Race and Disability

Race and disability are deeply intertwined — but this is not only a story about harm. Disabled people of color have shaped culture, led movements, and built the very framework of disability justice that this wiki draws on. They are not defined by what systems have done to them. This page centers their leadership and brilliance first, and is honest about the structures they organize against.

A note on the numbers below: disability statistics shift depending on the survey used, and some figures (especially around policing) are estimates, not complete counts. We name sources and flag uncertainty rather than overstate precision.

Disabled people of color built this movement

Disability justice was created by disabled queer and trans people of color — among them Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who co-founded or shaped the performance project Sins Invalid and named its 10 Principles of Disability Justice. The framework’s core ideas — interdependence, collective access, “most-impacted lead,” wholeness — come directly from their lived brilliance.

This leadership is not new:

Brad Lomax, a Black disabled activist and member of the Black Panther Party, was central to the 1977 Section 504 Sit-in — the longest occupation of a federal building in U.S. history. The Panthers delivered hot meals every day for nearly a month, keeping the protest alive. Disability rights in the U.S. were won, in part, through Black radical solidarity.
Johnnie Lacy led independent-living organizing as a Black disabled woman, naming the racism inside the disability movement itself.
Leroy Moore founded Krip-Hop Nation, a global network of disabled hip-hop and music artists, much of it led by disabled people of color.
Harriet Tubman — who lived with a seizure disability from a head injury — is claimed as an ancestor by Black disabled organizers today.

The point: at every stage, disabled people of color have been architects, not just subjects.

Culture, community, and joy

Beyond struggle, there is richness — language, art, humor, ritual, mutual aid, and chosen family built at this intersection. Disabled people of color create access intimacy (the ease of being with someone who gets your access needs), crip-of-color art and poetry, neurodivergent and Mad culture, Deaf communities of color with their own histories, and care networks that model a different way of being human together. Disability justice insists that disabled people of color are whole — full of complexity, desire, creativity, and futures — not problems to be solved.

The structural realities (told honestly)

None of that erases what people organize against. Structural racism produces disability and deepens its harms:

Uneven distribution. American Indian/Alaska Native adults report the highest disability rate of any racial group (~39%; CDC Disability and Health Data System, 2022 BRFSS data released 2024), and Black and Indigenous disabled people have the highest poverty rates of any group (National Disability Institute, 2019) — driven by environmental racism (e.g., lead exposure, Flint), medical neglect, and disinvestment, not by anything inherent.
Medical racism. Providers who hold false beliefs about “biological race differences” undertreat Black patients’ pain (PNAS, 2016); Black children are diagnosed with autism later and less often (research summaries, 2022).
Maternal health. Black women die of pregnancy-related causes at roughly 2.6–3.5× the rate of white women (KFF; CDC).
State violence. Researchers estimate up to half of people killed by police are disabled (Ruderman Foundation, 2016) — an estimate from media-reported cases, not a complete dataset — and organizers like the Harriet Tubman Collective stress that disabled people of color bear its sharpest edge, while disability is erased from the story.
School-to-prison pipeline. Black students are ~40% more likely to be labeled as having a disability (Child Trends) — a story less about headcount than about mis-identification, segregation, and discipline. (There’s genuine scholarly debate about over- vs. under-identification.)

These are conditions to change — and disabled people of color have always been the ones leading that change.

A history of harm — and resistance

Eugenics and forced sterilization targeted communities of color (Buck v. Bell, 1927; a 1976 GAO investigation documented thousands of Indian Health Service sterilizations with widespread consent violations, and historians — notably Jane Lawrence, 2000 — estimate that roughly a quarter, by some accounts up to half, of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized in this period; coerced sterilizations of Black and Latina women). Institutions like Willowbrook warehoused disabled children. But each of these systems was met with organizing, lawsuits, exposés, and survivors who refused to disappear — and that resistance is as much the history as the harm.

Organizations and resources

National Black Disability Coalition — disability equity in the Black community, by and for Black disabled people.
Sins Invalid — disability-justice performance project centering disabled people of color and queer/trans disabled people.
HEARD — abolitionist organization supporting Deaf and disabled incarcerated people.
The Autistic People of Color Fund — mutual-aid microgrants for autistic people of color.
Disability & Philanthropy Forum — resourcing disability justice.
Harriet Tubman Collective — read “Disability Solidarity: Completing the Vision for Black Lives”.

Contribute to This Page

This page especially needs the expertise and stories of disabled people of color — including the joy and culture, not only the struggle. If you can strengthen or correct it, see How to Contribute.