she/her Black girl magic+disabled pride |MA Global Comms | my thoughts | #DisTheOscars + #AbledsAreWeird #ThingsDisabledPeopleKnow | ✉️ imani.barbarin gmail
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Jan 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
TW: suicide
By the way, you all fundamentally do not understand the stakes: people are not afraid of your threats of fascism because they feel that their greatest relief would not be Biden, but death.
Have you been paying attention? Do you hear how people are talking about
Suicide? People lament waking up and not dying in the sleep in the form of jokes. They see no advancement in their lives, they see themselves being worked endlessly until death.
People are hanging on by a fucking thread and you’re chomping at the bit to punish them for not
Dec 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I’m just posting this for posterity: but the thing that pisses me off with how disabled people are treated every single election cycle is when people offer or organize rides for disabled people to vote.
Most disabled people struggle with freedom of movement, it is extremely
Hard to get anywhere when you have a disability and that is even in cities with existing transit infrastructure. Even still it can be a demeaning process and there’s no assurances.
Never mind if you live in a rural or suburban area where transit options may be scarce or
Dec 29, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The sad reality is that COVID is likely to be one of the greatest political blunders in the history of the U.S., let alone the globe.
And, for the “resistance” crowd, the fascinating part is how you all seemed to miss that the spread of Covid was literally a part of the plan.
Jared Kushner signaled in 2020 that they WANTED Covid to spread, specifically to “Blue” states so that Dems would shoulder the political brunt of the fallout—only for democrats to walk head first into that themselves when Biden took office.
We are only at the very beginning of
Dec 22, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
While I will never tell a person with a disability how they should describe themselves, I mostly hear the phrase “differently abled” from nondisabled people speaking about disabled people and the use does more harm than good.
Firstly, it releases society of any responsibility
In making an accessible society but rather puts the onus on the disabled person presenting societally disabling barriers as merely difficulties that do not need to be systematically addressed.
Also, people, while you can be gentle with introducing disability into their
Dec 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ableism is wild because it is quite literally the accelerator for almost all oppression.
Racism: look up the logic behind “bodies made for labor.
Sexism: see “hysteria”
Homophobia: the same architects of conversion therapy designed autism therapies.
Fatphobia: “why are you
Eating your way to a disability?”
Xenophobia: the western gaze presents nonwhite cultures as unintelligent at points implying they’re intellectually disabled.
Classism: poor people are presented as too lazy and not fit for society
Imperialism: mass disabling events that
Dec 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
There’s not a single person on the left that thinks Trump would be a better president, but most know that Democrats would be better people, organizers and advocates under Trump.
Most on the left have come to the conclusion Dems would rather perform opposition and “resistance”
Than actually invest in the progressive policies people want and Dems have the capacity to move forward when in office but don’t because they only adopt progressive platforms—appropriate them is the better term because they actually come from grassroot movements and marginalized
Nov 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I’m really disinterested in the political theater that is partisan politics when they agree on genocide. I find the Trump trial to be just another media circus to prove our system has checks abs balances when we have little to none when it comes to protecting oppressed people
I am wholly done with the belief that democracy ever existed or that these parties actually believe in it. I disdain watching as they hold your rights over your head presenting the other side as worse when they will inevitably justify your genocide too just with nicer words and
Nov 27, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
What’s the plan?
The plan is for liberals to shut the fuck up.
I can’t tell whether it is out of self sabotage, craven disregard for the people you profess to care about, or if you cannot muster the empathy or compassion to recognize it, but harassing, intimidating or
Dismissing the concerns that Black and people of color, particularly Arab-, Muslim-, and Palestinian-Americans about voting for Biden during this time not only presents you all as uncritical, cruel and sycophantic acolytes of the Democratic Party, but PERMANENTLY alienates
Nov 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I actually agree with the ADL, social media is a problem for them, just not for the reason they think.
They attribute GenZ’s “radicalization” to reporting of and exposure to Palestinians’ experience on the ground which has played a major role, but I think the videos that most
Made younger social media users look twice at the nature of the “conflict” were videos and social media posts like “get ready with me ‘war edition’ with a settler making gluten-free cookies for soldiers and the trend of dressing as Arabs and pretending to be bombed.
I remember
Jul 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
TW: sexual abuse
The reason why M4L want to ban healthcare in schools is multi faceted but it boils down to this:
School nurses have access to children’s medical files and are MANDATORY REPORTERS.
If you reorient your lens, you realize that their every action is to
Enable the sexual abuse of children to procure pregnancies from those children.
Banning books on consent as “sexually explicit.”
Prohibiting sex education.
Outing children as trans and trans panic to prevent children from using puberty blockers increasing risk of
Jun 30, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I need people on the left to be bare bones real for a moment: we are not going to see progress in our lifetime particularly with the democrats we currently have in office—in fact, the system we have is just “master’s tools” so abiding it is useless.
Stop selling this lie.
You can pitch voting as harm reduction all you want but that means little to queer people having to flee their states, disabled people, who because GOP is rolling back Mail-in voting and y’all won’t wear a mask, have to choose between their life and their vote.
Mar 5, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
No thank you, I really only have a handful of questions I’d like answered.
•Is Ms. Williamson both-sides-ing/questioning the efficacy of vaccines and anti-depressants?
•I went on the 2024 website. I may have missed it, but there’s zero mention of the ongoing pandemic.
In light of the other advocacy points, wouldn’t all that be rendered ineffective in light of a continuous mass disabling and death event?
•in a similar vein, millions more are now disabled from COVID and medical structures are largely ill-equipped to accommodate a large influx
Feb 15, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Interesting to hear blip from Biden, who ended labor negotiations for railway workers who warned about something like the East Palestine train derailment happening, which is now leaking chemicals into the air and groundwater, which will most likely cause
illnesses like cancer while a core tenant of Biden’s advocacy is eradicating the disease.
Affect because people go looking for it to contextualize why it’s missing.
In E1on’s case, this is happening at an exponential level.
Each time a new policy change is found to be hypocritical, people post articles about why he is the way he is and other poor business
Dec 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Here’s the thing about HIM ™️ celebrity and wealth creates distance which people expect from the wealthy and notable, but he cannot stand the idea of not being in proximity to his praise which therefore compromises the well (poorly) constructed façade of genius that has
Abetted his success as a billionaire.
When you take over a platform like this, especially as an ego-driven person, whatever policy decisions made on behalf of the platform is seen as an extension of one’s own hubris.
But the closer he is to the hoi polloi, the more he himself
Dec 17, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is true. But here is where listening and understanding community comes in to play.
I was born with my disability too. And when I sat down and sought to understand other disabled folk, I heard experiences that were much like my own.
Sadness being treated that way. They were the same emotions I had felt within myself growing up but had squashed down because I thought I was alone in feeling that way because everyone around me was either non disabled or we weren’t having those particular conversations.
Dec 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Eric Adams Locking up mentally ill people should terrify everyone ESPECIALLY at this stage in the pandemic.
One of the very first things that happened on the heels of the 1918 flu pandemic was a rising hostility towards disabled people and their involuntary institutionalization
And we all know what happened just years after that.
One of the last conditions of having a disability according to the ADA is that someone can easily observe it within you—diagnosis or no. The concept has been historically weaponized against dissenters and marginalized people
Nov 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Whenever someone says “(insert diagnosis here) isn’t a disability,” they are almost always telling on themselves.
Not an extensive list, but I find the following to be true:
1) they view disabled people as lazy and the person who comes to mind is accomplished in some way.
2) the disability has no visible signs and they only think of disability in terms of wheelchairs, canes, crutches and easy to pinpoint physical differences.
3) they dislike the person they’re thinking about and think they’re just saying they have a disability as an excuse/
Nov 8, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The thing about mail in voting for Pennsylvania is that it was first proposed by Republicans in the state legislature. They spearheaded the entire thing. They only took back support after it worked too well.
By in large the push for more accessible voting practices on the left
Has been through coalition work with advocacy groups and advocates.
Oct 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oh also, regarding @ryanmurphyprod and #Dahmer, I just saw a tiktok of some stunned black folk after a yt gay man came up to the black guy they were with and said “you look dahmer-able. I think you’d look good in my freezer.”
Imagine making that show and not even understanding
What you’ve unleashed on Black and Brown people because you saw silence from the families as consent.
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