ABSTRACT
Disability and race are uncomfortable bedfellows. They are bedfellows because both disability and race embody a modality of difference from some hypothetical norm that organizes bodies along an oppressive social hierarchy. This chapter gives an example of school segregation, illustrating how race and disability become uncomfortable bedfellows in the social context of education. The discomfort lies in how the politics of race and disability are pitted against each other. In public schools all over the US, African-American and Latino/a students are over-represented in special education, remedial education, and alternative educational classrooms, while White and Asian students dominate college prep and advanced courses. Shifting to the economic context, transnational capitalism is also implicated in the simultaneous deployment of racism and ableism. The recognition of the intimate relationship between race and disability is indebted to the scholarship of critical race feminist Kimberle Crenshaw. Crenshaw critiques identity politics because as she writes it "frequently conflates and ignores intragroup difference".
