Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Space, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Is it okay for me to go ahead? Yes, okay. Hi, welcome everyone to

Abolition and Disability Justice, a round table discussion. My name is Leah, L-E-A-H,

Lakshmi, L-A-K-S-H-M-I, Piepzna, P-I-E-P-Z-N-A, Samarasinha, S-A-M-A-R-A-S-I-N-H-

A. I am a light sand colored mixed Sri Lankan Roma, Irish, nonbinary femme with big

clear cat eyeglasses and pink lipstick and brown and gray hair in an undercut. I am so

thrilled to be hosting this panel where we will be speaking with three incredible people

doing work at the intersections of disability and transformative justice and abolition. Yolo

Akili Robinson, Andrea Ritchie, and Elliott Fukui. I will say more about them in one

moment. I'm taking over a little bit at the last minute for Euree Kim, who unfortunately

cannot access this Zoom. Before I do anything else I'm gonna do a little bit of

accessibility housekeeping. I'm gonna ask participants when you speak to introduce

yourselves with your name, pronoun, a brief information of what you look like. I'm gonna

ask people to keep speaking slowly and pausing so the captioning and simultaneous

translation can keep up. Before speaking, please say your name first, i.e., I would say,

"This is Leah speaking." When you use terms of names, if you're saying someone's

name, spell it out. For example, if I was citing Xu Bing's work I'd say his name, sorry, Xu

Bing, and then spell it out. X-U B-I-N-G. For self care, if you need a break during this

workshop, please go do it. Please go stretch. Take a walk, drink water, go to the

bathroom. Be here as you are in the body and mind you are in today. For Spanish

interpretation, you can access it by entering the separate link posted on the event page.

And for a little bit of background, this event is being put on by a number of groups, but

centrally by The Abolition and Disability Justice Coalition, which is a nationally-based

collective of abolitionists, psychiatric survivors, people with disabilities, and

accomplices. Earlier this year Elliott Fukui, E-L-L-I-O-T-T F-U-K-U-I; Andrea Smith, A-N-

D-R-E-A S-M-I-T-H; Liat Ben-Moshe L-I-A-T B-E-N-M-O-S-H-E; and several others

came together and wrote alternatives to policing based on disability justice. Over time,

more people and groups have become involved, and this content was published in mid-

December. You can see it at the website, abolitionanddisabilityjustice.com. I am thrilled

to be hosting this panel. I have been involved in disability justice and abolition work

since I was involved in the psychiatric survivor and prison abolition movements in

Toronto in the late 1990s. I wanna start by land acknowledgement. I'm currently

speaking to you from south Seattle, on Duwamish D-U-W-A-M-I-S-H, territory, which is

governed by the 1865 Treaty of Point Elliott. We come together recognizing that we are

meeting, most of us, in North America on stolen indigenous land. We are meeting here

as indigenous people from many nations, as settlers and the descendants of settlers,

refugees, people brought by enslavement, and combinations of all of the above. Land

back, treaty rights, reparations, and other frameworks are essential to both disability

justice and abolition as a project. We know that colonization and transatlantic, and

Atlantic slavery created both prisons and abolition. We're here for a crucial conversation

about disability justice, a revolutionary framework for disability liberation that centers the

leadership, issues, and strategies of Black, brown, queer, and trans disabled people

and abolition. Abolition is not just about ending spaces and practices of incarceration

and policing. It's about imagining new ways of life, so that a world in which prisons,

policing, and other systems become unthinkable. The call, we keep us safe, reminds us

that solutions should empower all people. That includes disabled, neurodivergent, deaf,

sick, and mad people, to exercise our self determination with care and understanding.

We all deserve the resources, support, education we need to love and protect ourselves

and one another. Now I'm gonna introduce the three panelists, who we're gonna have

an amazing conversation about the connectedness and strategies between abolition

and disability justice. Yolo Akili Robinson, Y-O-L-O A-K-I-L-I R-O-B-I-N-S-O-N, is a

writer, yoga teacher. I'm sorry, it just skipped back and forth. And the executive director

and . For over 15 years Yolo has been on the forefront of progressive wellness work. At

the core of Yolo's work is a commitment to wellness informed by social justice. His

interests are the practical embodiment of theory into systems and practices that help

heal, transform, and support black communities. He makes his home in Los Angeles,

California. Find out more at beam.community/yoloakili. Y-O-L-O A-K-I-L-I. Elliot Fukui,

E-L-L-I-O-T-T F-U-K-U-I, he, him, has been an organizer, trainer, and facilitator for

almost 20 years. He's had the privilege of living and organizing across the country and

is currently based in Ohlone territory, O-H-L-O-N-E, the Bay area. He comes to this

work as a mad, queer, and trans Nikkei Hafu Psych survivor. N-I-K-K-E-I- H-A-F-U. He

has primarily worked in queer and trans, Black, indigenous, and people of color

communities, working to support folks in community security strategies, emotional

wellness, and safety planning. He loves building curricula, radical cartographies, and

movement history. You can visit his website at madqueer.org. Finally, Andrea J. Ritchie,

A-N-D-R-E-A J R-I-T-C-H-I-E, is the author of the book "Invisible No More: "Police

Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color" and coauthor of "Say Her Name:

"Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women," and "A Queer Injustice: "The

criminalization of LGBT people in the United States." She is a Black, lesbian immigrant

survivor who has been documenting, organizing litigating, advocating, and agitating

around policing and criminalization of women and LGBTQ people of color for over two

decades. Andrea has the privilege of working with Mariane Kaba, M-A-R-I-A-N-E K-A-B-

A, and Woods Ervn, W-O-O-D-S E-R-V-N, sorry, Ervn, at the Interrupting

Criminalization Initiative, which you can find interruptingcriminalization.com, serving on

the movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and working with groups around the country

to defund and abolish policing. Welcome everyone. We are gonna get into it now. Okay,

so my first question is the $3 million question, which is just, what are some of the ways

you connect disability justice and abolition in your work? How is disability justice deep in

abolition? And how does practicing disability justice help us win and get free? I know

that three questions. You can answer however you want. I'm looking in the notes, Elliott,

I saw you put your answers down first. Is it okay if we start there? Or does anyone else

really wanna go first? Should I pick someone

Elliott Fukui: I can-

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Elliott, you gonna-

Elliott Fukui: I can.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: I'm sorry.

Elliott Fukui: I can. I can start. 'Cause I'm very excited to hear what Yolo and Andrea

have to say So, this is Elliot, E-L-L-I-O-T-T. I am a mixed race, Japanese American,

transmasculine femme, with short brown hair. And I'm wearing a black and gray sweater

with black and silver buttons on the shoulder. I call it my fancy sweater. It's for panels

only. And I'm so grateful and just humbled to be sharing this space with such amazing

comrades and everybody today. So thank you for making time. So this is a big question,

and this is a big three questions, yeah. So I guess I would start with saying we live in

cultures and communities that have been dehumanized and perpetuate

dehumanization. And I think the beautiful thing about disability justice and abolition, in

my experience of them, is that they both work to rehumanize people. And specifically

rehumanizing people who are seen as disposable or unworthy or dangerous because

we have survived the suppression, oppression that has been placed on our bodies and

minds because of our differences. So when we look at both the roots of the medical,

industrial complex and psychiatry, as well as the prison industrial complex, we can see

that those systems grew out of the same seeds. And have the same roots. And Angela

Davis said it best. Radical simply means grasping things at the root. So any system

that's built that does not honor the humanity, the dignity, and the agency of the people it

serves, and I think many of us from many different communities could speak to this

across the board. It's obviously not going to be transformative. It's obviously not going to

be effective in building the necessary trust that folks need to ask for and receive the

care that they need, and to offer the care. I think we also assume that disabled folks

don't have anything to offer or folks who are inside or who are currently incarcerated or

formerly incarcerated, don't have anything to offer. And this is a huge mistake. It's a

huge mistake. Most of my work is primarily supporting people in emotional crises and

conflict as someone who has survived institutionalization and psychiatric abuse. And I

will name, too, that even in that work, many folks don't use the language of disability or

neurodivergence to describe what they are experiencing or how they move through the

world. Even though that may be how they would be read by police officers or by social

workers or by the state. And I think that brings us to how stigma and shame, how

internalized ableism, insanism, really prevent us from asking for the support that we

need, which inherently puts us at higher risk for being caught by the state. Everyone

has feelings. If you are alive and a person you have emotional health, you have

emotional wellness. And so I think it's also critical, when we think about disability justice

and abolition, that we also look at why so many of us end up in these systems in the

first place is because we cannot ask for, or when we do ask for the support we need we

are unable to receive that support or that support is not aligned with us and what we

actually need in a moment. And as a survivor and an organizer, I can see the way that

the relationship between how institutionalization and incarceration are essentially

functioning to just warehouse bodies and minds that do not align with like cis white dude

standards. And in order for me to find my own wellness and my own way of being in this

world after surviving institutionalization, I had to detangle myself from the system and

build my own network to survive and keep my agency. And I think that is, that is the

thing that I wanna plant early on is actually every single one of us is responsible for

keeping ourselves in each other's space. There is no external answer that will come.

We don't have a booklet about this is how you do this. So this is a practice. Disability

justice is a practice. Abolition is a practice. And they are both proactive approaches to

building with our folks that is based in authentic relationship development. And

recognizes that accountability and understanding and repair are processes that actually

requires support networks and whole communities. Healing and care and emotional and

physical wellness and support should not be bonuses in life. It should be the baseline of

what any of us should expect to receive in our communities. And I'm gonna stop there

and thank you for this time.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha This is Leah speaking. Elliot, thank you so

much for everything you just contributed. Who wants to go next. It's like the jello

wrestling moment. Are you pointing? Yolo, I just saw Yolo's finger first. So I'm gonna

pick Yolo if that's okay.

Yolo Akili Robinson: This is Yolo, Y-O-L-O, and I was pointing to Andrea, A-N-D-R-E-

A, we were pointing at each other. I am a caramel-colored Black person, nonbinary

person with a bald fade and a dark top, as well as my signature long dangly earring,

which is silver today. And I am wearing a dark blue shirt with small white flowers on it.

And also my signature purple geode amethyst ring, which is my favorite. So happy to be

here today. I'm really excited to be a part of the conversation and the dialogue. I wanna

begin by saying that at BEAM, in our work, we often use the term healing justice, and I

wanna be very clear and explicit in naming that there is no healing justice without

disability justice, that it is really the work of Black and brown and queer and trans

disabled, chronically ill folks, people living with HIV, that really provided the theoretical

framework for what we understand healing justice to be. I also wanna pause there and

make sure I'm very clear, too, that the term healing itself has such a deeply ableist and

racist and misogynistic history. And so I want to be clear that when I say that term, I am,

what I am invoking and what am I inviting into the space. And so when I say healing, I

think about healing as not about creating a world where everyone can acquiesce to

enablist vision of being. I see healing as a lifelong art and practice of relating to our

feelings in a manner that fosters liberation, interdependence, tenderness, and joy. And

so when I talk about that lifelong practice it means relating to my rage, my

scatteredness, my frustration, whatever state I'm in, how do I, how do we cultivate

communities that allow us to be in relationship to whatever state we are in, in a way that

fosters, once again, liberation, interdependence, tenderness, and joy. And I wanna be

clear om naming that. Pause for a moment there. The next piece I want to lift up in

terms of how I see disability justice connected to abolition and also to healing justice.

And a lot of my work, the way in which this shows up, it's often in our engagement with

dominant mental health and clinical institutions. To put this frankly, dethroning them as

the authority on our bodies and our lives. And it is very difficult for even many Black

clinicians or many clinicians to hear us articulate that position. We will often offer that,

while the mechanisms that Western medicine has created may have a useful medicine

within them in sometimes, some useful medicine, they are not the authority nor the

absolute, nor are they the only way that we can access healing, our liberation, our

wellness. And so I think that's really important in our work. And it often off puts people

when we come into spaces with them, when we say well we actually believe in village

care. We actually believe that our mental health and our wellness and the healing work

is held by big mamas, is held by barbers, is held by stylists, teachers, coaches, friends,

and colleagues. And that that work is often sometimes more critical than the work that

happens in those talk therapy sessions that people in Western medicine often elevate,

and that while we also, without those additional village care, those interventions would

be, and still remain, continue to be, not adequate for our wellness. So that is one

particular piece. And through that lifting of village care is really for us. So for me, it's

really abolition in a way that it's re-imagining putting the tools and strategies, or refine

the tools and strategies that we have always had and elevating them. 'Cause it's so

important to name that for black and queer and brown and trans communities, we have

had our own mechanisms to navigate distress, whether that is for people living with

mental conditions, whether that's people who are neurodivergent, we've had all these

strategies that have been dismissed and denied. And what has happened instead is the

academy has taken and stolen that knowledge, repurposed it, and sold it back to us as

if it is not something that we already know and know in our own ways of being. And so I

think that that is one of the ways to think about abolition is saying to some of these

university systems, you stole this from us. This is, you actually don't, these theories, this

perspective, this entire approach was stolen from indigenous folks, was stolen from

black folks, and really claiming taking it, taking it back, and saying, you don't get to be

the authority on this and you never should have been. And so I will pause there.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: This is Leah speaking. Thank you so much,

and Yolo, I just wanna reflect that in the Q and A, the last time I looked, there was like

five people saying, "Thank you for that framing. "Thank you for that definition of

healing." I thank you for that definition of healing. It makes me think about something I

think about a lot where as the abolitionists and as disability justice folks, we're often kind

of approached by people, and they're like, "Well, what are you gonna replace the

prisons with? "What are you gonna replace the institution with?" And I'm like, "It's

replacing a gun with an ecosystem." It's not like you just take one peg out and put in

another that's a different color. You change the whole thing. I'm gonna open it up to

Andrea Ritchie to say what she has to say. Andrea, I can't wait to hear, we all can't wait

to hear from you. Thank you for being here.

Andrea Smith: Thank you. I just wrote down yet another mind blowing thing that I

learned from the three people on this panel. So, I'm so grateful. I am Andrea, A-N-D-R-

E-A. I am a light-skinned Black woman who sometimes, depending on the season,

might be white passing. I have curly hair and purple glasses, and I'm wearing a brown

sleepless top. I am coming to you from the land of the Kashaya people, K-A-S-H-A-Y-A.

And I do want to start by naming my teachers, in spite of the fact that I have been

disabled for 25 years, I have not always led with a disability justice analysis, and I have

deeply manifested ableism in my own work. And I am unlearning and in a practice of

accountability around that and doing better. In addition to everyone on this call, E.

Williams was one of my teachers, and I wanna honor their legacy and their loss. Their

name is spelled E, the letter, or E-L-A-N-D-R-I-A, Elandria, Williams. Also Leah and,

that's L-E-A-H, our host, and the Creating Collective Access crew at the Allied Media

Conference; Leroi Moore, L-E-R-O-I M-O-O-R-E and the group Sins Invalid, S-I-N-S I-

N-V-A-L-I-D; Cara Page, C-A-R-A P-A-G-E, one of the originators of the Healing Justice

Framework that Yolo just referred to; Mia Mingus, M-I-A M-I-N-G-U-S; Shira Hassan, S-

H-I-R-A H-A-S-S-A-N; TL, letters T, letter L; Dustin Gibson, D-U-S-T-I-N G-I-B-S-O-N;

and so many more. I could be spelling names all day, but I really wanted to name those

teachers who have been holding me in accountability for decades, and I'm really

grateful and in learning and in shared community. My work focuses on police violence

and-

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Andrea, Andrea, I'm gonna interrupt, just slow

down and pause a little bit more.

Andrea Smith: Thank you.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: No worries.

Andrea Smith: My work focuses on police violence, and obviously disabled people

have been targets of state violence since the U.S. exists, have been incarcerated in

asylums, have been policed under laws that were explicitly created to remove disabled

bodies from public spaces, have been subjected to forced sterilization, and also to

forced incarceration when police respond to what Elliot was describing, as someone

having unmet needs, emotional reactions we all have, and in ways that are deadly or

result in incarceration. Half to two thirds of people who are killed by police are or are

perceived to be disabled in some way. And, in many cases it involves being perceived

to be in a mental health crisis, which is something that Black people are always

perceived to be Black people are always perceived to be deranged and disabled from a

mental health perspective, but sometimes it also can involve people who are deaf or

hard of hearing or people who are physically disabled and unable to comply with police

orders. And this is particularly true as we're all sitting with the police killing of Breonna

Taylor, that when we think about Black, indigenous women, and trans people of color,

that though the majority of folks who were killed who are women or queer people of

color are disabled or perceived to be disabled, based on stories about us that come

from colonialism, that come from anti-blackness, that come from slavery that play out to

this day in police interactions. And so what that means is that abolition obviously

requires disability justice, that ableism, and it requires us to understand as TL and the

disability justice primer that Sins Invalid created, and the organization is called S-I-N-S,

Invalid, I-N-V-A-L-I-D. Ableism and anti-blackness and racial capitalism are all

inextricably intertwined. And abolition requires us to get rid of all of them in order to be

able to get to a place of collective care in the ways that people have been describing.

And that leads us to an understanding of how policing extends beyond police, to

medical providers, to social work providers, to actually every system that is framed as a

helping system, polices disabled bodies and people and communities and communities

that are perceived as inherently disabled through anti-blackness, through patriarchy,

through cis hetero patriarchy, through colonialism. And so if we don't adopt a disability

justice analysis we won't get to abolition, we'll just get to new and different forms of

policing of our bodies and our communities and of our safety and our ways that we try

and keep each other safe. So when people ask, as Leah was saying, "What next?

"What instead? "What are we doing instead of police?" We also can really look to the

ways in which we are already creating communities of care in the ways that people

have describing, particularly in disabled communities, but also communities that have

experienced police violence and violence of the state in every setting, and learn how to

live interdependently in ways that make abolition possible. And someone who writes

about that brilliantly in their book called "Care Work" is Leah. So those are my initial

answers. Thank you.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Thank you so much, Andrea. Yeah. I wrote a

couple books. This is Leah again. I wanna say, when I first saw this panel, I was like, it's

an hour. This is great. That's actually accessible for a lot of people, because I don't

know about you, there's only so many two to three hour Zooms I can sit through without

just, my brain going someplace else and my butt going another. But I'm just like, we

could talk about this stuff all day. There's so much to share, because when I hear you,

Andrea, speak about interdependence, we've all talked about it, my brain goes to, we

could spend we could sit in this village the next 10 years talking about what

interdependence really means in practice. You know, what it really means for folks who

are in emotional crisis to have what we need. You know what it really means to unpack

the stuff that's in so many people's heads about, oh, well depression's okay, but that's a

scary mental health disability. It's very easy, I think, for a lot of people to be like, well,

I'm not ableist, but then to be like, oh, but I still hear the word psychosis, and I'm like,

ooh, I don't know. So I asked three big questions to start under the guise of one

question. I'm gonna segue to my second bunch of questions. And we have about, we

have around 15 minutes left for this conversation. I know, it went really quickly. So I just

wanna turn the floor back over to the three of you and ask if you would pick some

current issues or campaigns where disability justice and abolition come together and or

some organizing projects, tools, resources, you can point people towards who are like I

wanna know how to get involved in this. So I'm already involved in it, but I wanna

deepen my work. Where do I go? How do I click in? And I trust that everything that you

share is gonna be amazing. Elliot, do you wanna go? 'Cause you were the first person

to go before and we'll go in the same order.

Elliott Fukui: Okay, I'll say, this is Elliot. Yolo and Andrea, you're both brilliant. Also

you, Leah, just saying. Just super grateful, again, to be in this space. Oh my gosh, so

many projects. The projects I would like to lift up and encourage folks to check out and

volunteer with and give your money and time and resources to would be The Disability

Justice Culture Club in East Oakland, which was founded by Stacey Park Milbern last

year in response to fire season and power shutoffs by PG and E that obviously deeply

impacted so many of our communities who rely on that power to survive. And lift up and

honor Stacey's memory always. Shout out to Fireweed Collective who graciously has

hosted this Zoom. And I actually credit to, I'm like if I hadn't found Fireweed, which back

when I found it was called the Icarus Project, I probably would not be alive today. I think

I can safely say. That entry point into the movement is what made it possible for me to

exit out of the system right before I was about to have my whole life signed away to the

adults who had been responsible for me. As Sins Invalid was already named, but it's

just such a, I mean, please watch everything they've ever done. Please get their toolkits,

their curriculum is phenomenal. Please give them your money. And then the last two

things I'll say, make a safety plan, please please, if you are disabled, if you are mad, I

wanna say that we are worth fighting for, and we do not have the luxury of making

ourselves small right now. We do not have the luxury of sitting in shame. That is not our

shame. That was put upon us because we need to survive and we need to make sure

our people survive. And so, I know there are probably 500 reasons in your head about

why you should not ask for support or talk to your friends and family. And I'm gonna tell

you that it is not an easy conversation, but it can be the make or break. And we are

about to head into some wild, pardon my, like some wild ass times. Like, I don't know if

you saw the debate last night, if that's any indicator of, what is coming in November,

make a plan. Make a plan. And your people love you and wanna support you. And even

if you think you don't have people, you have a whole lot, we are out here. So we are out

here. Find the online groups, email Fireweed, email BEAM. Find us. We are out here

and we have been doing this. The tools are there. This doesn't have to be scary. We're

gonna figure it out together. And the last one is Anti-Police Terror Project. Mental Health

First, which got started in Sacramento this summer, which is community members,

some folks who are trained in social work or psychiatry, and some folks who are

survivors of the system, who are providing first response and an alternative phone

number for folks to call when they're in emotional crisis. And these types of programs

need a lot of support. If we want those alternatives, we need folks who are willing to get

trained up on hotline. We need folks who are willing to get trained in verbal

deescalation. We need folks who are willing to get to know their neighbors. So if that's

something you're interested in, please please check it out. And I'm gonna stop there.

Thank you.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Thank you so much, Elliot. Yolo, I hope this is

okay. Andrea texted me saying I have to go at 1:55. Can I go next? So, that's cool?

Okay, so we're gonna turn it over to Andrea Ritchie.

Andrea Smith: Thank you so much Yolo. And I'm so sorry that, this is Andrea, I'm so

sorry that I have to leave this conversation that I also could be in for days, but I'm going

to host a conversation among organizations that are working to defund police and invest

in community safety strategies. And so that's the first place I would ask people to plug in

who care about this work. If you are part of or wanna join a conversation in your

community about defunding police, make sure that you read the work of all the people

here and raise the question of not transferring the same things that police do to social

workers or mental health workers or emergency technicians or firefighters. Don't just

turn the same functions over to people wearing different uniforms. Often when I talk to

people who have experienced police violence in connection with mental health needs,

for instance, they say to me things like, "When I'm in a mental health crisis "I can't tell

sometimes "whether I was picked up by the police "or the emergency workers."

Sometimes the sheets feel a little different at the hospital, but otherwise everything feels

the same. Or they talk about having been in the custody of handcuffs or Haldol for most

of their lives. So don't fall for, it's not a policing response, it's a public health response

that we need without reading all the work of people like Cara Page, who I mentioned

before, or other people, who point out that public health has also always been about

policing, surveillance, and violence against Black and brown bodies and queer and

trans bodies. So be really involved in that work so that you can say we're not just

transferring the same function to other people. Another piece of work that we're doing at

Interrupting Criminalization, if you're a medical provider please reach out at

interruptingcriminalization.com because we are in a campaign with many organizations

trying to come up with principles for medical providers to not participate in

criminalization in any way, shape, or form, whether that's around public health orders

from the pandemic, the war on drugs, policing pregnant bodies, shuffling people with

unmet mental health needs into the criminal punishment system, providing terrible or

nonexistent medical care to people incarcerated, force confining people in the ways that

Elliott was describing around civil commitment, policing migrant bodies and referring

them into ICE detention, participating in sterilization of people in ICE detention or

prisons. There's so many ways that medical providers facilitate, participate in, condone

criminalization that we wanna interrupt. So it's one thing to come out and say, we're

white coats for black lives, or we support Black Lives Matter, but we want to create

possibilities for people who are medical providers or staff to be in resistance to the ways

that they are either mandated to participate in criminalization or sometimes do even

against their own mandates because the pressure is there to do that. So we wanna

create opportunities to resist there. So go to interruptingcriminalization.com, email us,

and we will invite you into that project, if you're a medical provider or staff person. So

those are the efforts. I would also invite people to support the work of HEARD, H-E-A-R-

D, around criminalization and police violence against deaf and hard of hearing people. I

think that's it from me. And I'm gonna listen for as long as I can to what you offer, Yolo,

and then I'm gonna disappear. But thank you all so much for having me.

Yolo Akili Robinson: Thank you, Andrea.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Yolo, this is Leah speaking. Yolo, go for it.

Yolo Akili Robinson: This is Yolo speaking. Thank you so much, Andrea, just, yes,

thank you. One piece I wanna echo that I have been constantly probably yelling at

people about for a while now, both of you and Elliot addressed is, I've been people we

don't, counselor cops is not the answer. I've been like hashtag no counselor cops.

That's not the answer. Making people, often in spaces that I am and people are like let's

get social workers. I was like, well, let's talk about social work and the history and

legacy of social work. And let's talk about the DSM and the tools they use and how

these tools still are about policing and pathology. And they need to be abolished. One

project that I wanna share a little bit about is a project I'm really excited and grateful to

be in partnership, Depressed While Black, Imade Boha. We have been working on the

project, Build a Black Vision for Mental Health. And what it is is essentially a

conglomerate of folks, Black folks who are living with mental conditions, mad black

folks, black folks who are invested in abolishing the system really trying to imagine what

is our most loving, radical, and caring vision for what Black healing and mental health

care can look like in this world, when we have village care centered. And a big part of

that initiative has been highlighting the really terrible and traumatic experiences that

Black people continue to have within the psychiatric jails. And I think that I'm building on

what Andrea said earlier. We don't call them hospitals. We don't call them, they are jails.

When you, they use the same policies strategies, resources, tools, and they're to

dehumanize and denigrate Black people who are living in crisis, who are in crisis, who

are living with mental illness and conditions. And so we are very clear that this is a

prison. These are prisons. And because these institutions disappear so many Black

folks so many of our folks, and really, and there is very little support when one has been

wronged or violated in those institutions to get those wrongs addressed. We have been

really vigilant about sharing stories with folks, you might've seen, we've had a

partnership with The Mighty where we had many people share their first person

accounts. We've also had several different interviews with people sharing their

experiences as well. In addition to that, we've also, one thing I'm proud of to support,

and it's something that Imade started, but BEAM has been supporting Imade with, I-M-

A-D-E, is a mental health hospital wishlist, which essentially built, what's essentially

what we did, bye, essentially what we've done is build relationships with these

institutions and be able to connect with folks who are inside these institutions to ask

them what are their needs or what are the care items they would like to help themselves

being as much dignity and respect as they can in those spaces? And so through that

partnership we have bought flip-flops, t-shirts, bonnets, do-rags, lotion, toothbrushes, all

these items that, as I say it, I get increasingly enraged that this is something that's

supposed to be, this is something that's supposed to be like something that we have to

do, like it's extra, excuse me, like the idea, but it is to affirm the dignity of our folks and

let our folks know that they will not be forgotten. We will are continuing to fight on the

outside to abolish these systems, to reimagine what care can look like. And I think these

gestures, so many folks let us know, and I know, that there can be so much fuel to help

you kind of get through these terrible experiences and denigrating experiences in those

spaces. So check out Imade, I-M-A-D-E, Depressed While Black, at her work, and also

Build A Black Vision for Mental Health as well on BEAM's website, which is B-E-A-M dot

community, C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y.

Leah Lakshimi Piepzna-Samarasinha: This is Leah. Thank you so much, Yolo. Thank

you so much, Elliot. Thank you so much, the interpretation team, everybody who put in

work to make this event happen. This is just the beginning. To all of you 300 and

something people who chose to take this hour to attend, we are about to wrap up. This

is the first of many events. You can go to abolitionanddisabilityjustice.com to see

statements, Instagram, Twitter, social media, whatever upcoming events that we're

doing. There were a lot of different organizations that co-sponsored this event, the latest

notes I got, and I'm kind of flying by the seat of my pants to do some facilitation that

wasn't originally on my docket do, But the knowledge I have is that someone was like,

oh, we're not sure if all them wanted to be shouted out. So I'm not gonna list them, but

just know there was like six, seven, eight, nine, 10 organizations that worked together to

make this happen. Thank you to all of you. I'm just really grateful for the breadth of

knowledge that Yolo, Elliot, Andrea were able to cover in this past hour. There are so

many ways that we can plug into doing disability justice and abolitionist work. And one

thing that I wanted to leave on, besides just a huge gratitude and thank you, is that if

anyone listening or watching this, is still like, how do I plug in? There are a million

different little ways you can. And one of the first places is to start unpacking the ways

we've been taught to be afraid of disability and mental conditions, madness, psychiatric

disability within ourselves and our communities. And to start with a really first step of

just asking people what they need. Yolo, I mean, the project you talked about about

bringing people bonnets and lotion and do-rags, and it gets me, it's so beautiful, and it

gets me angry, too. It gets me, I'm continually angry for all of our folks and the brutalities

that we are put under. And I'm also continually inspired by the work we do to make

change in real little, big ways every day. So we're at time. Thank you so much for comin'

together. And we look forward to meeting each other in the streets, in the bed, in lock

up, on Zoom, in the whirlwind, as we continue to make the world that we deserve

possible. Thank you so much.