ABSTRACT
In 2005 the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Professsion wrote, “The future of Disability Studies is Black indeed.” Their prophecy expressed a determination to begin a longoverdue discussion of black issues and artists in the context of Disability Studies, and vice-versa. Committee member Robert McRuer, of George Washington University, noted that, with few exceptions, Disability Studies silently assumes whiteness in its practitioners and subjects. McRuer recalled how, twenty-four years earlier, the endless repetition of the phrase “blacks and women,” as though the two were mutually exclusive categories, had provoked the creation of the volume, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. That emphasis on where identities intersect, and the need to create more complex concepts of identity that could accommodate that intersectionality, transformed feminism: McRuer and his allies hoped for a similarly deep transformation in Disability Studies.
