Disabled Black Lives Matter: Key terms and definitions

Black people and People of Colour:

We define Black people in the context of our work and this includes People of Colour as an additional “non-white group’ to ensure identity representation.

Social Model of Disability

Disabled people are seen as being disabled not by their impairments (such as visible and invisible) but by society’s failure to take their needs into account. Being Disabled is part of the normal spectrum of human life: society must expect Disabled people to be there and include us in all aspects of life.

Read more about the Social Model of Disability on ALLFIE’s website.

Mutual exclusive:

This is when our identities are viewed as single and separate issues. This is a barrier because the focus of the agenda is on ‘disability’ only and does not think about other identities of Disabled people, for example race and gender and how this can affect our experiences as Disabled people.

Intersectionality:

It is a way to help us to understand how people can have more than one identity.  For example a person can be black, disabled, lesbian and a woman. The failure to think about the different experiences results in more oppression for some disabled people. This also results in ‘intersectional erasure’ because the focus of the agenda is only on ‘disability’. ‘Intersectional erasure’ means to ignore individuals different identities.

Racism:

This happens when others treat people negatively because of their skin colour. There are different types of racism such as institutional and direct racism. For example direct racism could be calling someone horrible names based on the colour of their skin. Institutional racism creates the barriers that disadvantage others because of the colour of their skin. The most recent example of institutional racism can be found in the Stephen Lawrence report (1999).