This is being written in agitation, exhaustion, and frustration, during a severe flare, while adjusting to dosage changes in my medications, and a move to different country. But it is urgent, it needs to happen now.
I need to address the white people and non-Black POC within the sick and crip communities that Iâm a part of, or that have resonated with Sick Woman Theory in their own work. I need to address the white people and non-Black POC within the activist, art, intellectual, political, and literary communities that are the context for my work. Iâm specifically addressing white-passingâand therefore white-privilegedânon-Black POC, like myself.Â
Iâm talking to you who count me as a friend, as a colleague, you who reference my work, who list me in your bibliographies, who have cited SWT in your essays or your emails to loved ones, who have supported me at public events or in private correspondence.
Itâs becoming harder and harder for me to engage in chronic illness and disability justice conversations, care communities and support groups, or any kind of political activism around ableism, which does not include thinking and work about race, racism, white privilege, and, specifically, systemic white supremacy, police brutality, and anti-Blackness.Â
And itâs becoming harder and harder for me to scroll through the timelines of white people, white friends, white colleagues, who are visible as political activists or advocates, as intellectual or critical thinkers, as teachers, as cultural producers, artists, and writers, and who have privilege in their visibility, but who are silent about Black Lives Matter.Â
I cannot take seriously any kind of work around ableism, disability justice, chronic illness, neurodivergent and mental illness advocacy, feminism, queer/trans/nonbinary rights, and/or anticapitalism that does not includeâno, that does not foregroundâthe critiquing and dismantling of racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, right now and always.
I am not here for sick and crip justice work that is not actively and visibly in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.Â
I am not here for any political activism or cultural production that centers whiteness, Euro-centric beauty, middle-class resources, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity. I am not here for it.Â
I am not here for any practices (artistic, political, pedagogic, social, et al) that do not demonstrate actions and work toward anti-white-supremacy, decolonization, and anti-racism.Â
I am not here for white cis-het feminists writing about their sadness and pain, but not their privilege, from the comfort of their heated bedrooms that only they occupy, whose medications, rent, and food are paid for by their parents.
I am not here for âanticapitalistâ white boys who demand able-bodied revolution in the streets, nor for white protestors at #BLM demonstrations who antagonize the police.
I am not here for white middle-class anarchists who shout for us all to quit our jobs if weâre âseriousâ about being radical.Â
I am not here for white, funded academics talking to each other in air-conditioned auditoriums about âprecarityâ and âvulnerability.â
I am not here for artists making expensive collectibles for the 1%.
I am not here for white people with a bone to pick about Beyonce ânot doing more for her community,â but no critique of any other white celebrity who has said or done nothing about Black Lives Matter.
(This is not an exhaustive list, obviously, itâs just what comes to mind right now.)Â
I am not here for any of it.
Sick Woman Theory is not here for it.Â
I am here for Black Lives Matter.
