Being Black & Disabled: An Advocate's Perspective

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. When Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, it changed how we thought about oppression. No longer were people just Black or just disabled or just a woman. Our lives exist at the crossroads of many facets of identity. For Canadians who are Black and disabled, there is a need for dedicated programs and services which address this complex intersectional lived reality. After the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, there were urgent conversations about race relations and especially anti-Black racism. But we must go deeper. After all, if one is Black and disabled, they live on the margins of the margins. Today we discuss the advocacy aspect of being Black and disabled. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta joining you from the Accessible Media studios in Toronto. We've been covering over the last few episodes, various perspectives and points of view on being Black and disabled, hearing from a number of different voices, all Canadian. We started with Tina Opaleke, who was a parent and talked about her journey, navigating the healthcare system with her small child, and also did an amazing spoken word piece that I would encourage you to check out. That was also my conversation with De-Lawrence Lamptey, who is the inaugural EMBARK scholar at Holland Bloorview Rehab Hospital, and who intends to found in that capacity READ the Race, Ethnicity, And Disability lab. We're building on those previous conversations with my guest today. My guest today is Liza Arnason. Lisa is the founder and chairperson for ACE Community Foundation for Black Canadians with Disabilities.
She talks to me about the role of the foundation, some of their work, including research and advocacy. They are creating the country's first-ever Black Accessible Knowledge Hub, which will be going live as early as this April. Liza shares her journey and why it's so important for Black Canadians with Disabilities to have not only a seat at a table, but a voice that makes a difference. So I hope you'll tune in to hear Liza. She is someone who does a lot of talking. She loves to talk and has amazing analysis and insight into why it's so important for Black people with disabilities, especially Black youth with disabilities, to get involved and make a difference. Liza, hello and welcome to The Pulse. I'm so happy to have you in the program.

Liza Arnason:
Bonjour and thank you for having me this morning. It's nice and bright here in Toronto.

Joeita Gupta:
It's a beautiful day in Toronto, that's for sure. Tell me a little bit about what the word ASE means?

Liza Arnason:
May I just start with, I'm a light-skinned Black woman. I love purple, so I'm wearing purple glasses. I have my hair short and curly, and I have a little broader nose for those. What does ASE mean? The ASE Community Foundation for Black Canadians with Disabilities, also known as The ASE Community. It means the word itself is a Yoruba word that is ancient meaning as well as meaning today. Yoruba is an African is in Nigeria, and it means the essence of the mind to manifest something into existence. It means, so you say it will be ASE, almost like an Amen, an affirmation. And when we were thinking about this and looking at the barriers and the discrepancies that we endure either through disability-led organizations or other organizations that don't understand disability or Blackness, we realize we have to make this happen and is by all means, it will happen. All means it will happen. So ASE.

Joeita Gupta:
Tell me a little bit about some of the work that the ASE Community Foundation does.

Liza Arnason:
Well, we are primarily a volunteer organization right now and always looking for funding and support to give, to pay and pay equitably Black people with disabilities who are contributing to this work. So what we do specifically is at the core, our mission is to eradicate anti-Black racism, ableism and gender discrimination and gender-based violence, making it a fair and free community for everyone across the board. So we have strategic priorities, and those strategic priorities start with one that we're launching this month in March. So please look out for us. We've been working on the first national Black Accessibility Knowledge Hub in Canada, and this is going to house Black focused, racialized-focused disability lens disability service directory, disability resources, and then also a searchable research policy knowledge catalogue. So we're looking for submissions, but we're also going to be open for anyone, and it's free for everyone.
The purpose of this is again, to consolidate all the knowledges, all the services so Black people or racialized people are looking for a culturally relevant psychiatrist or psychologist or nutritionist or dietician or they don't know how to apply for the disability tax credit. All of that information will be there, including research, which is another category that ASE community is involved with. We've done one particular one with Employment and Social Development Canada, the disability inclusion unit, social inclusion unit on the capacity building of the research project on the capacity building of racialized and Black community organizations led by Black and racialized people with disabilities. So that was core and what it did is it not only found many of the gaps in the experiences of people like me who lead organizations either off their tables in their kitchens or wherever they are like us, but we found them across Canada.
We are there, we do exist. We're just not heavily funded. And so we wrote some engagement strategies, what others would call recommendations to the government on how to engage with our population and how to include us in their work and their policy and their funding criterias. The next thing we work on is knowledge platform. So you're going to see as well a national Black Accessibility Coalition collective. Whatever we come up with, it will be, and it will house our youth coalition of Black Youth with Disabilities, which already exist, and it will house a research collective of people doing this type of work. And it will house Black people with disabilities across Canada in the territories where they can have their voices heard and brought to the forefront instead of maybe being asked at the end of a research project or a policy review. "What do you think?"
And then we also have youth initiatives, which I spoke about the coalition, but we also have an annual Black Youth Disability Summit for three days at the end of August. Anybody's welcome, everybody attends. We just make sure that we talk about the intersection of race and disability and the resources that are available. So we do a variety of things. Everything is at the point of making sure that our voices are heard, that we are seen as people, not just within the disability movement as we have been on the peripheral and we continue to be on the peripheral, not invited to the room, even to the point of being told at a major event, "It's a fire code violation why you can't join our coalition."
Now for people who are racialized or Black or indigenous, we've heard this before, it comes in many different forms and always said, "It's too small. There's not enough space. You have to be on the list," blah, blah, blah. And this is from leading disability organizations in Canada. That's why we exist because at the moment, it's not even about adding a chair to the table. It's about even finding out where the meaning is and getting the code to be selected to be on a list to make decisions. And that's what we found when we went across Canada with the Black and racialized led organizations, led by people with disabilities, is that we are not in the conversation. And also, many times, even organizations that are leading in disability themselves, their boards or their organizations are not led by the lived experience of people, persons with disabilities and definitely not led by Black, indigenous or racialized people with disabilities, even though they add intersectionality to their tag.
And then they hire a few lower level precarious staff that are racialized, maybe disabled, and they add that and they throw somebody on their board that doesn't have power and then they claim intersectionality. So you use that term earlier about intersectionality and Kimberle Crenshaw, I want to bring everybody back to one of the major influencers in my life. I'm 53 years old, so when I was growing up in Calgary, Alberta and went to the University of Calgary, one of the maybe less than 20 Black people at all in the institution at the time, in the '80s, in the early '90s, I came across somebody called, oh my gosh, how can I not Audre Lorde and if no-

Joeita Gupta:
She's amazing.

Liza Arnason:
Oh, Joeita, what happened? I think I saw something happen. If I say Audre Lorde, what do you say?

Joeita Gupta:
Oh, she's just, just amazing. Amazing.

Liza Arnason:
Yes. If people were to saying we weren't talking about intersectionality back then, we were... She talked about intersectionality. She talked about that in all of her work as a queer Black woman, which was excluded. But every once in a while included in the women's movement. And if you want to read something that's very interesting enough, look, it's on my desk.

Joeita Gupta:
The Master's Tools Will Never Destroy The Master's House. That was Audre Lorde's seminal work.

Liza Arnason:
If you get this book. It was a speech that she recreated at a women's conference and that she had no play. They invited her but had no interest in doing anything different. And she changed up what she was going to say. And she said this, it ended up being published. And if you understand what someone might say, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House. And you have an understanding of what Black Lives Matter is talking about. What Idle No More is talking about, what warriors trying to eradicate the histories and the systems and structures that were built off colonialism. So we work within a disability justice framework. We work within Black feminism and we work within an adapted version of critical race theory with the hope that we will be able to create a framework on Black disability studies or Black disability work.
We haven't know what that will be, but that's where we're like to be. That's who, that's what we do. And we advocate, we attend meetings, we sit on panels, we sit on things that they invite us to. We sit there where they don't invite us to. I did invite myself to the room that was a fire code violation. "You're not on the list." I invited myself. I went in anyways and it wasn't pleasant. And as a Black woman who's lived with this her whole life, who cares if it's unpleasant for you because it's unpleasant for me all the time. And then we're talking about whiteness here. You can have a disability and not understand the Black experience or the racialized experience. And this takes us into this intersectional thing. You can be Black and not understand ableism and your own role in the taboo subject of disability within the Black and racialized or ethnic diasporas because we know disability means and acts differently based on where people come from, their culture, their language, their faith. And this is even makes it even more complicated for Black and racialized people with disabilities in this country.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you're planning to hold a conference for youth and you're doing a lot of research with youth. Why was it so important for ASE to have a focus on youth leadership?

Liza Arnason:
Oh, well, the first is youth are the ones that help build ASE. The majority of the board and the staff are actually youth with elders like myself and more in between. And I've been an assistant dean for students international and community at the University of Toronto Scarborough for a long time before I went on leave. And I value the energy, the passion, the intelligence, the talent of youth with disability, youth, Black youth. And then you realize that in you when I'm in this education system, you realize that youth with disabilities don't get those taps on the shoulders to join, to be research assistants to do this because somebody's already decided based on their disability, they won't be able to do it. So I always from, and I've worked at Ryerson, I've founded the Tri-Mentoring Program. Again, another program interested in doing the same thing.
And the idea is that youth have untapped talent, Black racialized people have untapped talent, persons with disabilities have untapped talent. I'm smart, basically. I know who to bring into the organization to get things done, to get ideas flowing because that's the group that does it because they have all the flexibility based on navigating all these systems that aren't set for them. Why did we choose youth? The youth chose as we built ASE. The youth was like, "We need to do an event," because so many youth don't know what we've taught them because we always do extensive training. And so we came up with the idea with youth that worked with us in the summer to do an annual summit. They organize it, they invite the professors, they invite the experts, they invite the keynotes, they organize the whole thing, and we support it through ASE.
And then from that, a year after that, they started still talking to student groups across Canada, Black student groups, student groups that work with disability talking to Needs, which became a really close community for us. And we realized that they needed a coalition. So they actually started with a student coalition and then this year changed it over to a youth coalition for people under 30. So again, this whole drive is driven by Black youth with disabilities. We also hire and part of youth who do are not Black but are also persons with disabilities. And so we really want to focus and we want to make space for our people, our young people, so they can build and grow as leaders and take up those space, those spaces of the deans or of the CEOs or of the person on the board or of the ED's of these organizations or of those policy advisors in the government.
I believe in pipelines. I believe in creating Black pipelines, Black women pipelines. I believe in creating persons with disabilities, racialized people, Black people, indigenous people with disabilities, pipelines. And unless we advocate for it, we will continue to be the number one group in Canada with the highest racial of unemployment and underemployment is Black people with disabilities off the Statcan statistics. And that is significant. And that's why we focus on young people and we use a mentoring, coaching champion, mothering, parenting, whatever model we can to make them understand the talents and the skills that they offer and we build on those skills.

Joeita Gupta:
We only have a few minutes left and I want to ask you about what in your life prompted you to found ASE? Because you've had many roles in your life and now you're an elder mentoring a lot of young people. What was that moment in your life where you said, "Liz, it's time to do something different?"

Liza Arnason:
It was forced on me, I'll be honest, anybody who's had a disability and hasn't told anybody ever that they had a disability, which is very common in the Black community and many other racialized communities as well. I did not tell anybody as the strong Black woman that I had disabilities for decades. And a few people knew, but I never asked for accommodations. After a significant surgery it triggered lots of other things, including chronic illness and posttraumatic stress. I asked for accommodations, was denied the accommodations. And it took me into big depression, basic, I would say a nervous breakdown of questioning who I was. I wasn't believed. And that is a experience that Black women have often when they approach help because it's seen as something other than that we need it because we don't look like it. We don't look, depression doesn't look the same for racialized women and Black women and indigenous women, the books and everything people have looked at, they were studied on white people.
So you don't know what it looks like for us. You don't know how we present. And unfortunately, while I was sitting at home feeling very sorry for myself and very angry all at the same time, I had this idea pop into my head. I called a colleague named Jheanelle Anderson and I, she herself, she's the vice chair and she has disabilities as well. And I said, "Hey, what do you think about this? Because every person I've spoken to that has a disability that's Black and particularly a woman, has had somewhat of the same experience regardless of where they were including in the Black community." So we said, "What do you think?" I said, "Okay." And one day God told me that the word ASE, I'd never heard it in my life. I looked it up, heard, saw what it was, got on the computer, registered the ASE Community Foundation for Black Canadians with Disabilities, and that was it. That was it. Now we've been doing it, this will be four years, three years, three and a bit incorporated.

Joeita Gupta:
That's amazing. You've, you've accomplished a lot in the last three-plus years and you are set to accomplish a great deal more in the years to come. If someone wants to contribute to, or even look at the Black Knowledge Hub, the accessible knowledge hub that we were talking about earlier in our conversation, where can they go?

Liza Arnason:
So the hub will be launched in March, so you can go there by April. But if you go to the asecommunityfoundation.com, you will find everything about us there. We will be switching over to a new website with the hub in March as well. But it's A-S-E-C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y-F-O-U-N-D-A-T-I-O-N.com. You can also email me. I love to chat by the way. So if anybody loves to talk, email me at lizarnasonconsulting.com. I've also had a consulting business for over 20 years, and feel free to reach out on LinkedIn, please come and join our group on LinkedIn and of course, find me on LinkedIn. We share a lot there.
We talk a lot of major issues that might just posted something about Spain giving sick days for menstrual time. And this is important because there's lots of health issues or disabilities related for women during these times and we're in the workforce, but it's never been considered. So these are the things I like. I want to press, press. I am an agitator and some people will roll their eyes in meetings. Some people will look away like, "Here she goes again." I don't care. So I'm going to keep talking.

Joeita Gupta:
Yeah, you're fighting the good fight. Liz, it's been such a pleasure speaking to you. It's never pained me more to say that we are almost out of time. I hope you'll come back. The foundation is doing such great work and I feel like this is the start of many conversations and I hope to have you back on the show. But thank you so much for speaking to us today.

Liza Arnason:
You are more than welcome. You have a wonderful day. Everyone have a wonderful day.

Joeita Gupta:
Lisa Arnason is the founder and chairperson for ASE Community Foundation for Black Canadians with Disabilities. You can always find their website. We'll put it in the description down below or contact Eliza by email. And of course, if you're a young person with a disability, I hope you will reach out, especially if you're Black and disabled and a young person that sounds like they're doing some great work and have lots of great programming and opportunities. So I hope you'll reach out to them.
We should probably wrap it up for today. This is about as much time as we have for the show. It's been great to be with you today. If you have any feedback for us, you can write to us at feedback@ami.ca or find us on Twitter @amiaudio. Use the #pulseami and you can also give us a call at 1-866-509-4545 and leave us a message along with your permission to play the audio on the program. Our videographer today has been Ted Cooper. Our technical producer is Marc Aflalo. Ryan Delehanty is podcast coordinator for AMI Audio. Andy Frank is the manager for AMI-audio. And I've been your host, Joeita Gupta. Thanks for listening.