Seeking Accommodations in an Ableist World
All my experiences are teaching me that in order to navigate an ableist world, we need to understand it as a white supremacist one.
I fell for it again. As a neurodivergent Brown femme, I was duped into the false sense of security that comes with working alongside people who say that they are “committed to social justice”.
Navigating the world with all the fragmented identities that I hold, I have learned and re-learned how I am so desperate to trust that I can find safety in the people around me, only to find that I am unsafe by the very people who I’m told will always love me. Especially since I learned at a very young age, through inheriting stories from my mother, about all the ways she was called disabled slurs because of her skin color by her own siblings. I know the trends– the meaning of spaces in between the words that are left unsaid. And yet, I still find myself confused when white leadership runs a nonprofit organisation based on white supremacist values and calls it a ‘marginalised community-led human rights organisation’.
It all started with a role that I was so excited to obtain during the pandemic. The new role meant that I could work from home on organizational change in a non-profit that said it was community-led, and make sure that the people whom I line-managed were heard and supported while they…
