The movements were never separate — I had just been taught them separately
Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.
Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality is a lens for seeing where power collides, locks, and intersects — race, ethnicity, gender identity, class, language, religion, ability, sexuality, mental health, age, education, body size, and more. Layers of discrimination through however we identify ourselves, and however others identify us. Multiple points of discrimination that do not operate independently.
Brad Lomax, a Black Panther Party member and disability advocate, helped make the 1977 504 sit-in possible and connected the Black civil rights and disability rights movements in practice, not in theory. Fannie Lou Hamer advocated for civil rights, disability, and women's rights while living with multiple disabilities: I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. Donald Galloway, a blind civil rights activist working from the 1970s through the 2000s, pushed for independent living and employment — and refused the assumption that a disabled person should only be hired to work on disability issues.
What unsettles me is that I learned these movements as separate units, in separate weeks, from separate syllabi. The separation is itself a finding about how curriculum organizes power.
Evolution of thinking · revisited
What I thought then
Intersectionality was a framework I would apply to my data later, at analysis.
What I think now
It is a design constraint on the study itself. If my sampling cannot see compounded marginalization, no analysis will recover it.
What changed my thinking
Noticing that the neurodiversity histories I found most often were written about, not by, the people they described.