Getting Down to Belonging
Thoughts from Qudsiya on finding and shaping inclusion.
Dear DTTS community,
Hello, and a warm welcome to our new readers—thanks for being here! In the blink of an eye, we’ve wrapped up season 8 of Down to the Struts, with seven new conversations that push us to imagine a more just, inclusive, and accessible world. Now is a great time to catch up on your listening, as we dive into production for season 9, coming later this year.
It's been a spring full of new milestones. After two years of work and partnership with the brilliant Nermeen Arastu of the CUNY Law School Immigrant and Noncitizen Rights Clinic, we finally published our article, Standing on Our Own Two Feet: Disability Justice As a Frame for Reimagining Our Ableist Immigration System.
This idea sprouted from the seeds of Alice Wong’s generosity when she asked me to author a blog post for the Disability Visibility Project about how the American immigration system has been used to exclude and categorize people on the basis of disability. While writing it, I was inspired by my interview with the phenomenal Katherine Pérez and Roxana Moussavian in season 2 of the podcast. Katherine and Roxana schooled us all on the importance of centering disability to understand the exclusionary nature of the U.S. immigration system; its origins in eugenics, racism, and ableism; and how the system itself creates disability.
My greatest lesson from doing this work is that, at the end of the day, the movements for immigrant justice and disability justice share a crucial common thread: they are both rooted in the concept of belonging. Since the late 19th century, our immigration laws have informed, and been informed by, a narrative about who belongs in America and who doesn’t. Who is “normal” and who is “deviant.” Who is “worthy” and who is “unworthy.” Who is “productive,” and who is a drain on public resources.
In much the same way, so many aspects of American life have been driven by narratives that cast certain bodies as worthy of inclusion in physical spaces, in the digital world, in the workplace, in the media, in the houses of government, and more. Perceptions of race and disability have directly informed decisions about who spends their life in an institution, and who gets to live in their community. Who will be brutalized by police, and who will survive those encounters. Who will receive healthcare and who will not. Who will be employed, and who will not. Who will end up in jail, and who will experience less punitive accountability for their wrongdoing.
After spending two years unpacking how our immigration and disability laws and the social movements surrounding them have discriminated against and excluded so many people (even in spite of our slow progress towards rights and protections designed to prevent that exclusion), it’s so easy to be cynical. It’s easy to slip into the belief that these challenges are intractable, burrow deep inside, and decide that there’s no way out. Lord knows, I’m often overtaken by those feelings.
The movements for immigrant justice and disability justice share a crucial common thread: they are both rooted in the concept of belonging.
But I have hope. I have hope because films like Unseen and the voices of people like Conchita Hernandez Legorreta remind me every day that we all deserve to belong. That despite the political views that divide us, the countries of our birth, our disabilities, and our life experiences, we are joined in our shared humanity. This is a truth that I find us forgetting, and I fear that this forgetting could be our ultimate downfall. But we cannot forget it.
We have to remember that we are all children, parents, siblings, partners, and friends. We all have people we love, and dreams that we strive for. And dreams are not a zero-sum game. That’s the beauty of dreams. They can be expansive and hold space for the dreams of others.
Watch the trailer for Unseen below:
Finding belonging
Speaking of dreams, May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and we are approaching Immigrant Heritage Month in June. My dear friend and past podcast guest, Bhavna Mehta, talked about her journey from India to America as akin to her journey into and through life in her disabled body.
In her experiences of immigrating to the U.S. from India at age 22, and of contracting polio as a child and transitioning from crutches to a wheelchair, Bhavna describes a quest for belonging: Learning a new language, culture, and exploring what it means to be a citizen in a new country. Both transitions, immigration and disability, require interdependence and acceptance.
Disabled people and immigrants rely on each other to ground themselves in new realities. Acceptance (or at least harmony) with the dominant culture is essential to our collective survival. We all owe it to each other to strive for a world that is inclusive, a world that is rooted in the strength of our interdependence.
May you all feel a sense of belonging, and hold space for others to belong in this world we all share as humans across the vast spectrum of our unique body-minds.
In solidarity,
Qudsiya
While I agree it is true that both immigration and disability activism are rooted in the concept of belonging, I believe that this is also true of all social justice movements. All forms of oppression are the product of privileged gatekeeping - of implicit cultural agreements, enforced by those with the power and influence to do so, that decide who gets to be included and who will be pushed into the margins, exiled, extinguished, or used up and thrown away. Equity and inclusion are, more than anything else, about the right to be included, respected, and valued without having to prove worthiness or pay a price for it. I think the links between immigration and disability and belonging are more obvious because of the particular ways that immigrants and disabled people are oppressed, and yet the question of belonging is universal in all liberatory movements.