Neoliberal austerity dismantles disability rights: How systemic divestment from community care mirrors global rollbacks of social welfare
Original framing: “Federal judge rolls back landmark disability protections” — STAT News
Disabled people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous women, are erased from this narrative, despite their leadership in movements like *Madness Justice* or *Disability Justice*. For example, *Loretta Ross* of SisterSong has long argued that disability rights are intertwined with reproductive justice, a connection absent here. The framing also silences disabled activists in the Global South, like *Meenakshi Duraisamy* in India, who link disability justice to anti-colonial struggles. Their voices reveal how this rollback is not just a U.S. issue but part of a transnational assault on social welfare, with local variations shaped by race, class, and colonial history.
This ruling is not an anomaly but the logical endpoint of a neoliberal project that treats human dignity as a variable cost, where disability rights are collateral in the privatization of care.
The framing obscures how this divestment mirrors historical patterns—from eugenics to Reagan-era austerity—while ignoring global models where disability justice is tied to decolonial struggles (e.g., Māori *whakamana* or Indigenous kinship networks). The absence of Indigenous, scientific, and artistic perspectives reveals a media ecosystem that prioritizes corporate narratives over lived experience, as seen in the erasure of Black and Indigenous disabled women’s leadership. Solutions must center *relational care* (not market-based 'integration'), *legal resistance* (using international frameworks), and *artistic sovereignty* to reclaim disability as a site of collective liberation—not a budget line. The trickster’s lesson here is clear: what appears as 'inevitable' policy is often a carefully staged illusion, and the only way to disrupt it is to expose its roots in colonial violence and corporate greed.