Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

You wanna know how you'll know if you're doing disability justice? ... We won't be grateful to be included; we will want to set the agenda.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (born April 21, 1975 in Worcester, Massachusetts) is a Toronto and Oakland-based poet, writer, educator and social activist.

Quotes

• I believe that Greta’s ability to tweet #Aspiepower and frame her autism as a superpower is a product of brave-ass autistic women and nonbinary people who have been speaking about our lives and demanding an end to the ableist violence of a world that wants us ashamed and self-hating rather than proudly ourselves and able to access housing, meaningful work (or the right not to work), safety from police murder and medical violence ­­– and love, respect and community, as we are.
  • Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha "As an Autistic Femme, I Love Greta Thunberg’s “Resting Autism Face”" op-ed (September 25, 2019)

"Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to “Move On” From COVID" op-ed (2022)

• I’ve started calling the time we live in “The Great Forgetting.” Some call it “The Great Gaslighting.” Both are true. By these terms, I mean the immense, on-purpose effort by the state to throw down the memory hole the fact that the last two years of the pandemic happened

• Many disabled people noted that the pandemic made for a “cripping of the world” — where for perhaps the first time in a while, the world, gripped by a global pandemic, dwelled in disabled reality. Remember how, for a minute, so many forms of access disabled people had long fought for were here because abled people needed them? Remember virtual work, pandemic pay for frontline workers, online school, online events with captioning and ASL, teaching people how to freaking wash their hands and stay home when they were sick, the ability to reschedule an appointment or a plane ticket when you got sick and not get yelled at or charged a fee, and immunocompromised shopping hours? These waves of access, mixed with mass resistance in the streets and at home against anti-Black, white supremacist violence, made for a powerful-ass two years. If that kind of mass access, resistance and mutual aid could happen, revolutionary change could happen too. The state wants us to forget that.

• A lot of people have had a brush with what it’s like to live a disabled life these last two years, and a lot of them want to forget it as quickly as possible. They’d rather expose themselves to all kinds of harm than continue to be disabled like us — mask, discuss risk, stay home, pass public policies for the safety of all.

• People like to say survivors of sexual violence make up false memories. But it’s far more common for people who perpetuate abuse to make up a false reality where they did nothing wrong.

• I want to finish what we started. I want us not to abandon the revolutionary dream some of us touched and made in 2020-2021 — of a world where community care, mutual aid for collective survival and a refusal to obey are not just possible, they make up the bones of the new world.

Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)

• You wanna know how you'll know if you're doing disability justice? You'll know you're doing it because people will show up late, someone will vomit, someone will have a panic attack, and nothing will happen on time because the ramp is broken on the supposedly "accessible" building. You won't meet your benchmarks on time, or ever. We won't be grateful to be included; we will want to set the agenda. And what our leadership looks like may include long sick or crazy leaves, being nuts in public, or needing to empty an ostomy bag and being on Vicodin at work. It is slow. It's people even the most social justice-minded abled folks stare at or get freaked out by. It looks like what many mainstream abled people have been taught to think of as failure.
  • p. 124

• Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.
  • p. 127