By 2017 Pro Bono Publico Award Winner: Lydia X.Z. Brown| Northeastern University School of Law

Each year, NALP confers the PSJD Pro Bono Publico Award, recognizing the significant contributions that law students make to underserved populations, the public interest community, and legal education by performing pro bono work.

Lydia’s record advocating for individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and people of color extends across the country and begins well before law school. We are honored to confer our 2017 award upon Lydia.

When I was in tenth grade, I was an awkward, openly autistic kid who wrote crime fiction and obsessed about historical and current injustices and mass atrocities. Within two months of starting the school year, I found myself across a table from a school administrator, falsely accused of planning a school shooting.

I was incredibly lucky, likely thanks to various privileges I hold in society, that I did not begin that year in handcuffs or with criminal charges pending. Other autistic and mentally ill people I’ve met, especially Black and Latinx autistic and mentally ill people, were not so lucky.

Our schools often function as the first site where multiply marginalized young people will be criminalized and shut out. We learn terrible lessons – that teachers can be bullies as much as classmates, that we will be punished if we fight back, that our bodies are not our own, that if we do not or cannot assimilate into whiteness or abledness then we will be easy targets for any form of violence up to and including death.

Advocacy for education reform, criminal justice reform, and gun violence prevention are all too frequently led by people who have never been and will never be directly impacted by the worst effects of ableism, classism, and racism that underlie and pervade the entirety of our educational, foster, and criminal punishment systems. Because law school is designed to admit only those who can excel according to capitalist standards meant for nondisabled, white, and moneyed individuals, and bar exams exist to further that elitism and exclusion, few attorneys have survived the worst effects of schools, institutions, or prisons.

I have learned that without a law degree, others can dismiss my perspectives as my personal experiences as a queer disabled person of color with no relevant expertise, education, or training. Once I graduate, I will be told that my perspective does not matter because if I have a law degree, I can’t really count as a disabled person since disabled people couldn’t possibly succeed in the legal profession.

In almost a decade of work for disability rights and disability justice (these are not the same), I have learned that every single person has something to contribute to the struggles against oppression in its many forms – even if that contribution is merely existing. My contributions are my own experiences along with my commitment to uplifting and supporting the work of others, especially those who are targeted or marginalized by forms of oppression I don’t face, in crafting truly intersectional approaches to organizing, advocacy, and activism.

When Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, professor of law at Stanford, introduced the term intersectionality to public discourse with her paper Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color, she intended its starting point to be recognizing unique and specific forms of oppression particularly targeting Black woman – later named misogynoir by Northeastern scholar Moya Bailey. Professor Crenshaw, Dr. Bailey, and others have expanded that work by deploying intersectionality as a framework for understanding compounded and particularized oppression as well as responses and challenges to it.

Intersectional approaches to gun violence, for example, require a deep understanding of racism and ableism. Most mass shooters have been white men, many with histories of domestic violence or other intimate partner abuse. Many have been openly white supremacist, including the attacker who targeted worshippers at a historical Black church in South Carolina, and the attacker who recently targeted students at a Florida high school. Yet prevailing media narratives have been of troubled individuals with histories of mental illness or speculation about autism – allowing whiteness to go unchecked and white supremacy and misogyny to remain unnamed, while ableism proliferates.

“Common sense” gun control measures, as advocated mostly by supposed “progressives,” rely almost entirely on racist and ableist measures. Increasing use of criminal background checks to screen potential gun buyers only relies on the exceedingly racist criminal punishment system to determine who has been appropriately convicted of crimes and should thus be denied a right allegedly meant for the people. Similarly, increased use of mental health screenings, and connections between mental health policy and gun policy, target those of us who seem weird, placing neurodivergent people of all kinds at heightened risk for dangerous surveillance and criminalization. (The conversation of whether the Second Amendment should or should not exist is a separate question; as written, gun ownership is considered a fundamental right alongside the rights to vote, marry, and travel between states. Erosion of one fundamental right based on spurious racial and disability biases raises the not so distant specter of further erosion of other fundamental rights, with less fanfare and sparse resistance.)

Disability rights demands that we craft policies that rely on documented histories, including criminal records, for specific factors like domestic violence, as a screening measure against gun ownership; demand policymakers to cease placing mental health reform and gun violence prevention in the same conversations, even when discussing suicide (which is not a violence problem, like small-scale or large-scale shootings targeting others); and incentivize voluntary and civilly administered gun buyback and temporary surrender programs that do not share data with entities in the criminal legal system or carry broader civil rights and civil liberties implications including those related to institutionalization.

In contrast, disability justice demands that we address the core societal causes of widespread gun violence (and other forms of mass violence that do not involve guns, including rape culture, restraints and seclusions in schools, and mass incarceration) – white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and patriarchal misogyny (gender oppression and male dominance). Disability justice is inherently intersectional, and understands our work as intricately connected with all movements for liberation and justice, because disability is implicated in every form of oppression. Disability justice looks beyond and past the law for liberation – fighting for life, love, and freedom by building strong communities with survivor-centric transformative justice practices where violence is no longer normalized in any form, whether by individuals or the state. Unlike disability rights, which is ultimately about harm reduction and immediate survival, disability justice asks us to begin building the world and future we want now through crafting alternative systems within communities – looking to the history of radical resistance by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in everything from providing healthcare to defending Black communities against white supremacist forces (and similar work by the contemporary Food, Clothing, and Resistance Collective in D.C.); looking to the path-breaking work the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective is doing in developing concrete accountability practices for redress, restitution, and reparations especially around sexual violence that do not rely on the criminal punishment system as a model for response to violence; or looking to the work of intellectual disability self-advocacy and peer/consumer/survivor respite, services, and support outside of conventional disability and mental health services systems led and controlled by nondisabled and neurotypical people.

As a disabled law student, advocate, and organizer, I have carried these principles with me into everything I do. Whether providing direct assistance and support to other marginalized people, testifying about legislative and regulatory proposals, or writing and speaking in various forums, I strive to use whatever resources I have to challenge injustice in all of its forms. I harbor no illusions that I can end systems of violence alone (for one, I believe in collective work for collective liberation), but I know that whatever I do I will always seek to amplify the work of others like me who know what it means to exist at the margins. I do not envision having clients as an attorney, but having collaborators and comrades, trusting in the wisdom and knowledge of those I work with every day to help lead us to the liberation we seek.