एना Maria 🌈 🇵🇸

Being on ground a lot lately has made me realise how absolutely opposed I am to shaming people with invisible disabilities and chronic illnesses for not physically showing up to political events, especially flash protests. Our movements need disability justice. We need to understand crip time. Not every body can move at the speed political organising demands. Not everyone can stand for four hours, travel across a city at a moment’s notice, run when police arrive, risk detention, or recover from doing all of this Yet we have created a very ableist idea of political commitment: the bodies we can physically see are rewarded as the most political. Yes, the people protesting, getting detained, documenting and reporting from the ground are doing essential political work. But so is the chronically ill person organising from bed. So is the disabled person researching, writing, fundraising, designing, documenting, doing mutual aid or making somebody else’s presence on ground possible. Physical visibility is not the only way to practise your politics. Just as movements must make space for women, Muslim women, queer and trans people, they must make space for disabled and chronically ill people. Accessibility and disability justice cannot be an afterthought to liberation politics. There is no single correct body with which to resist. If your body couldn’t show up somewhere you desperately wanted to be, you do not need to prove your politics by hurting it. Shaming people is not okay. And ableism should have no space in our movements.