Center for Racial and Disability Justice

09/25/2026

CRDJ strongly supports the vision shared by our peers at Disability Culture Lab and its insistence that disabled people deserve more than survival, accommodation, or inclusion within unjust systems. We share its commitment to collective liberation, leadership by those most impacted, cross-movement solidarity, and recognition that racism, capitalism, colonialism, state violence, and other forms of oppression are themselves disabling. These principles are central to CRDJ’s work connecting racial and disability justice across law, policy, research, and community-led action.

The memo also offers something needed in this moment: a vision expansive enough to name the violence disabled people face while directing us toward interdependence, autonomy, repair, material security, and joy. We are especially encouraged by its call to embed disability justice throughout every movement for social change.

CRDJ welcomes this invitation to build beyond fragmented rights and isolated reforms toward communities and institutions in which everyone can belong, lead, and thrive.

Disability Community + MovementNorth Star Memo We are living through overlapping crises that threaten the very fabric of our democracy, our freedom, our health, and our lives. Yet disabled people — who have long navigated, resisted, and reimagined systems that were not built for us — are too oft...

09/25/2026

Music has always traveled beyond the borders drawn around us.

For Hispanic Heritage Month, our latest CRDJams playlist, Sin Fronteras, moves across countries, generations, and genres to explore the sounds through which Latin American and Latine communities have remembered, resisted, migrated, belonged, and imagined otherwise.

From Indigenous resistance and the songs of the Chicano Movement to Nuyorican salsa, son jarocho, hip-hop, Afro-Latino traditions, and contemporary anthems, Sin Fronteras brings together music shaped by struggles over land, labor, migration, colonialism, racial and gender justice, and cultural sovereignty. These histories also shape experiences of disability and access, from the conditions of labor and migration to the borders, institutions, and environments that determine whose bodies can move freely, safely, and with dignity.

Disability Justice reminds us that liberation is interdependent. Resistance is not expressed through protest alone. It also lives in the languages we preserve, the rhythms that cross borders with us, the histories we refuse to forget, and the joy communities create and carry forward.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, Sin Fronteras celebrates a heritage that has never been contained by a border. 🎧 Listen now on our CRDJ YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJjsi4CAikpw&si=0PpSETqTvOvdl9fP

09/07/2026

is often a celebration of workers. This year, we are also asking: What is work allowed to demand from us?

Research on disability and labor reminds us that “ability to work” has never been a neutral category. Labor systems have helped define whose bodies are productive, employable, dependent, or disposable—and racialized workers have disproportionately borne the injuries, illnesses, exhaustion, environmental exposures, and instability those systems produce.

That history feels especially important right now. Public support for unions is near historic highs even as federal labor protections are under attack. In California, workers are continuing to organize—and some of the most important fights concern staffing, heat, scheduling, care, immigration, surveillance, AI, job security, and control over the pace of work. These may not always be described as disability struggles. But they are struggles over human capacity, bodily autonomy, care, and who bears the costs of work.

This Labor Day is also meaningful for us at CRDJ because our staff recently became members of UAW 4811 at UCLA. Recent UAW 4811 wins remind us what becomes possible when workers move questions of flexibility, security, healthcare, caregiving, immigration, and workplace power out of the realm of individual negotiation and into collective action.

Disability justice has something important to offer the labor movement—not simply a call to include more disabled workers, but a challenge to rethink what worker power is for. And labor organizing has something equally important to offer disability justice: a way to turn demands for access, care, safety, and bodily autonomy into collective power over the institutions that structure our lives. The movements are closer than we sometimes imagine.

This Labor Day, we are interested in what becomes possible when we organize that way.

09/04/2026

What does freedom look like when disabled people help define it?

As the United States reflects on 250 years, CRDJ's Declaration of Interdependence invites disabled people, disability communities, organizations, and collectives to help imagine the next 250 years of disability freedom and liberation.

Add your voice. Share your perspective. Help write what comes next.

🔗 Link: Padlet.com/crdjustice/interdependence

08/27/2026

Black August is rooted in remembrance, political education, resistance, and Black liberation. This Black August, we’re using DisCrit to look at how racism and ableism shape who is surveilled, punished, segregated, and confined, and what abolition asks us to build instead.

Abolition is not just about dismantling systems of confinement. It is also about building the conditions people need to live, move, learn, communicate, and thrive with access to care, resources, and community-based supports.

Study. Resist. Build. Abolish.

Check out the full carousel with the embedded links at tinyurl.com/BlackAugust-CRDJ.

08/24/2026

Professor Jason Arday was more than the headlines surrounding his death. He was a Black autistic sociologist whose work examined racism, neurodivergence, inequality, mental health, and belonging in higher education.

As calls for accountability continue, the conversation cannot stop with the media. Academia must also confront the racism and ableism embedded in its own norms, structures, and ideas of merit and belonging.

We’re also amplifying actions shared by Everyday Racism and Everything Good About Jason Arday, a student-created collection of memories from people who knew and learned from him.

Remember the work. Carry it forward.

Check out the full carousel with the embedded video and links at https://canva.link/xz2np7pcmcul07w

08/17/2026

Disabled people belong in our communities, not institutions.

CRDJ joined California organizations in a letter calling on Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta to publicly affirm California’s support for Olmstead and the integration mandate under the ADA and Section 504.

In June, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo challenging the longstanding federal understanding of the integration mandate under the ADA and Section 504. The memo reflects a significant shift from the position DOJ advanced in Olmstead and continued to enforce in the decades that followed.

At a moment when the federal government is retreating from its longstanding position on community integration, states must make clear where they stand.

The letter calls on Governor Newsom and Attorney General Bonta to affirm the Commitment to Community Integration for People with Disabilities and publicly affirm California’s support for Olmstead and the integration mandate.

Thank you to Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF) for organizing this letter and sign-on effort.

Disabled people must be able to live, work, and participate in their communities. We cannot go backward.

Read the letter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DyyWcSnVDjNIngGhMSpH_Sa4Ov-GHl4Cs0TSHLpz2Ao/edit?tab=t.0

August 11, 2026 Governor Gavin Newsom 1021 O Street, Suite 9000 Sacramento, CA 95814 Dear Governor Newsom: As you likely know, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel recently issued a memo stating, essentially, that there is no integration mandate for people with disabilitie...

08/14/2026

Show you care by sharing some spoons today with this playlist. 🥄

Our latest CRDJams turns up the volume on rest, joy, movement, resistance, recovery, and everything in between. Rooted in the disability community’s language of "spoons,” a way of naming the finite energy we carry through our days, Spoons in Stereo is a soundtrack for moving at your own rhythm and honoring the energy you have.

Listen now: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEJE2Vmxy7vA

08/14/2026

Show you care by sharing some spoons today with this playlist. 🥄

Our latest CRDJams turns up the volume on rest, joy, movement, resistance, recovery, and everything in between. Rooted in the disability community’s language of “spoons,” a way of naming the finite energy we carry through our days, Spoons in Stereo is a soundtrack for moving at your own rhythm and honoring the energy you have.

Listen now on our YouTube Center for Racial and Disability Justice

08/07/2026

As we reflect on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, it's worth remembering that protecting the right to vote also means protecting the conditions that make political participation possible.

Our Political Disablement brief examines how exclusion has evolved, and why disability justice is essential to the future of American democracy.

Read the brief: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6914478

Voting rights are not only about access to the ballot. They are about access to power.

In "Political Disablement: The Modernization of Exclusion in American Democracy," Dr. Kate Caldwell examines how law, maps, paperwork, databases, access barriers, and constitutional doctrine are modernizing political disablement and weakening the collective political power of racialized disabled communities.

The brief argues that today’s attacks on voting rights do not simply create barriers. They preserve formal rights while stripping away the conditions that make political participation meaningful, making some communities harder to recognize, count, represent, and protect.

Access is not charity. Accommodation is not exception. Representation is not symbolism. Remedies are not threats. They are the infrastructure of democratic power.

Read the full brief at CRDJustice.org/resources.