It is time to celebrate our
Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how horrible our society is at valuing and practicing interdependence.
You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence
Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today. If we do not understand that we are interdependent with the planet we as a species will not survive.
Let's organize our lives around love and care Let's write each other letters and call it prayer Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere At the temple of broken dreams --Temple of Broken Dreams by Ezra Furman
We steer by the collected phrases below. They are compasses and stars that align us on our mission.
We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.
🏩 Mission – Stimpunks Foundation
We serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.
Our philosophy points us toward the real.
Point me toward the real motherfuckers Point me toward the real I've been lied to and abused Time to try to heal Cut me loose, cut me loose See what freedom might reveal Cut my bound hands free and Point me toward the real
- ∞ Design is tested at the edges.
- 🦼 Disability justice (and disability itself) has the potential to fundamentally transform everything we think about quality of life, purpose, work, relationships, belonging.
- 🫀🧠🌈 Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason.
- 📚⚖️ The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by diagnosis.
- Laziness does not exist.
- 🛏 We urgently need a society that’s better at letting people get the rest they need.
- 🔨 Stop, Hammer Time: When you measure include the measurer.
- = There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
- 🧷 All human beings have the same innate need: We long to belong.
- 🫶 It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
- ❤️🩹 Care work makes all other work possible.
- 👏 Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.
- ⏳ Dreams are met, bridges are built -timelines changed.
- 🩸 We exist as friction.
- Nothing About Us Without Us
- 🪢 Embracing pluralism is good citizenship.
- 🔌 Name the systems of power.
- 🏩 What if love said: Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
- As If We Existed
- Exist For Love
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
∞ Design is tested at the edges.
∞
Design is tested at the edges.
Foreground complexity as the baseline.
We have to embrace our complexity. We are complex.
Democracy is served by centering and empowering people’s voices.
⛑
It is in the dignity of the most vulnerable that the dignity of all mankind is upheld.
Flexibility makes a big difference in inclusion.
Accessibility is a collective process!
Affordability is a part of accessibility.
The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.
Provide freedom to those who deal with a world that’s built to be hostile toward them.
Prioritize the most marginalized, and we’ll all rise together.
James Baldwin…deserves flowers everyday, most of all, because he was willing to discuss things that were painful, hard to look at, hard to see, hard to accept.
Meshell Ndegeocello
James Baldwin’s prophetic literature The Fire Next Time was at the forefront of my mind. I’d been reading it a lot, carrying it around in my pocket. It became like my religious text. Baldwin speaks about things that are very familiar within the human condition, and the most revolutionary music to me — the music that changed my life — is the songs about the inner struggle, the commonality of being human.
Songs of Protest & Healing: Meshell Ndegeocello on the Gospel of James Baldwin
The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. There is no way around this. If one is permitted to treat any group of people with special disfavor because of their race or the color of their skin, there is no limit to what one will force them to endure, and, since the entire race has been mysteriously indicted, no reason not to attempt to destroy it root and branch.
The Fire Next Time
From my point of view, no label, no slogan, no party, no skin color, and indeed no religion is more important than the human being.
James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
James Baldwin
🦼 Disability justice (and disability itself) has the potential to fundamentally transform everything we think about quality of life, purpose, work, relationships, belonging.
Elevate ableism as one of the injustices of our world.
🫀🧠🌈 Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason.
To be pro-neurodiversity is to be anti-racist.
Difference is not our deficit; it’s our operating system.
Diversity is strength. Difference is a teacher. Fear difference, you learn nothing.
Mind is an embodied phenomenon.
Magic happens when you combine collaboration and neurodiversity.
📚⚖️ The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by diagnosis.
📚
The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by diagnosis.
Written communication is the great social equalizer.
Presume competence. Never assume that the ability to speak equals intelligence.
When I went to your schools I went to your churches I went to your institutional learning facilities! --Institutionalized by Suicidal Tendencies
Laziness does not exist.
People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.
Laziness Does Not Exist: But unseen barriers do
Maybe you weren’t always able to look at human behavior this way. That’s okay. Now you are. Give it a try.
🛏 We urgently need a society that’s better at letting people get the rest they need.
WIP by Kristina Daniele I’m in pain. Mental. Physical. The result’s the same. Retreating into silence. Resting my brain. Taking deep breaths. Trying to reframe. Writing in my journal. Listening to myself. Trying to get centered But drifting to the left. I’m in pain. Mental. Physical. Emotionally, it’s the same. Stimming to reset Moving to get rest. Blocking out the world, And listening to myself. Trying to get centered But drifting to the left. I'm a work in progress. I'm not finished yet.
Nothing in this culture wants us to have rest. Wants us to have ease. Wants us to have care. The softness was stolen. Our dreamspace has been stolen. Our space to just be has been stolen.
Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry.
🔨 Stop, Hammer Time: When you measure include the measurer.
It’s not Science vs Philosophy … It’s Science + Philosophy. When you measure include the measurer.
MC Hammer
I would insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the un-marked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation.
Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
The interpretation of objectivity as neutral does not allow for participation or stances. This uninvolved, uninvested approach implies “a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988). In many ways, claims of objectivity allow one to “represent while escaping representation” (Haraway 1988) and mimics the construction of Whiteness2 in the racialization of marginalized peoples (Battey and Leyva 2016; Guess 2006). Indeed, there is extensive evidence suggesting that STEM cultural norms are traditionally White, masculine, heteronormative and able-bodied (Atchison and Libarkin 2016; Chambers 2017; Eisenhart and Finkel 1998; Johnson 2001; Nespor 1994; Seymour and Hewitt 1997; Traweek 1988). Thus, while purporting to be a neutral application of a generic protocol, science-and STEM more broadly-has a distinct set of cultures that governs legitimate membership and acceptable behaviors. The concept of a meritocracy is often used to justify who succeeds in STEM cultures. However, far from “leveling the playing field”, meritocracies exist in cultural systems that prioritize people who have, or to a lesser extent closely emulate, these traits. Success in science, then, tends to privilege cultural traits associated with the above identities and often marginalizes scientists who can not or will not perform these identities. This introduces structural inequities in the pursuit of science that align with social manifestations of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia and ableism (Cech and Pham 2017; Wilder 2014).
Defining the Flow—Using an Intersectional Scientific Methodology to Construct a VanguardSTEM Hyperspace
The failures of autism science are not random: they reflect systematic power imbalances.
Autism and Scientism
= There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
There is no path to equity that does not involve a direct confrontation with inequity.
Inequities are primarily power and privilege problems.
Equity requires the redistribution of material, cultural, and social access and opportunity.
You cannot counter structural inequality with good will. You have to structure equality.
We are all accountable to the urgent work of building a more just, more equitable world.
I wish you could know What it means to be me Can you see You’d agree Everybody Should be free (Because if we ain’t, we’re murderers) --I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free by Nina Simone
One of the most punk angst people in history is Nina Simone.
AFROPUNK: The Movie
She was neurodivergent and did her best work as an activist completely unaware she was bipolar and suffering from PTSD. As such, the disability community should embrace her as a savant in the wider sphere of neurodivergent people who demonstrate talent usually limited to the label autistic savant.
Nina Simone: Black Activist, Bipolar Savant | NOS Magazine
I sing from intelligence. I sing from letting them know that I know who they are and what they have done to my people around the world.
That’s not anger. Anger has its place. Anger has fire, and fire moves things, but I sing from intelligence. I don’t want them to think that I don’t know who they are.
Nina Simone on BBC HARDtalk, 1999
🧷 All human beings have the same innate need: We long to belong.
Giving inclusion safety is a moral imperative.
All human beings have the same innate need: We long to belong.
Shame is not a weapon. Shame is toxic. It is the difference between “sorry I did” and “sorry I am.”
Authenticity is our purest freedom.
The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it.
🫶 It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
❤️🩹 Care work makes all other work possible.
Care work makes all other work possible.
Health is at the center of the human experience.
We need a counterculture of care.
Reframing is self-care and social change.
In the Parable books Lauren is a young, black, disabled woman who manages to not merely survive but to create a belief system and lead a community that brings together and helps thousands in the midst of chaos. As a result, this series is one example of how a better future can include those of us whose lives, bodyminds, and perspectives are often devalued and discounted.
Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction
Embrace diversity.
Parable of the Sower (p. 196)
Unite—
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
Earthseed is Olamina’s contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.
Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1)
The strategies that played out in Octavia’s books included adaptability and interdependence—often through the practice of repeated vulnerability.
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Let's organize our lives around love and care Let's write each other letters and call it prayer Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere At the temple of broken dreams --Three New Songs by Ezra Furman
👏 Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.
Everyday there's a sad a twist of fate And it's easy to think there's no way we can make it But I swear you and I can stay strong through the fight If we hold on long enough to face it Sure there's Purple haze in the sky And they say maybe we're running out of time But I don't care cuz you and I Know that love is all we need to survive If the world is on fire I don't care cuz you're down for the ride We'll survive We'll get by From now on til the end of times --Purple Haze by Joy Oladokun
⏳ Dreams are met, bridges are built -timelines changed.
Dreams are met, bridges are built -timelines changed.
All these realities become more true via each other, being ourselves; being that: we are the materials which become the embodiment of such.
*We Artistrian” was an utterance by A Badelle in pondering viewing a prior work titled “The Adorned Man.”
🩸 We exist as friction.
We must not allow pressure for resilience to permit broken systems to persist.
Dislodge hyper-punitive cultures and ideologies.
Haitian Fight Song, to begin with, could just as well be called Afro-American Fight Song. It has a folk spirit, the kind of folk music I’ve always heard anyway.
My solo in it is a deeply concentrated one. I can’t play it right unless I’m thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution, and how unfair it is. There’s sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling: ‘I told them! I hope somebody heard me.’
The Clown Album Liner Notes
Nothing About Us Without Us
Every issue in our news cycle today – gender affirming care, access to abortions, COVID-19 policies (or rather lack thereof), and racist hate crimes – are intimately tied to the history of the eugenics movement. These are intertwined stories.
Our platforms might have changed, but the content on them has not. People aren’t learning this pseudoscience at state fairs anymore, but that doesn’t mean they’re not learning it. It’s embedded into our culture in both obvious and obscured ways.
Our news headlines reflect what oppressed people have long known – eugenics is still alive and well. From the rhetoric used in the recent hate crime in Buffalo, to that coming out of the Supreme Court, to the daily statements of the CDC, eugenics is there at the core.
@Nicole_Lee_Sch
I first heard the expression “Nothing About Us Without Us” in South Africa in 1993. Michael Masutha and William Rowland, two leaders ofDisabled People South Africa, separately invoked the slo- gan, which they had heard used by someone from Eastern Europe at an international disability rights conference. The slogan’s power derives from its location of the source of many types of (disability) oppression and its simultaneous opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice.
“Nothing About Us Without Us” resonates with the philosophy and history of the disability rights movement (DRM), a movement that has embarked on a belated mission parallel to other liberation movements. As Ed Roberts, one of the leading figures of the international DRM, has said, “If we have learned one thing from the civil rights movement in the U.S., it’s that when others speak for you, you lose” (Driedger 1989:28). In this sense, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and “Power to the People” can be recognized as precedents for “Nothing About Us With- out Us.” The DRM’s demand for control is the essential theme that runs through all its work, regardless of political-economic or cultural differences. Control has universal appeal for DRM activists because the needs of people with disabilities and the potential for meeting these needs are everywhere conditioned by a dependency born of powerless- ness, poverty, degradation, and institutionalization. This dependency, saturated with paternalism, begins with the onset of disability and con- tinues until death. The condition of dependency is presently typical for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.
NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US: Disability Oppression and Empowerment
A motto of the self-advocacy movement is “Nothing About Us, Without Us!”. Lots of people talk about us without letting us talk. We should always be part of the conversation, and be in charge of our lives.
WELCOME TO THE AUTISTIC COMMUNITY
🪢 Embracing pluralism is good citizenship.
Embracing pluralism is good citizenship. Democracy demands equal accommodation.
Fostering healthy pluralism, which democracy demands, means confronting intolerance.
In order for true diversity to flourish, we need to first become unswervingly anti-racist.
🔌 Name the systems of power.
Inclusivity involves looking at a space and seeing all the ways it’s set up to benefit those in power. And then redesigning and resetting that space to support, affirm, and amplify marginalized folks.
The lens of power can really help us see what’s going on.
People suffer, and when they do, it’s for a reason.
You wanna be somebody? See somebody? Try and free somebody
Got a list of demands Written on the palm of my hands I ball my fist and you're gonna know where I stand We're living hand to mouth Hand to mouth --List of Demands by Saul Williams
🏩 What if love said: Hear me out a bit before the future comes around.
As If We Existed
... What if love said: Hear me out a bit before the future comes around ... This isn't anger, no, it's passion so let's live the way we should As if we existed "As If We Existed" by Solillaquists of Sound
Exist For Love
And then I learned the truth How everything good in life seems to lead back to you And every single time I run into your arms I feel like I exist for love Like I exist for love Only for love I can't imagine how it is to be forbidden from loving (Ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah) 'Cause when you walked into my life I could feel my life begin Like I was torn apart the minute I was only born
And you're the other half The only thing that makes me whole I know it sounds like a lot But you really need to know We are leaning out for love And we will lean for love forever, I know I love you so And then I learned the truth How everything good in life seems to lead back to you And every single time I run into your arms I feel like I exist for love Only for love
And when you say my name Like white horses on the waves I think it feels the same As an ocean in my veins And you'll be diving in Like nothing is out of place And we exist for love Only for love
And I love you, I love you, I love you And I love you, I love you, I love you
Let’s organize our lives around love and care.
Mission
We exist for the direct support and mutual aid of neurodivergent and disabled people.
We serve our loved people so we can keep on living through the onslaught.
Creed
I center the marginalized and the different. I center edge cases, because edge cases are stress cases and design is tested at the edges. I center neurodivergent and disabled experience in service to all bodyminds.
Covenant
We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.
Philosophy
We steer by these acquired phrases. They are compasses and stars that align us on our mission.
Interdependence
It is time to celebrate our interdependence. Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.
Edges
Our designs, our societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness.
Let's organize our lives around love and care Let's write each other letters and call it prayer Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere At the temple of broken dreams
