bonus surprise stack: two cute things and a extra essay about white utopianism vs disabled BIPOC wc realism in sci-fi

and a poem

meme from @socialistsinspace, image is of Data from Star Trek TNG dancing with a horrified frozen “this is fine” smile on their face with someone with a fancy gold dress and blonde updo, with text that reads, “When you’re trying to go to work and make content and live your life, but genocide is being livestreamed on everyone’s phones and 2000 people are dying every week from a pandemic the government says it’s over and it’s 80 degrees in February.”

greetings and salutations.

this is a bonus stack that was a surprise even to me. I found myself writing the essay that’s the last part of this as a little treat break in the middle of the 8 jobs/ surprise medical crisis/ writing other things, out of some ruminations I have been chewing on and chewing over with friends. I was also pleasantly surprised by two disabled things that I thought to let you know about. do not worry, I‘m not going to start sending shit to you every week/ month because it would be annoying and also no one would read it.

First the short surprises:

I’m still behind on my website contact form email (thisisdisabilityjustice) but I’m slow combing when I can and was pleasantly surprised to read an email from this crew @ streetsoundsystem, a London UK based collective who made a text video of my "Palestine is Disabled" essay and projected it on buildings in London. Here’s the embed:

you can also view it on Instagram here.

The first location they projected is 500 metres from Buckingham Palace and the second location is on the other side of the bridge from the Houses of Parliament ;)

They also have a project where they’ve used their soundsystem to play sent-in recordings from people who can't be physically join the London marches for Palestine- they play their recordings as people march. This is literaly something people talked about as a tactic in Cripping the Resistance in 2020 and I’m so glad to see people taking it up.

Every place and person I’ve shared this with has had much joy and tears. It feels really good to see people doing the shit me and others have been yelling at everyone to do- try some wild disabled shit to throw sand on the gears of empire. Thank you for this disabled creative.

if you want to show the films yourselves, reach out to me at brownstargirlnew@gmail.com or to the crew at their instagram and we can try to put you in touch.

second, I am reading new work at Pandemic Solidarity for the Long Future this Saturday sometime between 8;30- 10:30 PM ET. You can check out the schedule here, register here and read their political statements here. (eta: looks like reg is full, still including but PS4LF is an important intervention and organizing project I’m excited for people to know about.)

From their website: PS4LF defines itself as “organized by a Black-led multiracial group based in occupied North America representing a tapestry of genders, ages, lived experiences, and abilities. This convening seeks to address the mass death, physical and social abandonment, and loss of access to public space during the past four years of the COVID-19 pandemic….”

Under, “Why We are Gathering” the group describes: “Within the context of eugenics, ableism, and white supremacy, a COVID Cautious event led by racialized TGNC folks, women, disabled folks, and youth allows us to lead conversations that truly center our dreams of a world of community care. We have a right to have access to clean air and protection from deadly diseases, and we believe we can achieve that goal together.

We are creating a COVID Cautious principled political framework grounded in Black liberation, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism and anti-eugenics that individuals, institutions, and movement organizations can use to inform, assess, and transform the way they work

Please note: All convening attendees, art gallery participants, facilitators, performers, and vendors must fall under our definition of a Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander (BBIAPI) umbrella.

Folks who are white and recognize themselves as “white-passing,” “white-presenting,” or “white-assumed” are not welcome at this convening. We ask that you honor and support the container we are seeking to build together.”

These two BIPOC disabled interventions give me heart, esp. coming the same week and change when the CDC announced, despite much organizing against it, that you only have to stay home for a half hour if you get COVID, no big. They announced it on Disability Day of Mourning no less, a day every year where disabled people mourn those of us murdered by our families, often in what is posed as “mercy killing” ie “better off dead.” wild choice, CDC. Then they announced that the USPS free COVID test program is over as of this Friday March 8. Clearly there is no test shortage if they are trying to dump as many as possible.

if you’re in Philly, the libraries and city spaces continue to have free masks and tests, including free PCRs at a rotating assortment of community centers, mosques and churches, please check this link for more info.

***

ok, here’s a new poem,

written from the depths of blood loss from Oceans of Uterine Blood this past week. it’s been a while since I’ve been this fucking severely heinously ill and it made me think on how some of my best/ most honest writing has come from when I’m in an altered state from pain or blood loss or dehydration. the censorship falls away in the midst of the disabled visceral. I mean, sometimes I have to focus on just eating, shitting and surviving, too, don’t get me wrong. but this too is true.

xoxox your messy nasty crip house

my garbage can is stuffed with bloody pads. there’s a

double half moon shaped ass smear of blood crocus

on my toilet seat. the tub needs a scrub. there’s a cat tree

i’ve needed someone to come pick up for two weeks now.

riding shotgun in my hallways. no one may be coming.

there’s rubble on the floor, yes, rubble.

used napkins crumpled everywhere. yes the

recycling is full again. what a scandal. it looks

like a crazy person lives here. survey says they do.

also a sick person. you know that cycle where your

house is gross and you need help but you won’t let anyone over your house

because it’s gross? that one. maybe i’ll be on the news.

i’m seeing spots in front of my eyes from blood loss

so yay, that means I can’t see  all the way what a shame my house is

i don’t seem like an “adult”. that’s fine.

I’m a cripple adult maybe slowly bleeding to death

because the next new patient opening is in june

and the hospitals are stuffed full of dying people in hallways

as bombs rain down on the rest of the world, paid in full.

this is me saying, wherever you are feeling like an embarrassed loser

i love you and your dirty-ass house

even if we die here, we are not the shame.

and now, the bonus essay+ book review/ rant. (ressay?):

white abled optimism and disabled BIPOC pessimistic realism in some recent and past works of science fiction.

all the spoiler alerts for details from several books and a story.

the great transition is a cli-fi novel on a mainstream press I enjoyed well  enough when I read it last year.  it's well plotted and it captured my interest til the end. decent 3.0 stars read. everything for everyone is a utopian queer socialist sci-fi book on a bespoke rad press that I read quickly and critically when it came out in 2022. I appreciated some parts of it, and a lot of it pissed me off.

Both are written by white leftists, at least partially. (the great transition is a single author book,by Nick Fuller Goggins, everything for everyone was co-written by M.E. O'Brien, who is white, and Eman Abdelhadi, who is  SWANA.) and uh, it shows. 

Both books employ the strat of appealing to a readership that wants escape. A leftist fantasy escape from the current grim/ stark into a future where things are less fucked up. This isn’t a diss- I respect fantasy, and god knows many of us have needed to fantasize to survive the last five years of COVID isolation in general and to imagine futures in specific. The books are also employing a strategy where they try to tell a story of“how we get from the current grim to a future that is less heinous.” A didactic story of, this is how we get from big bad to the big good, with a roadmap people might choose to follow.

I get this strategy. I’ve used it myself. But the thing about roadmaps is the terrain is ever shifting and rougher than you thought, and if you think you can trust google maps you might drive into the ocean by accident. I worked for a white woman once who was a rich Maoist and she stuck 13 sheets of big paper on the wall once with little dots for where all the “members” would move in lockstep and in 20 years we’d have ended childhood sexual abuse if they just did what she said. She didn’t like it when I told her that things didn’t work that way and that everyone, CSA survivors in particular, like to have a little autonomy and control over our lives. or might even, you know, have some of our own useful ideas about how we thought ending child rape could happen.

The pitfall white/ monied, “radical fiction or science fiction” telling a “here’s how we get there to the rev” story can fall into is the same as any writing by radical or marginalized writers: when we feel like we have to just write “positive characters” and “positive stories/ futures.” When we leaves out moral ambiguity, batshit unpredictability and complex, imperfect, realistic characters and situations, we cheat the story and we lie to our readers. We also don’t create a future that rings true.

My biggest critique of The Great Transition and Everything for Everyone is that both books, to different degrees, tell a optimistic whiteness/ abled story of, wow, shit just worked out! Whiteness and ableism and class show up in their world building and future building to their detriment.

To be fair, the books aren’t without visceral reality. The Great Transition does a decent job detailing the gnarly horror of how climate apocalypse goes down, opening the book with the climate fire implosion of the forest surrounding a protagonist’s Maine home (yeah, even the great north woods aren’t far north enough to be safe), killing his parents as he survives by diving under the waters surrounding their seaweed harvesting boat.  His partner goes from being locked up in an ICE camp as a climate migrant to being conscripted into forced Climate New Deal labor, which kills her sister and gets her permanently disabled from fighting wildfires.  In Everything for Everyone, O'Brien's character spends her 60s locked up in a prison camp on the former site of  Riis Beach. Many, many people starve to death, die or live with long term PTSD from the war with fascists, the entire west coast borreal forest dies, Jackson MS is nuked after a Black radical uprising takes control of the city. I appreciate how both books don’t sugar coat just how bad shit gets.

But there’s still a certain kind of white, abled optimism with some class tells present in both books, and it fucks them up. In TGT’s present, carbon  got to net zero a while ago, and while there's struggles and attempts at push back and nefarious attempts at undermining the Rev and the Good Safe Place, people live in nice collectives with pretty, humane ecotech. Land Back somehow just…. happened without the massive repression every Indigenous land occupation has faced from the cops and the state. In the flashbacks that show us how the world got there, there's a lot of scenes of multicultural people happily coming together and getting along to fight to protect the last three sequoias and build high speed rail. There’s no fascist or corporate desire to monetize the end times while killing people. Fuller Goggins depicts people as naturally wanting to work together for the right thing, if you just give them the option. Things got bad enough climate collapse-wise that somehow a new eco party Just Wins (because there's no electoral repression) and funds a Green New Deal on Adderall.

Everything for Everyone pissed me off more that TGD did, which might surprise some: I’m theoretically part of the target audience for E4E because I’m queer and brown and “radical.” I minded Fuller Goggins’ book less because there’s a touch more class and disability politics and it shows in how he writes a future where there’s corporate creep and corruption, as well as a more desperate underground militancy fueled by a brown disabled lead character who just doesn’t trust the “everything’s fine” of the good future.

There's stuff I liked ok or that piqued my interest in E4E- the communization of space elevators, advances in rec drug use and trans bodyhacking, that it’s a future with sex work controlled by sex workers, the highlighted inclusion of characters who are gang involved and in the party scene and those places as central places where organizing happens. It also does a serious consideration of ok, if fasc and climate really beat us into the ground over the next decades, how the hell would communards actually pull off a win?

But there’s so much that made me wince. O’Brien’s characters remind me of how Leslie Feinberg wrote BIPOC characters in Drag King Dreams- they all feel like a collection of “positive stereotypes” and like they were written by an earnest committee. A friend said he couldn’t finish the book because it reminded him of something between Christian Rock and an ecological puppet show. My main crit is, while there's some discussion of the mechanics of how revolution takes hold in both books- mass meetings, people invading food warehouses and taking over the means of production and distribution, armed standoffs between Indigenous people and fascists- there's also an overall vibe of "Once things get bad enough, the people will just unite to enact  fully automated luxury queer space communism! It just happens"

Organizing is a lot more of a pain in the ass than that. It’s great and all, and it’s also butchered by personality differences and beef and mental health crises no one know how to address and the cash grabs of people who can get that offer. Organizing will fill your heart but also break it and burn you the fuck out and betray you. Also, many people are turned off by organizing culture, or just don’t have time or interest to get involved, or are never seen as someone important to “recruit” in the first place.. In E4E no one gets burnt out, no one is recruited by the feds, there's no sell out by the whiter, lighter and wealthier and no one steals the cashbox during an altered state or out of a desire to buy cute shit. Shit just works out.

White  and class priv’d and abled people expect ease, and that things will work out. That’s what whiteness and class priv and ability/ normativity has to offer- an idea of effort and being/ doing good being rewarded with outcome. Many white, abled and class privileged radicals bring a naive vibe of expectation of success to both their organizing and their future tripping. They have little Black and brown/ immigrant/ disabled/ poor and working class life experience with the "yeah and big surprise, some shit went sideways," factor. Let alone of "permadoom, bad thing after bad thing after bad thing happened and then more bad shit" lumpen reality.

When they try to write “radical futures,” the futures they write are written from that place of startle that things haven’t quite worked out but optimism that they of course will. When people then pick them up as road maps and instruction guides for how to get to utopia without that bias being named, it’s dangerous. We deserve roadmaps, sure. But we deserve honesty within them.

So- and this is connected- despite a twenty year war and multiple pandemics, somehow in E4E  almost no one is disabled. There’s one cognitively disabled character talked about by someone else in IMO a patronizing way, she doesn’t get to speak for herself. A lot of people have CPTSD or other neurodivergence but don’t seem to have a disabled or ND consciousness or community- they go to therapy and do psychedelics to deal, but that’s it. No cultural identification and also no “disability politics is a thing” identification.

And this killed me. You're telling me  that there's a HUGE WAR and no one is an amputee or a para or a chair user or had five strokes and a TBI when they drove over a land mine? No one - no MASSES of people- is living with long COVID from mutation number 2674? War alone is one of the biggest places disability happens! Anyone who’s been in the military, had family in the military or lived through war (or is from a community that has, even if we are sheltered from it living as immigrants/ kids of immigrants) knows this. That this didn’t show up makes me wonder if the authors haven’t had these experiences. I’ve run into a lot of class privileged radicals who sniff or act appalled upon learning that anyone joined the military, that it must mean that they don’t get politics. without understanding the basics of, most folks who join do so because they’re broke and in a bad situation and don’t have another option.

Beyond just lack of there being disabled people in a future fucking sucking -it's fucking sad disappointment number five million  that it's yet another "radical future" where there is no disability- it’s also a missed opportunity that there is no disabled leadership or disabled radical vision in the future. Like how different would E4E be if the rev was guided by the experience of disabled anti fascist vets? If that cognitively disabled char was a leader? If the future was shaped by disabled people who understood how to prevent or mitigate pandemic outbreaks and that they were real, and mitigation was not separate from “the struggle”? .

The erasure of disabled reality in the book also points to a crucial failure in its vision of the future, a lack of crip realism/ pessimism.

Because disability is the anti-ease. Even white crips know shit doesn't just work out. All of us sit in the stark of, of course they want to eliminate us before birth, make a drug to change our genes so there are no more of us- at least, for the parents that can afford it- and after birth they work damn hard to kill you, too. BIPOC crips know the anti-ease a thousandfold more. We're not ever surprised by betrayal or the deliberate failure of systems or that doctors and systems both lie and actively work for us to die.

In Fuller Goggins's book, the brown main character’s disability is part of what pushes her to take a more militant approach to securing the revolution. This is a a radicalization from disability that O'Brien and Abdelhadi's book doesn't get to. A possibility, that comes from crip pessamism, that was missed.

***

BIPOC and/or disabled and/or written by poor/ working class writers science fiction that's "leftist" at all often gets lumped into the same bunker as books like the ones above, but they really aren’t the same thing, at all.

What too many people miss is  how the pessimistic realism of how those writers write is fundamentally different. It drives me nuts the way people have talked up Butler's Parables books as “utopic” ( like, how?) - or "showing us the way" through the current crises on infinite earths. When they are actually deeply anti-utopic, and honest about the betrayal and heartbreak within the attempts to make something good within crisis. Octavia Butler was very clear in Parable of the Talents that the utopian dream of running away to the woods to hide/ survive/ love/ make an ideal alternative community (ie Acorn) gets invaded, mass raped, enslaved, smashed and scattered if it can't make alliances with local white communities, and maybe even then.

It always makes me blink when people refer to Mia Mingus' short story "Hollow" as a story of disability justice utopianism. It's not. It’s a story of a mass genocide of disabled people who are slaughtered after an attempted revolution gets backlashed two weeks later, our bodies left in the fields for the crows to pick. The few disabled survivors of this massacre broker a deal - the lead Perfect balked at murdering his own disabled child in the end - where we get sent to another planet so the Perfects don’t have to look at us. But then the day comes when they decide the cripples can’t even have our own planet and come to wipe us out again, and we have to flee while arguing over the different strategies some of us wanted for the rev we hoped for (as well as our drama from dating each other) and still haven’t got.

That's realistic. Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves is also realistic, unrelentingly clear in how brutal whiteness is as it tracks down and harvests/murders the biomatter of Indigenous people to allow white people who can afford it to dream again when everyone's lost the ability and is going mad.  M Téllez’ chapter of All That’s Left that appears in their September ‘22 podcast episode Double Layer Light Compression has a moment I love where some young person is going off about how the rec center run by elder women with gorgeous nails and everyday people from the neighborhood with good fashion that’s offering people fleeing flooding decon and food and herbs and hospitality “isn’t enough” they need to be fighting the system, man! and this elder rolls her eyes and says “this? this that we’re doing right now, you and me and all of us, being rescued by our neighbors from peril? being washed and fed and put up for the night? for nothing? that is something. that’s what we’re doing.”

It is something. It matters. The band of eight Indigenous people running from the new residential school bone marrow harvesters in Marrow Thieves isn't utopic, but is tender and matters.   The larger Indigenous community of survivors they find in the North who are scrabbling together the little they have and who have romantic jealousy and beef even while an army of white people are trying to kill everyone is realistic and tender: I believe that community. The all crip community of Southing in Hollow is magnificent/ realistic before and while it’s forced to flee.

Every single community in these works matters for as long as it lasts, and it still matters after it is scattered or falls apart.  It’s the crip kitchen table that keeps getting evicted, but comes back in a new way. A valuable possible world but not an easeful one. And, arguably, a more accurate road map to not a utopic radical future, but a deep broken one where some of us survived.

A cripple broke road map, over busted crip roads.

***

Something I've been thinking about lately was how, when I was young and sick and crazy and a writer, how long I would work writing in the basement to get my pieces right. Because I wanted them to last forever,  and because I had limited shots and spoons. And, of course, because I was working at a sick slow crazy poor pace. How as time went by and I got a little more spoons and a little more opportunity, there's been pushing on the deep dark pool where the words live in the bottom of the ocean, pressure to come out faster, be more microwave. How as disabled writing gets more room to breathe overground, there's pressure on us- to make more sense, be more legible - to the Others. To write a normal, straightforward story. To serve their agendas for the minute they’re halfway interested in us as the flavor of the week.

As disabled/ crazy/sick/ ND/ Deaf writers, often the only assignment we are given by the Others is to write a 101.  To provide a quick simple fix  to the lack of access in a way abled people can understand (even though they probably never do it.) Five fast facts/ ways you can be more accessible. A listicle.

We are asked to be didactic and simple . To be of use, not art.  Not something that comes from a lungfish deep, in words they might not understand, or you might feel hit bone in the way you have always been wanting. 

As Stacey Park Milbern wrote, “Sometimes I feel impatient about how much ableism has forced us to emphasize accessibility to get people to pay even a modicum of attention to it….Access… is only the first step in movement building. People talk about access as the outcome, not the process, as if having spaces be accessible is enough to get us all free.”

TL DR: when we get asked to do anything at all we get to do the access workshop. What everyone doing that misses is the bigger disabled vision and strange new worlds we could make and create. Access is the door and the ramp, not the destination.

I’m not a science fiction writer, but I’m a divinator and poet who writes nonfiction essays and political work about what disabled futures could breathe like, and how the futures we inhabit right now do. That writing comes equally out of the real and possibility I have found in all us sick panicking drooling limping suicidal weirdos, and being honest about when shit is really stark.

It's stark right now. A lot of people are having their early 50s strokes and heart attacks. A lot of people keep dying in prison. A lot of people are sick with long COVID after  infection number 48 that could've been prevented by public health, and can't remember shit or have more than two hours of energy a day. As Imani Barbarin tweeted after the SOTU yesterday, “I can literally name 5 thing killing disabled people right now that are basically unmitigated: 1. COVID 2. Private equity in healthcare and disability services. 3. Caregiving shortage 4. Policing 5. Institutionalization.”

Our lives are worthy, and shit is still bleak. We might want dream need a happy ending where it all works out, and that’s fair. But the future we might live to create is going to be a lot more of a mixed bag, and we serve no one by making the roads to it prettier and easier than they are.

The best of all we've ever had as disabled people and writers has been to not lie. To be as gross and hilarious and surreal and sad as fuck devastated as we are.  

If shit is real, we might as well keep both our souls and our power, by staying real when we write it all down. That’s what might actually maybe help us get free.