Nas

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background........Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again." How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice

“No, I mean to the other place. The next place. I don't think I'll make it. I don't think you'll find me there." . . . "Listen to me." Baba held on to his arm. "You could never be more wrong, Amar. We taught you one way, but there could be others. We don't even know, even we can only hope. How many names are there for God?"
"Ninety-nine."
"Some contradict each other, remember? Didn't you just say to me--what if this is meant to show us more? What if we are meant to look closer?" . . .
"We will wait until you are allowed in," Baba said, as if to himself. "I will wait."
Baba pointed at the sky, and Amar looked, past the stars and past the lighter patch of the Milky Way, past the moon, and maybe God was there and maybe God wasn't, but when Baba said to him, "I don't think He created us just to leave some of us behind," Amar believed him. Amar wanted to.”
― Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us

“Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?”
― Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice