Lydia XZ Brown: Dreaming Disability Justice into Our Future

Lydia XZ Brown ( / autistichoya ) provides a compelling and inspiring narrative on how we can make disability justice a reality through our words and actions, and how disability justice is grounded in the intersectional work of feminism, LGBTQ+ activism, racial justice, and more.
This speech was the closing keynote for the 28th annual Colorado Youth Diversity Conference on Sunday, January 31, 2021. The event was organized by teens through the non-profit Youth Celebrate Diversity, and was presented by RBC Wealth Management, with additional support from Boeing, the Cherry Creek School District, and Colorado State University. This video includes ASL interpretation.
If you are a teen interested in inclusion, social justice, and activism, find out how you can get involved in this work with other teens by visiting ycdiversity.org.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lydia X. Z. Brown (they/them) is a disability justice advocate, organizer, educator, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work has largely focused on violence against multiply-marginalized disabled people, especially institutionalization, incarceration, and policing.
They have worked to advance transformative change through organizing in the streets, writing legislation, conducting anti-ableism workshops, testifying at regulatory and policy hearings, and disrupting institutional complacency everywhere from the academy to state agencies and the nonprofit-industrial complex.
Lydia co-leads the project on disability rights and algorithmic fairness at the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, and teaches for Georgetown University’s Disability Studies Program.
In collaboration with others, Lydia is co-editor and visionary behind All the Weight of Our Dreams, the first-ever anthology of writings and artwork by autistic people of color and otherwise negatively racialized autistic people.
They have been honored by the White House, Washington Peace Center, National Council on Independent Living, Disability Policy Consortium of Massachusetts, National Association for Law Placement/Public Service Jobs Directory, Society for Disability Studies, and American Association of People with Disabilities.
Lydia graduated from Northeastern University School of Law as a Public Interest Law Scholar.
#disabilityjustice #socialjustice #teenactivism #studentactivism #colorado #takeoffyourmentalmask

[@preciousgauthier1110]

Amazing so grateful I got to see your talk!

[@donnaparks1919]

In berryville arkansas where can I get council ? On disability can't get help with my disabilities. I don't fall into there requirements severely dyslexic half blind and more.

[@pesquer2211]

My reading of ‘Cynical Theories’ by James Lindsay led me here. I can now see how the ideas presented here by Brown are integrated and inseparable from Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, but especially Queer Theory. which themselves are products of a mix between postmodernism and neomarxism. Disability studies is part of a whole package of ideas that threatens the liberal principles upon which the civil rights movement stood. I urge viewers of this video to not tie its ideas at face value but to research their origin…please. Liberal democracy needs educated generations.