Black and Brown Disability Advocacy on a Higher Ed Campus: Subverted Truths

• In Event: What Is Democracy to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act? Confronting Racism in IDEA

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to center the experience of students of Color in a campus-wide protest to advance students’ concerns about mental health at a predominantly white, selective liberal arts college in the middle of the United States. By centering the experiences of the students of Color leaders of the protest and following advocacy, we examine the ways in which their activism was ultimately interpreted and appropriated into de facto policies that favor individualist approaches to disability in the college classroom, discursively maintaining access to a competitive classroom as an exercise of democratic education. We offer an alternative framing that disrupts access to classroom competition as a right of Disabled students, to instead center the communal perspectives of students of Color and to reconsider access as the opportunity to engage relationally with peers, curricula, and instructors within third space (Guttirez, 2008) through agency.

Theoretical Framework
Building on Author’s (2019) theory of “terrible, sticky truths” (pathologization, disablement and exclusion) and “subverted truths” (redefining identity through radical love, replacing intellectual competency, revaluing community, reimagining, and restoration), we surface, interrogate, and disrupt how disability advocacy is enveloped in whiteness and center Black and Brown people with disabilities as knowers. We surface the presumed whiteness of disability activism by making visible an emphasis on individualism, productivity, perfectionism, and exclusion in disability advocacy, policy, and law. We recognize the consequence of these over-emphases as the “terrible, sticky, truths” (Author, 2019) of pathologization, disablement, and exclusion. We focus on how individual advocacy for accommodation and intervention might preclude equity.

Methods & Data
To do this, we look to the work of Black and Brown student activists on the campus of a small liberal arts college in the central United States. Together, we theorize around this work through the lens of “subverted truths”: centering the ways in which students embody and enact: a) redefining through radical love, b) replacing intellectual competency with their ways of knowing, c) revaluing their community, d) reimagining wholeness, and e) restoring health and wellness through community-centered, relational access. IRB approved.

Significance
We draw from the knowledges of those who are most often disenfranchised from disability advocacy—and disability law— to build on a theoretical orientation that deconstructs the traditional notions of competitive rigor as successful teaching in postsecondary spaces. Rather, we consider as rigorous the provision of collaborative and communal educational experiences facilitated through pedagogical orientation that privileges a presumed wide learner variability in race and disability, and thus places an emphasis on collective access as the opportunity to enact agency in learning spaces.

Authors

• Maureen Negrelli Coomer, Colorado College

• Mercedes Adell Cannon, Indiana University - Indianapolis

• Germaine Koziarski, Arizona State University