A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Disability studies scholar Sami Schalk traces Black disability politics across the Black Panther Party and National Black Women’s Health Project, the National Black Disability Coalition, and contemporary Black disabled cultural activism. Using archival research, interviews, and cultural analysis, she shows how Black movements have addressed disability even without disability-rights language and how ableism, racism, gender, class, and state violence shape one another.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
This book challenges histories that whiten disability politics or treat disability as separate from racial justice. Schalk’s concept of Black disability politics helps travelers recognize practices of care, access, survival, and resistance that conventional movement archives overlook. It belongs as rigorous intersectional scholarship with implications for churches and civic organizations. It is not an introductory accessibility checklist or a claim that Black political movements have been consistently disability-affirming.
Good starting place if…
You want historically grounded scholarship on how Black activism and disability politics intersect across health, state violence, gender, organizing, and cultural work.
Know before you begin…
The book discusses medical racism, police violence, incarceration, illness, sexism, ableism, and movement conflict. It is an academic history that rewards prior familiarity with disability and Black studies, and its selected organizations do not represent every Black disabled experience. Nondisabled or white readers should not extract concepts while bypassing living Black disabled leadership. Historical recognition must be joined to present material access, compensation, policy, and accountability rather than symbolic inclusion alone.