.

Shakespeare

Tom

. 2006. Disability Rights and Wrongs. New York: Routledge.

87.

Shapiro

Joseph P.

1993. No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement. New York: Three Rivers.

88.

Shaw

Linda R.

Chan

Fong

McMahon

Brian T.

2012. “Intersectionality and Disability Harassment: The Interactive Effects of Disability, Age, Race, and Gender.” Rehabilitation Counseling Bulletin 55(2):82–91.

89.

Sherry

Mark

. 2016. Disability and Hate Crimes: Does Anyone Really Hate Disabled People? New York: Routledge.

90.

Shifrer

Dara

Muller

Chandra

Callahan

Rebecca

. 2011. “Disproportionality and Learning Disabilities: Parsing Apart Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Language.” Journal of Learning Disabilities 44(3): 246–57.

91.

Snow

David A.

Rochford

E. Burke

Jr. Worden

Steven K.

Benford

Robert D.

1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51(4):464–81.

92.

Spade

Dean

. 2013. “Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38(4):1031–55.

93.

Steadman

Henry J.

Osher

Fred C.

Robbins

Pamela Clark

Case

Brian

Samuels

Steven

. 2009. “Prevalence of Serious Mental Illness among Jail Inmates.” Psychiatric Services 60(6):761–65.

94.

Taylor

Paul C.

2007. “Race Problems, Unknown Publics, Paralysis, and Faith.” Pp. 135–52 in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Sullivan

Tuana

Albany: State University of New York Press.

95.

tenBroek

Jacobus

. 1966. “The Right to Live in the World: The Disabled in the Law of Torts.” California Law Review 54(2):841–919.

96.

Titchkosky

Tanya

. 2015. “Life with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric in Social Justice Praxis.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9(1):1–18.

97.

Treatment Advocacy Center. 2013. “Justifiable Homicide by Law Enforcement Officers: What Is the Role of Mental Illness? A Joint Report by the Treatment Advocacy Center & National Sheriff’s Association.” Arlington, VA: Treatment Advocacy Center.

98.

Turner

R. Jay

. 2013. “Understanding Health Disparities: The Relevance of the Stress Process Model.” Society and Mental Health 3(3):170–86.

99.

Valiente-Neighbours

Jimiliz M.

2015. “Beyond Post-race Paralysis: Creating Critical Dialogue on Race in the Obama Era.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1(2):331–35.

100.

Vidali

Amy

. 2010. “Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4(1):33–54.

101.

Wailoo

Keith

. 2001. Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

102.

Wendell

Susan

. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.

103.

Wray

Matt

. 2006. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.