How My Disability Justice Practice Had to Align with Fat Liberation for Representation
In that role, I often had Black, Indigenous, and racialized students doubt if they were eligible for registration with Accessibility Services, despite regularly seeing medical professionals for health issues that clearly limited their ability to pursue their learning. Over time, with each discussion with these students whose skin tones resembled mine, I came to realize that they too had implicitly come to perceive disabilities as "a white thing," likely because it was rare to see disabled representation of Black, Indigenous, and racialized folx, which posed a barrier to our self-identification as disabled. Personally, despite first navigating the debilitating impacts of Migraine Disorder since my teens, I did not begin to call myself disabled until multiple decades later.
