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.

By the time a global pandemic resulted in employers shifting to remote work in an attempt to flatten the curve in March 2020, I had begun to consider how I might be considered disabled, but had not yet come to claim that identity.

When unable to see my beloved chiropractor weekly for months, I struggled more with back pain, sleep issues, and migraines, which limited functioning, and made it abundantly clear that I had every reason to call myself disabled."

Given my realizations about how limited representation of Black, Indigenous, or racialized disabled folx may hamper communities of colour from identifying as disabled, I was happy to write about my experiences.

Later that year, I was writing my first magazine feature that came with a budget for my disabled Canadian sources across multiple provinces to be photographed, but could not find a single Black, Indigenous, or racialized source willing to speak with me if being referenced by their real names, so I had both a Black source and a brown source who required aliases, therefore neither was comfortable with having their photos taken out of fear of it limiting their employment prospects.

Since my personal essay introduced the vignettes, my editor suggested that I could be photographed if I was open to that. I was my fattest I had been until then, and my most gray, with no salon visits while struggling to survive institutional violence at the hands of Accessibility Services at Canada's largest university, but I knew that despite my discomfort, this was an opportunity to embody Maya Angelou's practice of doing better when we know better, as my photograph could tangibly show that brown folx are also disabled, which would diversify disabled representation, and hopefully help more communities of colour to unpack their internalized ableism towards the final Disability Justice principle of Collective Liberation."

I wish I could tell you that I now love that photo much more than before, but I would be lying, so instead I will carry on the necessary work of learning, unlearning, and relearning for my Fat Liberation, which must accompany our Collective Liberation."