…Able-bodied supremacy has been formed in relation to other systems of domination and exploitation. The histories of white supremacy and ableism are inextricably entwined, both forged in the crucible of colonial conquest and capitalist domination. One cannot look at the history of US slavery, the stealing of indigenous lands, and US imperialism without seeing the way that white supremacy leverages ableism to create a subjugated ‘other’ that is deemed less worthy/abled/smart/capable…
In many precolonial contact communities, there existed ways of being disabled that did not mean stigma, shame, exile, or death. Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in pre-contact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.
With the arrival of white settler colonialism, things changed, and not in a good way. For many sick and disabled Black, Indigenous, and brown people under transatlantic enslavement, colonial invasion, and forced labor, there was no such thing as state-funded care. Instead, if we were too sick or disabled to work, we were often killed, sold, or left to die, because we were not making factory or plantation owners money. Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best, we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities—from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities. At worst, a combination of legal and societal ableism plus racism and colonialism meant that we were locked up in institutions or hospitals, “for our own good.” The Ugly Laws, on the books in the United States from the mid-1700s to the 1970s, stated that many disabled people were “too ugly” to be in public and legally prevented disabled people from being able to take up space in public. The Ugly Laws were interwoven with a mass creation in the 1800s and onward of hospitals, “homes,” “sanitoriums,” and “charitable institutions” where it was the norm for disabled, sick, mad, and Deaf people to be sequestered from able-bodied “normal society.
These institutions overlapped with other prison/carceral systems, like residential schools, where Indigenous children were stolen, abused, and stripped of their language and culture, and prisons where Black, brown, poor, criminalized, trans, queer, and sex working people were locked up for profit. People’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse. The specter of “the home” and lockup still haunts everyone when we consider asking for or needing care.
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