Lydia X. Z. Brown
Lydia X. Z. Brown is an advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist, and writer. Their work focuses on addressing state and interpersonal violence targeting disabled people living at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. They are Policy Counsel for Disability Rights and Algorithmic Fairness for the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs for the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network.
Lydia currently serves as a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights, chairperson of the ABA Civil Rights and Social Justice Section’s Disability Rights Committee, and representative of the Disability Justice Committee to the National Lawyers Guild’s National Executive Committee. They also serve on the board of directors of the Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, and on advisory boards for organizations including the Transgender Law Center, The Kelsey, Borealis Philanthropy, the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy, the Nonbinary and Intersex Recognition Project, and the Vera Institute for Justice. They regularly provide consulting, training, and workshops to nonprofit organizations, services agencies, colleges and universities, and other programs and companies interested in radical access and inclusion.
Lydia founded the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment. They are currently creating their own tarot deck, Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. Lydia is Adjunct Lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University and Adjunct Professorial Lecturer in American Studies at American University’s Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. Previously, they taught at Tufts University as a Visiting Lecturer for the Experimental College. Often, their most important work has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.
Thursday, May 26, 2022 | 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM (CDT)
Disability Justice in the Movement for Racial Justice
Disability Justice is a radically intersectional framework necessary to sharpen our political analysis, clarify our demands, and shape our everyday activism and organizing practice. Disability Justice offers radical and revolutionary ways of reimagining our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the communities where we live, work, and learn. During the global COVID-19 pandemic, Disability Justice offers urgent and vital interventions for addressing and ending the myriad harms of race science/eugenics, the medical/carceral industrial complex, and capitalist oppression. Disability Justice enables us to understand and examine interpersonal, systemic, structural, and institutional ableism and its intersections via legacies of pathologization with queermisia and transmisia, capitalism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy. Disabled people at the margins of the margins have always been at the forefront of movements for justice and freedom, building networks of care and solidarity, and creating social and cultural transformations that enable us to experience rest and practice active love as co-teachers and co-learners.
