Episode 28: Mourning, Mobilization, and Mutual Aid

This is Aimi Hamraie, and I am speaking to you on Monday, June 1, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a content warning, I will say a few words about anti-Black violence, white supremacy, and medical ableism.

In the last few months, there has been an immense amount of collective grief in our communities. We grieve the lives lost to a global pandemic, particularly the ways that the failures of infrastructure and prevailing medical ableist attitudes have devalued Black and Indigenous people, elders, and disabled people, further exacerbating existing healthcare inequalities and hierarchies of valued and devaluated life. We mourn the loss of Black life. We mourn the lives lost in the Navajo nation. We recognize the role of colonial and racist geographies in making these deaths possible. We mourn the nameless losses. We mourn the disproportionate losses. We mourn the collective sense of responsibility destroyed by those who would rather get a haircut than care for other human beings. We mourn a world in which economy bears greater significance than life. May our grief mobilize us.

We grieve the loss of Stacey Park Milbern, fierce Disability Justice and mutual aid organizer, agitator against medical ableism and white supremacy, rigorous analyst of our material and social worlds. Stacey’s work has touched every part of our commitments and solidarities in the Critical Design Lab. And, as you will find in the upcoming episodes with members of her mutual aid collective, the Disability Justice Culture Club, her sense of strategy and political commitments have saved lives by drawing crucial connections between ableism, white supremacy, climate politics, urban housing, and technology. May our grief mobilize us.

We grieve the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, Yassin Mohammad, and other Black people killed by police. We say their names and decry racist and ableist narratives that attempt to justify their deaths. May our grief mobilize us.

Ibram X. Kendi writes, “Will we fight for black people to live? History is calling the future from the streets of protest. What choice will we make? What world will we create? What will we be? There are only two choices: racist or anti-racist.”

We understand these provocations as social decisions, but even more significantly as design decisions, calls for making choices to create and work differently.

So in these next few Solidarity Chats on the Contra* podcast we will hear from disabled people who are engaged in many forms of mutual aid and solidarity work and we will learn from them about how to use mutual aid to build relationships and communities, to navigate institutions strategically, and to do whatever is within our power to care for others. Sending everyone so much warmth and solidarity at this extremely difficult time.