My understanding of activism is taking a stance against and applying direct action towards the diminishing or demolishing of repressive acts or movements upon a community that you feel is oppressed. I am so glad that I decided to watch Netflix’s Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. The film began with documentation of a summer camp in New York called Camp Jened which allowed people with disabilities to live in a free atmosphere. This camp showed participants how they should be living and enforced how society was wrong with how it viewed disabilities within them. The disabilities among them were widely-ranged from polio survivors to those that suffered from cerebral palsy. It was just incredible to witness and learn about this community of people who even today are looked down upon for disabilities when in fact, many are just as capable if not more to take a stance for what they want and deserve and have the ability to subject change just as anyone else. Camp Jened did so much for these camp-goers who finally felt seen and understood by their peers that many banded together in an attempt to demand a change of the system for disabled people everywhere. Judy Heumann, a “polio” and camp Jened partaker, took a prominent role in leading and representing the disabled community from the 504 Sit-in in 1977 where she along with other disabled persons occupied federal buildings in the United States in order to push the issuance of long-delayed regulations regarding Section 504 of the rehabilitation Act of 1973 to Washington D.C. for the issuing of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which was set to provide clear prohibition of discrimination on the basis of disability. During these protests, the participants whose disabilities ranged in all kinds of severity demanded to be heard by joining one another in solidarity enduring sleepless nights on the floor, not having running water for weeks to bathe or brush their teeth, and eventually relied on the support from any part of the community that supported the cause. The resilience was incredible to watch as the disabled community stood up for their civil rights just as any of us capable beings have. I am in complete awe. There was a woman in the film named Hollynn D’Lil who became a paraplegic after being run off the road by a truck in her early twenties that said “I had all the assumptions and prejudices that people have about people with disabilities and about disabilities” prior to her accident and it struck me because it took me back to the intersectionality of Patriarchy and oppression that seem to be ingrained in us subconsciously from a young age and again I wonder “why are these the things we’re taught?!”.
I think the best, most realistic way I can begin engaging in activism in regards to gender justice is to speak up now that I have a better understanding and knowledge about it. Even when confronted with a seemingly basic scenario, staying quiet after knowing would just be a way in which I choose to partake in the oppression of my siblings willingly. I feel like in daily settings with family, friends, even strangers, these conversations come up and comments are always made that prior to really engaging in this material would keep me silent or indifferent. I want to challenge myself to feel the right to state what I now know because I also understand the importance of this knowledge being spread instead of all the convenient misinformation so many choose to believe.