The Labs for Liberation fellows are exploring how ideas about disability and race can better inform how we think about design and technology. They will examine these intersections through blog posts throughout the year. In this year’s first blog post, LJ Jaffee explores the concept of “access-washing.” Access is usually considered the goal of disability rights and politics. But disability justice organizers, such as Stacey Park Milbern, have critiqued the way that the concept of “access” can also be used to justify violence against disabled and marginalized people. Access-washing is the first of many terms in “Critical Access Studies” that the fellows will explore.
I started grad school in 2014 at a university renowned for its disability studies program and disability rights history. My first semester coincided with the tenure of a new chancellor, and across campus, I was witnessing deepening ties to the military and defense contractors. Given that war is one of the greatest producers of disability globally, this struck me as paradoxical. I wanted language to make sense of my surroundings, but at that time, disability studies hardly engaged with feminist analyses of settler-colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and militarism (the work of Nirmala Erevelles and Jasbir Puar being notable exceptions). I started using “access-washing” to name this paradox.
The concept of access-washing has been useful for many disability scholars and activists because it names how access—the goal of disability rights—may sometimes be used to harm disabled people. This term is most often associated with the late disability justice activist Stacey Park Milbern, who described access-washing as “leveraging ‘accessibility’ as justification to harm communities of color and poor & working-class communities” (2019). Independently, I began using access-washing in 2017 to describe the deployment of accessibility rhetoric by settler states (and their institutions, like universities). Settler states, such as the U.S., Israel, Canada, and Australia, are sovereign nation-states politically dominated by migrant settlers rather than peoples indigenous to that land. My work shows that settler states rely on access-washing to repel criticism of their colonial violence and maintain control of stolen land.
Access for Whom?
Access-washing, as an analytic lens, grew out of the work of disability justice organizers. Disability justice is an anti-capitalist framework theorized by U.S.-based queer and trans disabled folks of color. Disability justice is rooted in an understanding that disabled peoples’ experiences of the world and of ableism are shaped by the interplay of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, citizenship-status, and religion. Because capitalist states differentially recognize/value disabled people along these lines, disability justice organizers emphasize that securing civil and legal rights through the state— the focus of the disability rights movement in the U.S.— is a limited strategy that mostly works for disabled people with relative power. For example, undocumented disabled people cannot rely on the state to protect their disability rights because the state does not even recognize their right to exist within its borders.
Drawing from the work of disability justice organizers, I use access-washing to “name the ways in which relatively privileged—often white, global Northern, cisgender—disabled groups are made hyper-visible to obscure structural forces that produce disability unevenly among populations, and particularly among the most marginalized disabled folks—Indigenous, Black, global South, trans” (Jaffee & Sheehi, 2024). This definition of access-washing complements and builds on Milbern’s definition by highlighting how accessibility is leveraged on a global scale. At the level of nation-states, access-washing can mask the power dynamic between occupied and occupier, colonized and colonizer, Indigenous and settler.
The concept of access-washing builds on the work of queer organizers who coined the term “pinkwashing.” Pinkwashing describes the use of LGBT-friendly messaging by countries or companies as a public relations tactic. Naming pinkwashing challenges the way that gay rights are used to absolve nation-states of accountability for state violence (the use of force or oppression by states to subjugate people). For example, the Bay Area group Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT) used the term in 2010 to describe state-funded propaganda to market Israel as a haven for gays and lesbians, part of a strategy to brand itself as tolerant and cover up Israel’s violence against Palestinians. Because Israel is dependent on U.S. economic and political support, access-washing— like pink-washing— helps boost Israel’s projected image to a U.S audience as being “just like us” (that is, benevolent/modern/moral/civilized/democratic).
Focusing on U.S. higher education as a site for stabilizing U.S. empire, my research explores the shifting historical and economic conditions that gave way to access-washing, the implications of presuming access is a self-evident good (see Hamraie’s, Building Access), and what we can learn from anti-imperialist and decolonial movements that value collective access over a view of access as something granted to “worthy” individuals by the state.
Access to What?
On World Autism Day, on April 2, 2024— one day after Israel killed 7 World Central Kitchen aid workers, when Israel had already killed an estimated 32,916 Palestinians and disabled untold numbers more— the organization Friends of the IDF (FIDF) tweeted, “FIDF’s Spectrum of Talent program is a trailblazer for inclusivity within the IDF. On #WorldAutismDay, we thank all soldiers for their courage, resolve, and dedication, with special acknowledgement to the power of talent and diversity.” The Israeli military is projecting an image as a leader in disability rights by advertising a program that grants Autistic Israelis access (here, to the military). What’s left out of the story is that disabled Israeli settlers’ access comes at the expense of Palestinians, who are systematically denied access to their own land (through Israel’s checkpoint system, apartheid walls, and ID system, among other means). Media coverage of Israel’s multiple programs for including Autistic Israelis in the IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces) consistently emphasizes Autistic soldiers’ visual-spatial perception as advantageous for analyzing drone footage and satellite images during Israeli incursions. Access-washing, here, reduces disability to a tactical advantage for land theft carried out by the military. In colonial contexts, access-washing is about land, and securing control of it.
The flip side of the hypervisibility of disability that access-washing creates in one instance is the invisibility of disability in another. Through access-washing, the Israeli military is attempting to hide the disabling of Palestinians en masse as part of Israel’s genocidal land grab. The maiming/disabling of Palestinians is a longstanding colonial tactic to quash Palestinian resistance, as in Rabin’s “Broken Bones” policy directing the IOF to break the limbs of Palestinian protestors during the First Intifada. More recently, Israel’s access-washing attempts to cover up record amputations among Palestinian children in Gaza (many without anesthesia because of Israel’s blockade), a disabling polio outbreak precipitated by Israeli attacks on Gaza’s sanitation infrastructure, and targeted attacks on Palestinian healthcare workers and infrastructure that lay groundwork for rampant spread of disease.
The Antithesis of Disability Justice
Mainstream approaches to access within the global North treat states (or state institutions) as the granters of access, ignoring that settler states are founded on denying access (to land, paid labor, education, healthcare, etc.) to many. Access-washing builds on critical work by disabled writers and organizers who name the limits of a disability rights approach that appeals to nation-states to enable, facilitate, or protect access for disabled people (e.g., the late Marta Russell’s work on capitalism, disability, and the limits of civil rights legislation; Jen Deerinwater’s (Cherokee Nation) work on the impossibility of attaining justice through policy change under a settler regime that structurally disables Native peoples; Aimi Hamraie’s work critically historicizing the post-WWII national project that made white, middle-class veterans disabled by war politically legible under the pretense of “access for all;” and my work with co-author Kelsey Dayle John (Diné) insisting that decolonization demands some spaces be inaccessible to settlers, as settler conceptions of access can undermine Indigenous sovereignty). Like disability justice, the framework of access-washing challenges liberal notions of access in disability rights and disability studies that assume that with the right laws in place, the state will protect disabled people. Access-washing is a reminder that settler-capitalist states will only ever recognize some as people who could be worthy of access. As Milbern put it, “access-washing is the antithesis to disability justice.”
Further Reading/Listening
Ben-Moshe & Harris (2024). Pathologizing Palestinian Resistance. Death Panel Podcast.
Cowling, J. L. (2020). Occupied Land is an Access Issue: Interventions in Feminist
Disability Studies and Narratives of Indigenous Activism. Journal of Feminist Scholarship.
Jaffee & John (2018). Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Conversation with Indigenous Theory and Activism. Disability and the Global South.
Jaffee & Sheehi (2024). Disrupting Fixity: Palestine as Central to Decolonial Disability Justice. Review of Disability Studies.
Milbern (2020). Notes on “Access Washing.” Disability Justice Network of Ontario.
Piepzna-Samarsinha, L. (2024). Palestine is Disabled. Disability Visibility Project.
Puar, J. (2017). The Right to Maim. Duke University Press.
Russell, M. (2002). What Disability Civil Rights Cannot Do: Employment and political economy. Disability & Society.
Snounu, Smith, & Bishop (2019). Disability, the Politics of Maiming, and Higher Education in Palestine. Disability Studies Quarterly.
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