Dustin Gibson argues that "race and disability were pathologized in a way that we can't separate them now.... I think we can't literally talk about ableism without talking about racism"; therefore, he continues, "I don't think that there's such thing as anti-Black ableism ... ableism is inherently anti-Black.”
Patrick Cokley similarly explains that in some regards "ableism is very much one and the same with racism because what we're really talking about is who has agency in our culture."
The relationship between racism and ableism (and other systems of op-pression) is most expansively articulated by TL Lewis, whom I quote at length in order to make clear not merely how Lewis and other Black disabled activists and cultural workers understand the relationships between these systems conceptually but also how this intersectional understanding shapes political approaches to social change. Lewis states:
I always chuckle about this because my brain doesn't disconnect them. There is no racism without ableism. There is no ableism without racism... you quite literally can't have one without the other.... There is a fundamental lack of understanding of the connections between racism and ableism, classism, and other structural and systemic oppressions that is killing us because if we understood those things—how they are connected, how there's an unbroken chain between asylums, plantations, zoos, circuses, and prisons—then we would be able to actually fight all of those things collectively and very differently.... [If we did make those connections,] then we would be able to have a much more holistic understanding of what is going on in our society but also a much stronger framework from which to unearth the histories... these collective histories and then dismantle the system—all of these systems....So long as we continue to allow people to think that it is just one or the other, we are going to keep spinning our wheels and not being able to identify the cause of the harm, which is all of these systems operating simultaneously.
Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics