The Pandemic Tried to Break Me, but I Know My Black Disabled Life Is Worthy

As a Black disabled woman, I spent most of my childhood and adolescence compromising my wants and needs to fit into a society designed to exclude me. But with age and experience came the realization that I, too, am worthy of respect and compassion. From then on, self-love became nonnegotionable. Or at least, I thought it had.

Then last January, Rochelle Walensky, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Good Morning America viewers that she and her colleagues were “really encouraged” by the findings of a recent study on vaccinated people. (A YouTube video of this interview has since been made private.) “The overwhelming number of deaths—over 75 percent—occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with—and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron,” she said.

Dr. Walensky’s seemingly celebratory comments softened my hard-earned resolve and knocked me back to the spring of 2020, when it became clear that many communities and institutions were unwilling or unequipped to protect or save people like me. Since the start of the pandemic, unabashed ableism has run rampant among public health officials, the government, and social media. Although people with disabilities of the mind and body have historically faced marginalization, exclusion, and oppression long before now, COVID-19 and the subsequent safety guidelines have made overt the long-standing institutional and systemic inequalities that span across our culture, from the medical system to workplace policies. These complexities are exacerbated when race and other marginalized identities come into play, particularly for Black disabled people, as we also face racial health disparities, like the disproportionate misdiagnoses of Black people due to culturally insensitive medical education.

To challenge the stigma and oppression inflamed by the pandemic and reflected in Dr. Walensky’s ableist comments, I kick-started a conversation on Twitter by coining the hashtag #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthy. Thousands of disabled people lent their voices under the tag.

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