The Intersection Nobody Talks About
Disability justice and racial justice aren’t separate movements—they’re deeply interconnected struggles that must be fought together. Disabled people of color face compounded discrimination that neither disability rights activism nor racial justice movements fully address when they operate in isolation.
You can’t achieve racial justice without disability justice. You can’t achieve disability justice without racial justice. These struggles are bound together by systems that devalue both disabled bodies and racialized bodies, and fighting one without the other leaves people at the intersection behind.
The Statistics Tell the Story
People of color are more likely to be disabled and less likely to receive quality disability services. Black Americans are 40% more likely to have a disability than white Americans. Latino Americans face similar increased rates. Indigenous Americans have the highest disability rates of any demographic group in the U.S.
This isn’t coincidence—it’s systemic. Poverty, environmental racism, lack of healthcare access, occupational hazards, and violence all contribute to higher disability rates in communities of color. Then those same communities face additional barriers to disability support, creating a cycle of disadvantage that compounds across generations.
Environmental Racism Creates Disability
Flint, Michigan’s water crisis didn’t just poison a community—it created a generation of disabled children, primarily Black children, who will live with lead poisoning’s effects forever. That’s environmental racism creating disability, and it’s happening in communities of color nationwide.
Communities of color are more likely to be located near industrial pollution, waste dumps, and environmental hazards. This exposure causes asthma, cancer, developmental disabilities, and chronic illnesses at disproportionate rates. Disability justice requires addressing environmental racism—the two fights are one.
Police Violence and Disability
Over half of people killed by police in the U.S. are disabled. That number increases when looking specifically at people of color with disabilities. Police are more likely to use force against disabled people, particularly disabled people of color, because disability behaviors get read as threats.
Autistic behaviors that don’t conform to police orders, mental health episodes, mobility limitations that prevent compliance—all these become justifications for violence when police don’t have training or willingness to recognize disability. And when the disabled person is also Black, Brown, or Indigenous, the risk multiplies.
Disability justice requires police accountability, defunding, and reimagining public safety in ways that don’t criminalize disability or Blackness.
Medical Racism and Disability
Disabled people of color face medical racism that compounds their disability experiences. Black people’s pain is systematically undertreated because of false beliefs about biological differences. Women of color with chronic pain are dismissed as drug-seeking. Immigrants with disabilities face additional barriers accessing healthcare.
This medical racism means people of color with disabilities receive worse care, face delayed diagnoses, and experience preventable complications. It means disabled people of color die at higher rates from treatable conditions because the healthcare system doesn’t value their lives.
Disability justice requires dismantling medical racism and building healthcare systems that actually serve disabled people of color.
Poverty and Disability
Poverty causes disability. Disability causes poverty. And both disproportionately affect communities of color, creating cycles difficult to escape. Poor working conditions, lack of healthcare, inadequate housing, food insecurity—all increase disability risk. Then disability makes escaping poverty harder because of employment discrimination, inadequate social services, and systems designed around white middle-class experiences.
Disability justice requires economic justice. That means living wages, universal healthcare, housing as human right, and social support systems that actually support disabled people without forcing poverty to qualify for services.
The White-Centered Disability Rights Movement
Traditional disability rights activism has centered white disabled experiences, often ignoring how race compounds disability discrimination. White disabled activists historically excluded disabled people of color, built organizations that didn’t address racism, and created frameworks that assumed disability was the primary axis of oppression.
This white-centered approach failed disabled people of color who experience discrimination based on both race and disability simultaneously, not separately. A Black wheelchair user faces different barriers than a white wheelchair user because racism and ableism interact, creating unique experiences that single-issue movements don’t address.
Disability justice emerged specifically to center disabled people of color, LGBTQIA+ disabled people, and others marginalized within traditional disability rights activism.
Incarceration and Disability
The prison-industrial complex disproportionately incarcerates disabled people of color. Jails and prisons warehouse people with mental illness, learning disabilities, and physical disabilities because communities lack adequate services. Then incarceration causes additional disability through violence, medical neglect, and trauma.
This is disability injustice and racial injustice simultaneously—systems criminalizing disability and Blackness/Brownness, using imprisonment instead of support, creating disability through incarceration.
Disability justice requires prison abolition and building community-based support that doesn’t criminalize disability or poverty.
Immigration and Disability
U.S. immigration law explicitly discriminates against disabled people, barring entry based on disability and creating pathways to deportation for immigrants who become disabled. Disabled immigrants face additional challenges accessing services, navigating systems designed in English for U.S. citizens, and proving eligibility for support.
Undocumented disabled people exist in impossible situations—needing services but unable to access them without risking deportation. Refugee and asylum systems often exclude disabled people or fail to provide necessary accommodations.
Disability justice requires immigration justice—ending disability-based exclusions, providing language access, and ensuring all people have rights regardless of immigration status.
Education and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Disabled students of color face disproportionate discipline, suspension, and expulsion. Schools funnel disabled students of color into special education tracks that limit opportunities rather than providing support. Zero-tolerance policies criminalize disability behaviors, feeding the school-to-prison pipeline.
Black disabled students are suspended at far higher rates than white disabled students with identical behaviors. This isn’t about behavior—it’s about racism interpreting disability through racist lenses that see Black disabled children as threatening rather than needing support.
Disability justice requires transforming education systems to actually support disabled students of color rather than criminalizing and marginalizing them.
Mutual Aid and Community Care
Disability justice frameworks emphasize mutual aid and community care—people supporting each other outside of systems designed to fail us. These frameworks have roots in communities of color that have always practiced mutual aid because government systems weren’t designed to support us.
Disability justice builds on traditions of Black and Brown communities caring for disabled family and community members, sharing resources, and creating informal support networks when formal systems exclude or harm.
This isn’t romanticizing poverty or lack of services—it’s recognizing that communities of color have survival wisdom about building support networks outside hostile systems, wisdom that disability justice movements should honor and learn from.
The Work Ahead
Achieving disability justice requires racial justice work. Achieving racial justice requires disability justice work. The movements must be integrated, centering people at intersections, building analysis that addresses how systems of oppression interact rather than treating them as separate issues.
This means:
– Disability rights organizations addressing racism within their > movements
– Racial justice movements addressing ableism and centering disabled > people
– Building coalitions that address multiple systems of oppression > simultaneously
– Centering leadership of disabled people of color
– Recognizing that liberation requires everyone’s freedom, not just > some people’s
You’re Not Alone
To disabled people of color: you’re not imagining it. The barriers you face are real, compounded, and systemic. You deserve support that recognizes your full humanity—both your racial identity and your disability identity.
Your experiences matter. Your leadership is necessary. And your liberation is bound up with all our liberations.
