Just the Messenger: disability justice on community radio

In early 2019, I had truly had enough. A disabled mind weary and disabled Body exhausted from years of trying to survive on the margins of an economic, social and physical landscape within which I was, as a visibly Black, visibly disabled woman, both highly visible and invisible. The complexity of the interaction of my physical disabilities, the accumulated traumas I live with, and the impact of it all on the way my non-linear mind and natural intuition works, rendered me and my rhythms unemployable in most workplaces. The gentle, slow needs of my Body and mind are incompatible with the grinding demands of colonial capitalism and have marginalised me within political spaces that, if accessible to disabled people at all, either explicitly or subliminally disregarded embodied knowledge and informal ways of learning that sit outside of institutionalised and text based education.

I say all this to say, my journey to finding a political home and accessible ways to share and engage with political ideas has been as long as the journey of unlearning much of what I had been indoctrinated to accept, as a migrant settler with my own Indigenous lineage living on stolen Aboriginal land, as a Black person in majority white schools and neighbourhoods without guidance as to how to navigate them, as a disabled person in a world soaking in contempt for, neglect of and dismissal of disabled minds and bodies. I was taught in so many ways to reject myself and to neglect my own needs and best interests in favour of the preferences of those centred in the spaces I interacted with: nondisabled people, white people, people of a particular class, educational or professional background, et cetera.

In mid 2019 however, after several months of me spiralling, setting fire to proverbial bridges but, in the process, correcting my own self neglect for the first time in my life, my political home found me, at 3CR Community Radio. Located on Wurundjeri land within the suburb of Fitzroy in Melbourne, 3CR is a community radio station that in its inception and throughout its vibrant life has been a haven to radical leftist politics in this city. This community hub has also strived to foreground the voices of Aboriginal people, women, workers, ethnic and LGBTQ+ communities, and people with disabilities (amongst others).

To that end, 3CR has for many years put on an annual Disability Day broadcast, as an antidote to official International Day of People with Disability (IDPWD) celebrations mandated by governments internationally and observed by state institutions comprised largely of nondisabled people. On 3 December, each year, 3CR had put to air 12 hours of disability rights-focused programming, made and coordinated by disabled people. Year after year, the coordinators of these broadcasts had raised the bar for disability rights discourse, with programs taking on an extraordinary array of topics that affect the lives of disabled people. In 2019 I was given the role of Disability Day Worker, to coordinate the broadcast. I had no radio experience, but a clear vision, informed by decades of learning in this highly visible/invisible Body within this colony, for what I wanted to do with that radio space.

Power from the Margins

In coordinating the 2019 day, 3CR and I wanted to centre the voices and perspectives of grassroots Black people, Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and people of colour (BIPOC) with disabilities. Not necessarily professional advocates, and not necessarily people with any broadcasting experience. There was one reason for this: through observation, for all the talk that had been going on about intersectionality in both disability rights and racial justice spaces, disabled BIPOC occupied a tough position, as we sat at the margins of two complex politicised communities: disability spaces dominated by Whiteness, and BIPOC spaces that still actively replicated ableism. I named the broadcast ’Power from the margins’, and with only a few unavoidable exceptions, people on air were BIPOC, with a range of disabilities— Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and disabled people with roots in almost every continent.

12 hours may seem like a long time to program, but it is quite difficult to adequately capture the complexity of the intersection between culture, race and ability in a half day broadcast—let alone curate content that explores all the implications of how this plays out in a settler colonial state like Australia, with its internationally notorious racist and ableist border enforcement regime. And all the state and cultural violence that comes with that.

To begin to address that settler state I created the program Ableism in the settler colony, in which Latoya Rule, Dominic Golding and anonymous members of the ex-detainee/refugee community explained the ways in which the settler colonial state criminalises and incarcerates disabled Aboriginal people and disabled non-citizens of colour, whilst also being responsible for causing a multitude of impairments through human rights abuses. In the case of Aboriginal people, this has happened over generations, through the colonial project.

This program concluded the broadcast, but to begin the day I felt it necessary to explain the framework underpinning the conception of the 2019 broadcast. Disability Justice (DJ) was not a term used in professional advocacy much in this colony at the time, but to grassroots politically disabled people I align with, it is the only disability framework that truly includes us and our kin, as it considers racial and disability justice as being inextricably linked, along with other justice movements. In It’s Too Early, the 2019 broadcast’s breakfast program, my co-hosts and I laid out the history and principles of Disability Justice as a burgeoning movement that brings together the agendas of multiple movements for liberation - led by multiply marginalised disabled and queer BIPOC.

Disability Justice holds anti-capitalism to be inseparable from the liberation of disabled people, and a number of shows during the ‘Power from the margins’ broadcast highlight the extra economic violence racialised people with disabilities face from the state. Notably in the program Tuzungumze, Hamile Ibrahim discussed the complicated and layered pressures that Africans with various disabilities experience, having been structurally forced into low income precarious employment, and denied economic safety nets and health care.

In a year where a royal commission into violence against people with disability had commenced, it would have been remiss of us to neglect discussion of violence against people with disabilities both in interpersonal relationships and in institutional care. Beloved 3CR broadcaster, activist and proud Yorta Yorta woman Jane Rosengrave shared her story of survival and self-advocacy in the face of such violence on her program Free as a bird. Self-advocacy, as it is every year, was a key focus of programming with shows like Disabled Parent, Disabled Child & the NDIS highlighting the advocacy of disabled people for themselves and their families.

In that show, CB Mako discussed the difficulties of being a migrant, disabled POC navigating state systems to access health care and economic support for their disabled child—even as a fluent English speaker. We aired a number of shows during ’Power from the margins’ that highlighted the multifaceted structural challenges that both culturally and linguistically diverse BIPOC face, as well as services being developed at the time by organisations such as Action on Disability Within Ethnic Communities and Centre for Culture, Ethnicity & Health for non-English speaking community members.

As one of the few regular 3CR broadcasters on-air on the day, Gavin Moore from Billabong Beats used his fantastic program to share a service that supports Aboriginal people with disabilities to access the NDIS. Elsewhere in the day’s programming we heard from young queer BIPOC with disabilities discussing medical racism, mental health, relationships and race, were entertained with two hours of music and arts programming. and explored the implications of climate change for disabled indigenous peoples of the Oceanic region.

Whenever I am thinking about Disability Justice now I keep the words of Jane, of Hamile, of all the people who were part of the 2019 broadcast in my heart. The title ‘Power from the Margins’ to me still points to a core belief of mine, that runs through my thinking regarding Disability Justice: that power can be built from the margins, from the truest grassroots, in order to challenge existing interlocking systems of oppression - and that there is actually no other way it will be done. The knowledge of marginalised Bodies must lead. As the second principle of Disability Justice states, “LEADERSHIP OF THOSE MOST IMPACTED. ‘We are led by those who most know these systems.’ –Aurora Levins Morales”.

Imagining Disability Justice

A month after the 2019 broadcast went to air on December 3, I intuitively started feeling a deep unease in my Body, like something big was coming, and my anxiety forced me into self isolation against this vague unknown threat in January of 2020. Months later, the catastrophic coronavirus pandemic was fully upon us, with profound implications for all disabled people - especially those with compromised immune systems locked away in institutional homes and carceral facilities, with no control over their environments or who they interact with, or in crowded and unsafe housing.  

It is difficult to write about the first half of that year. Watching the state respond in the most heavy handed, carceral ways to what is a public health issue requiring care, comprehensive community engagement and a well resources health care system, was painful and deeply triggering for those of us disabled people who know medical trauma and have well founded fears about loss of autonomy and carceral control of our bodies. Mutual aid initiatives sprung up to address the stark material inequalities laid bare by the pandemic and the states response to supporting the population, as well as the interlocking forms of oppression that compound this material inequality.

At the same time, in 2020 I connected with more multiply-marginalised disabled people here in so-called Australia, and made more connections with disabled people involved in Disability Justice efforts in other settler colonies. There was no escaping the trauma of the mass disabling event that was unfolding, yet the conversations we were having, perhaps as a survival mechanism, were also reaching beyond the present circumstances for what might be possible if we turned more deeply to the knowledge our Bodies hold, and the values that unite us as people committed to Disability Justice. People who desire a better world for everyone with our whole hearts.

When it came time to coordinate the 3CR Community Radio Disability Day broadcast again, the theme to me was clear: ‘Imagining Disability Justice’. I wrote this blurb for the day:

The theme and artwork selected for this year’s broadcast is inspired by the book ‘Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice’, disabled mutual aid, and the soft, gentle care disabled community members have engaged in to ensure their comrades and loved ones had access to what they needed, when both the state and the public (locally and globally) conveyed through actions and rhetoric the message of our disposability. The artwork also speaks to the respite many of us have sought in our imaginations, holding space for ourselves and imagining possibilities beyond the current paradigm, when many of us face being confined until a COVID-19 vaccine is made. Whilst the broadcast will feature people talking about all that the pandemic has revealed about the structural marginalisation of disabled people, we will also be making space for discussions about what we can create together to replace all of this. Space to imagine disability justice.

In ‘Imagining Disability Justice’, I wanted to capture the voices and ideas of some of the people who were having conversations about Disability Justice here. People like Vanamali Hermans, whose interview with Mario Pozega on the show Chronically Chilled covered the Black Lives Matter movement, what abolition could look like from a Disability Justice perspective, and her experiences in mutual aid organising.

People like Elena Macdonald, who lead Mob Dreaming Up: Yarning Sick, Disabled Realities, a powerful 2 hour program featuring the voices of six disabled and ill Aboriginal people yarning on the realities of illness and disability within the colony. People like Nakayn, Morag & Liv who we supported to create THE DREAMSPACE, another incredible 2 hours of radio discussing pandemic revelations and utopian visions for Disability Justice.

The full broadcast featured over 40 people with disabilities from all different backgrounds and age groups and included discussions about anti-Blackness and COVID-19, abolition of carceral facilities, climate intersections with disability and Indigenous activism, gender based violence, the Royal Commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled people, Queer Disability Justice dreams, disabled sex worker rights, issues to do with the far-Right & autism, and much more.

One of the programs featured an interview with Pan Karanikolas talking about Liat Ben-Moshe’s book entitled, Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, which was the selected text for a political reading group convened in 2020 by Vanamali Hermans and Georgia Mantle through Facebook open invite. This reading group became the impetus for events that took place the following year.

Grounding Disability Justice

After Vanamali and Georgia had co-facilitated nine reading sessions for the book Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition, and inspired by the conversations within it and the potentials for political organising that could come from such collective learning, they secured some grant money in 2021 and founded the Disability Justice Network (DJN), and from that, a Disability Mutual Aid Fund. The fund was created to assist multiply marginalised disabled people facing hardships and in need of fast assistance. The necessity of such a fund is clear from the sheer volume of multiply marginalised disabled people who need urgent financial assistance on any given day, particular during this pandemic.

The same month the DJN was founded, I had the good fortune of being able to do a webinar on Disability Justice with Alice Wong, a highly accomplished disability rights activist based on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush (rah-my-toosh) Ohlone peoples, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. Alice is also someone who had been part of the 2020 3CR Disability Day broadcast ‘Imagining Disability Justice’ and is the inspiration behind the theme for this issue of Demos Journal. She and I decided to structure our webinar on Disability Justice as a simple conversation, with each of us asking the other questions and given the opportunity to respond. We commenced the webinar by grounding ourselves through acknowledging the country from which we both were joining the session from. My first question for Alice, was how Disability Justice organisers who are settlers in the Turtle Island/United States context, address the necessity of solidarity with First Nations peoples over there.

As 2021 went on, I observed more conversations and conflict in different circles about the correct way to orient Disability Justice work within settler colony Australia, with questions about who should be leading such organising - more specifically, whether white disabled settlers, those who are multiply marginalised, should be leading such work at all. There remains divergent views on this. At the same time, I myself was holding a deep intuitive yearning to connect Disability Justice to decolonial political potentials, and ground my own Disability Justice imagining in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sovereignty, first and foremost. It felt even more necessary to me as someone with my own Indigenous lineage in the Oceanic region subject to Australian coloniality, one with ancestral ties to the First Peoples of this continent.

This is ultimately what led to the conception of the 2022 3CR Disability Day broadcast theme, ‘Grounding Disability Justice’, the follow up to ‘Imagining Disability Justice’ that made space for an exploration of what Disability Justice has been, is, and will be on these lands - led by Blak Disabled community members. The broadcast featured some of the best formations of words I have ever had the privilege of witnessing from young Blak disabled community members.  

“Our world is already here, in some (many) ways. It is partly brought into existence by our collective imaginings, far greater, more expansive, than can be shared in this space. It is held in our work within communities today; within our struggle to maintain as we have begun; together, centred in Indigenous ways of being (our ways); in abolition, beyond academic text; in intersectional, collective liberation.” - Elena Macdonald, Paredarerme, residing on Wurundjeri land

These words, used as a pull quote in the synopsis for the broadcast were from Elena Macdonald’s reading in the 2021 DJN storytelling event ‘Dreaming Disability Justice’ and featured in the broadcast in the program Dreaming Disability Justice + Abolitionist Futures. But it was Elena’s words in their own program, Manifesto for Rest and Survival [on resistance and the power of collective - an Indigenous call to disability justice] that must be taken in fully to understand what a Grounded Disability Justice looks like on Sovereign, returned lands.

Every 3CR Disability Day broadcast has been accompanied by artwork by a disabled artist. For 2021, I commissioned artist Renay Barker-Mulholland (Biripi Daingatti) to create the artwork for the broadcast and after yarning about it, she created a beautiful work titled Gunagala (sky). Her artist statement:

Flowers grow, the world revolves, and we make it through another day. While the sun sets, the diminishing rays ignite our own introspection on the status quo and our part in that. As we take stock of where we are, intertwined is a wealth of knowledge and strength.  This is the destination, and now is the journey.

This work was created in response to my first outing on Country with my new powered 4wd wheelchair, I was finally able to engage in something so integral to my culture. I came across a giant bush covered in spectacular flowers, and was awestruck by the beauty of it. I finally felt in that moment that I could see what true justice for everyone meant, while noting the solid and intricate branches that grew these magnificent specimens. We’ve had the world stop, and the looming of the unknown has forced us through space and time to reflect on the kind of world it is we’re trying to save. Now is the time to be brave, the revolution is here. Just like that beautiful bush, we needed to make sure every branch supports a magnificent display of us.

The words shared by the Blak disabled community members in the 2021 broadcast, remain for me the ultimate long term goal of Disability Justice on Aboriginal land.

Rest is Survival

In early 2022, after several years of struggling and severe stress, I began the year unintentionally losing weight, losing hair, and feeling more physically vulnerable than usual. My Body then told me to take deep rest by shutting down, and I became unable to eat the foods I normally eat. So, I took deep rest. I attuned fully to her, made the decision to do as much as I could for myself outside the stretched medical system, and let her healing process lead me throughout the year. With access to a welfare payment, I was able to take 2022 off to rest and regenerate.

Throughout the year, I also witnessed many disabled people being forced to rest, and many more not being able to take that rest due to the demands of waged work, the absence of material support to facilitate such rest, and many other complex factors. Once again, the conversations, heartaches, critical observations and embodied experiences of the year informed the theme:

Disabled Rest is Survival

In year three of the pandemic, where significant public health protections mitigating the deaths of immunocompromised people were removed by the state and voluntarily abandoned by non-disabled people en masse in public space, where the under-resourced medical system and its unsupported workers were stretched, where climate change induced floods swallowed huge parts of this ancient continent’s eastern side, and contributed to an electoral turn towards a Labor federal government who have since pursued an agenda including tax cuts for the wealthiest capitalist polluters, the necessity of our multi-movement struggle against capitalist society’s commitment to eugenics, social murder and ecocide is clear.

In the midst of this, survival for many in our disability community (both before the pandemic and now) means taking deep rest. Rest for our disabled and ill Bodies, minds, nervous systems, because we have no other option. Rest in isolation and self quarantine. Rest whilst waiting for health care and care services. Restorative rest for healing. Rest to both preserve and affirm the worth of our Bodies, minds and very lives.

But who has access to rest under colonial capitalism? Those who can buy it, access it, as survival is for those who can afford it and who can participate in an increasingly unsafe workforce to do so. Those who are not incarcerated or in need of medical care from a medical system ill equipped to provide it. Those with safe housing and living circumstances. Those who are held by safe and accessible communities with members practicing consistent COVID safety.

In this year’s Saturday Disability Day Broadcast, we’re talking about REST as a necessity for our survival, the ways disabled people are habitually denied both rest and income, reflections on disabled rest and joy, disabled Indigenous anticapitalist futures, and much more.

Universal access to rest, to wellness, to life, is Disability Justice.

In the program F*** WORK, which I created with Leilani Fuimaono for the broadcast, I go into more detail about the theme ‘Rest is SURVIVAL’ and what I see as the need to centre rest in both our organising and in the future we seek to create. Leilani and I push back at the focus on the abled worker and labour relations in general in leftist politics, and push back at discourse on rest led by nondisabled people, particular those who are materially comfortable. I also discuss what are to me the two things that are essential to developing Disability Justice in this location:

Grounding Disability Justice in Aboriginal Sovereignty and land back. And figuring out how to meet the material needs of everyone, through meeting the needs of multiply marginalised disabled people (beyond colonial capitalism and the abolition of carceral institutions).

There’s so much more I would like to say about the essential conversations and other voices heard on the 2022 Disability Day broadcast, but instead I will simply encourage you to explore the podcasts and transcripts on the 3CR website at your leisure. What I have learned from fellow disabled community members over the past four years, and through my experiences as a Disability Day worker on 3CR Community Radio, are now the foundation for the Disability Justice work I will pursue with comrades and kin in the near future.