When we talk about understanding disability, one important concept is intersectionality, which describes how different forms of inequity pertaining to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and other individual characteristics intersect with one another and overlap to create a compounded and unique experience of oppression.1
Building on this, disability intersectionality refers to disabled people’s lived experiences that are “impacted by their other intersecting identities.”2 Additionally, it describes how different systems like ableism, racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia operate together and reinforce one another.
An important takeaway is that our disability experiences are diverse because of this intersectionality—everybody’s story is unique. As I’ve mentioned before, the disability community is not a monolith.
I am a disabled Asian woman. As an Asian woman, I feel fetishized, but as a disabled person, I feel infantilized and desexualized. During the height of the pandemic, I feared for my safety and being harassed during the rise of anti-Asian hate and misinformation about the origins of COVID; at the same time, as a disabled person, I feared getting COVID, and if my symptoms were severe enough that I needed to be hospitalized, I feared doctors making judgments about my quality of life (since many assume that simply because we are disabled, we must have a poor quality of life) and not giving me access to proper care.
Disability intersectionality doesn’t just affect my current reality. It also influences my story, which is both a disability story and a story of what it means to be the daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant and a refugee from the Vietnam War.
When I was young, I was taught that our family had a collective identity and reputation. Disability is taboo in many Asian cultures, based on an antiquated cultural belief that it is some form of punishment, and disabled people are seen as outcasts.3
After my dad died, my mom told people he was away on a trip. So I started telling people that he was away on a trip, too, like a form of collective gaslighting. We believed it was a way to avoid bringing shame to our family. For my mom, being widowed meant that bad luck somewhere in her lineage had caused my dad to die. Additionally, I now had a physical disability, which added another level of shame to my Asian narrative. Because of my self-consciousness around my arm that now looked different, I wore long sleeves all the time, even in the humidity and heat of Washington, DC, summers, so I could hide my disability and not talk about it. I had internalized the shame of the physical and mental trauma of the car accident because of the ableist cultural beliefs I grew up with.
My mental health was never discussed. My parents, like many other Asian immigrants of their generation, had overcome many hardships to get to the United States, so I thought I should not complain and should be grateful for the sacrifices they had made. It was only in 2019, two years after I had begun therapy for the first time, that I was diagnosed with PTSD related to the car accident—a non-apparent disability. That was a twenty-two-year treatment gap. For over a decade after the accident, I felt that I couldn’t talk to anyone about my dad or my disability, and I wonder if that exacerbated what ultimately became my PTSD diagnosis.
Research shows that Asian Americans are three times less likely to seek mental health support than white people, and only 8.6 percent of Asian Americans seek out mental health services compared to 18 percent of the national population.4 Many Asian cultures simply do not view mental illness as a disability that requires treatment. Psychiatrist Geoffrey Liu explains,
For some Asian Americans, there’s a real sense that your value as a person depends on your ability to take care of your family and community.… Mental illness is seen… incorrectly… as taking away a person’s ability to care for others. For that reason, it’s seen as taking away someone’s identity or purpose. It’s the ultimate form of shame.5
The result is that many people do not get the support we need.
Another compounding factor is that Asian Americans deal with the model minority myth: the harmful belief that Asian immigrants or children of immigrants must assimilate to whiteness and perform better than other marginalized groups in order to belong and succeed in America. For disabled Asian Americans, the pressure to prove that we are hardworking makes it even more difficult to navigate society with our disability. As disability activist Mia Ives-Rublee remarks in a Huffington Post article, “We need to make sure our community survives and thrives wherever we’re at, and part of that means putting our heads down and not complaining and working hard and being that American success story.”6 Because of this, Ives-Rublee finds herself in a paradox at the intersection of her Asian American and disabled identities: “Disabled Asian Americans will never fit the model minority myth. And I’m proud to say I subvert it.”7 While we know that the model minority is a myth, I thought this statement was fascinating because it put into perspective how much I had tried to achieve it in my own life. It always felt as if what I did was not enough because I wondered if, in my mom’s eyes, being disabled made me not fit that “model.”
Here’s a look at communities at other intersections. A 2020 study found that one-third of LGBTQIA+ adults, 36 percent, self-reported having a disability. They were also more likely than non-LGBTQIA+ people (at 24 percent) to be disabled.8 Disabled LGBTQIA+ people face compounded stigmatization as well. Unique challenges include both finding LGBTQIA+-inclusive and accessible community and health care services and facing bullying and harassment at school more than their non-LGBTQIA+ peers with disabilities and their LGBTQIA+ peers without disabilities.9
Yema Yang is a queer, mentally ill, autistic, and disabled Chinese-Burmese Buddhist woman and the child of immigrants. She is a critical mental health and disability justice scholar-activist-poet dedicated to collective refuge, love, and liberation. She shared with me her experience of seeking disability accommodations while at university and the struggle she faced both with older white therapists and a system that was already unfamiliar and alienating. Having already been denied a psychiatric verification—essentially, a letter stating that she had a diagnosable mental illness and that required disability accommodations in her academic setting—Yang began to question the veracity of her own experience:
Here my therapist was, suggesting I was an imposter in disability. As a Chinese-Burmese woman who rarely saw herself reflected in mental health or disability spaces, I already was fighting to feel like I was legitimately mentally ill and disabled. I had to constantly remind and convince myself that my experiences and feelings were real and valid—that it wasn’t all in my head.10
She was able to get her accommodations, but only a semester after she had requested them. Yang reflected on her frustrations:
One of the most bitter parts of this whole experience came from realizing just how difficult this whole [expletive] process was. I am a queer, racialized, disabled woman and child of immigrants—in many respects, this whole American process of acquiring academic accommodations was already new and difficult to me. Yet, I am also privileged in other ways—upper middle class, English as my main language, in higher education. Additionally, because of my organizing work, I was familiar with advocating for myself and others, especially in mental health contexts. But even with those privileges and backgrounds that allowed me to get into a therapist’s office, be understood when I articulated my experiences, and identify my need for support, I was still rejected and doubted for disability accommodations.
I have a theory that this old white man therapist saw some Asian girl doing “well”—this face of the “model minority”—and didn’t require accommodations as a result. Would he have given psychiatric verification if the student was white? I may never know for sure, but I do know how his decision impacted me.11
Yang’s experience is an example of the clash between her intersectional identity and institutional ableism: a clinician and an academic institution created barriers to her access, perhaps specifically because of the way she presented.
Within the Hispanic/Latinx community, adults with mental illness receive treatment at a lower rate than the US average, with an estimated more than half of Hispanic young adults ages eighteen to twenty-five living with severe mental illnesses because they do not receive treatment.12
This is what Dior Vargas, a Latina mental health activist and the creator of the People of Color and Mental Illness Photo Project, experienced:
As a child, I never saw any non-white, positive representations of mental health. It made mental illness seem like a curse or punishment or a lack of strength. I felt extremely alone because no one in my Latine family talked about mental health, nor did we think that mental health was important given what immigrant family members had gone through in the past. A lot of the thinking behind well-being was prayer and believing in God.13
Meanwhile, one in four Black people has a disability, according to the CDC.14 Keri Gray, founder of National Alliance of Melanin Disabled (NAMED) Advocates, told me about her experience as a child cancer survivor:
Now I was not only this… Black girl growing up in the South, but now I’m this Black disabled girl. And I honestly didn’t know how to navigate that identity. On one hand, I had a lot of representation of what it meant to be Black; of what it meant to be a woman. But I did not have much, if any, representation of what it meant to be openly disabled. And to be okay with that.15
The struggle to navigate an additional minoritized identity heaped on top of others can absolutely send anyone into a crisis. But as she navigated the experience, Gray landed in college and found herself surrounded by disabled peers, many of whom were achieving incredible things. It was because of the understanding that she came to, recognizing that “there’s a whole community here, where I can learn and grow,” that Gray became an advocate herself and got involved in education around disability and racial justice.16
While Gray was able to transform herself into an advocate, not every Black and disabled person will have or want the same experience. More than half of disabled Black people in the United States will be arrested by the time they reach their late twenties, a “horrifyingly high” number that is double the 28 percent rate of white people with disabilities, according to Erin McCauley, the author of the study.17 In 2019, Elijah McClain, an autistic twenty-three-year-old Black man who was deemed “suspicious” by three police officers while he was walking home from a convenience store listening to music, was restrained and placed in a chokehold and later died.18 Disability is often falsely viewed as a threat of resistance to and non-compliance with law enforcement, especially when police officers do not know how to deal with disabilities like epilepsy, deafness, or autism, leading to unnecessary escalation or use of excessive force.19 When we consider this on top of America’s long history of overpolicing Black people, it is no wonder that disabled Black people are especially at risk. The combination of disability and Blackness leads to “a double bind,” according to Talila Lewis, where the US government uses “constructed ideas about disability, delinquency, and dependency, intertwined with constructed ideas about race, to classify and criminalize people.”20
And just because a Black and disabled person isn’t being arrested doesn’t mean they’re not being othered. Eric Harris, a thirty-six-year-old Black disabled advocate and the director of public policy at Disability Rights California, was born with his disability and is a wheelchair user. He told me a story that still pains him:
After wheelchair basketball practice, I had to stop for gas. I stopped at a local gas station and asked the gentleman behind the counter if I could use the restroom. I figured that there might be a key to access the restroom like at most gas stations. This person told me that the restroom was not working and that nobody could use it right now. I went on to fill up my gas tank, but while I was waiting, I saw someone go into the restroom to use it. I then went inside to confront and question the person behind the counter, and they acted like they did not understand me and still would not let me use the restroom. I did not know if this was because of my disability, my race, or a combination of both.21
In 2005, Sins Invalid, a collective of disabled queer women of color, developed the concept of disability justice. Evolving from the disability rights movement that began in the 1960s, disability justice is a more comprehensive and sustainable approach to the fight for the rights of disabled people that is rooted in intersectionality.
Sins Invalid recognized that earlier disability rights movements had leadership that was “historically centered [around] white experiences” and were “single-issue identity based,” centering people who could already “achieve rights and access through a legal or rights-based framework.” These movements therefore “invisibilized the lives of peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression,” such as disabled people of color, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, people experiencing homelessness, incarcerated people, and people whose ancestral lands were stolen by colonizers.22
In response, disability justice lays out a ten-principle framework, focusing on tenets such as intersectionality, anti-capitalism, and cross-movement organizing while recognizing how systems of oppression interact with and reinforce each other.
Here is an example of this in action: disability justice is climate justice because the climate crisis impacts vulnerable communities like the disabled community the most. I learned more about this after attending former US vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore’s thirty-sixth Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in 2017. Rising temperatures and extreme heat are dangerous to those with multiple sclerosis who experience greater pain on hot days and to people with certain spinal cord injuries who cannot sweat to cool down. Air pollution exacerbates health conditions like asthma, and power outages threaten disabled people who rely on electricity-powered medical equipment like ventilators. Evacuation from natural disasters impacts those who have mobility issues, and accessibility devices are often lost in fires and floods. Droughts that cause food shortages and water insecurity also impact disabled people due to the disproportionate number who are already caught in an endless poverty cycle.23 Additionally, the climate crisis is caused by capitalism, an “extraction-based economy” of “endless consumption” that is not only destroying the earth we live in but also operates on the basis of the lie that “disability is individually tragic and collectively burdensome.” In a dying world fueled by capitalism, disabled people are often the last people to be saved, if we are saved at all.24
Disability intersects with many other social issues. Disability justice is not just climate justice but also reproductive justice, racial justice, economic justice, and police reform, to name but a few.
Intersectionality must inform how we understand disability. If we want to live in a world where we recognize that no bodies are superior to other bodies and that all lives are valuable and equally deserving, we must fight for justice and the liberation of disabled people, all other oppressed people, and the earth we live on.