 Hello, this is Sarah Bays, Communication Director at A&E Shiraya. I have the pleasure to introduce Dr. Dennis Tyler. Dr. Tyler is an Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. An expert in African American Literature, disability studies, and critical race studies, he is the author of Disabilities of the Color Line, which was published in 2022. This book skillfully explores the historical and ongoing anti-black systems of division that name, immobilize, and stigmatize black people, which results in the entanglement of disability, disabliment, and black identity. He powerfully describes the entwining of racism and the ideology of ableism, but as importantly, how black authors have embraced disability as a way of articulating the impacts of the dehumanizing practices of racism on their bodies and on their communities. His work also describes how black authors have always understood disability as a kind of community in kinship, where the embrace of disability is key to present day and future transformative justice. His essays and reviews have been published in African American Review, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, The Feminist Wider, Oxford Bibliographies, and American Literary History Online Review. You can follow him at Prof. Tyler. His presentation is entitled, The Problem of the Color Line in the Age of COVID-19. We will be taking questions from the audience afterwards. Professor Tyler, we are honored to have you join us as our keynote speaker today. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for that kind and generous introduction, Sarah. And thank you to everyone, Mike Rembers, Chris Fadanihu, Brittany Kish, Sarah Bates, and other folks at NHGRI for organizing this event. I am Dennis Tyler. I am a black man, and my skin is the color of cinnamon sticks. I have thick black glasses, a salt and pepper beard, and I'm wearing a cream sweater. I'm honored to be here with all of you to discuss a section from my new book, The Disabilities of the Color Line. The final stages of the writing and revising of the book occurred during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is still ongoing. So I thought for today's talk, it would be fitting for me to discuss both how the color line persists in the 21st century, especially during the pandemic and the movement for black lives, and to discuss the historical understandings of the color line within black literature and culture by briefly looking at the work of Frida Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Francis Harper. As you'll see, I'll be moving back and forth from the present to the past, the present in my talk. I'm planning to speak for about 40 minutes, and I'm hoping that we'll have time to have a conversation about my talk, my book, or any other ideas. My presentation may have sparked. As Sarah mentioned, the title of my talk is the problem of the color line in the age of COVID-19. Next slide. This is how black people get killed, said Susan Moore, a black woman doctor and patient who was being treated for COVID-19 in IU Health North Hospital in Carmel, Indiana. Lying in a hospital bed with an oxygen tube hooked into her nostrils, Moore turned to social media to express her frustration about the poor treatment she received from the hospital staff in November and December 2020. As a physician herself who understood her own ethical responsibility to protect the health of her patients, she recognized how her care was being compromised at this hospital. While Moore took issue with her patient advocate, as well as her on-call nurse, she described her doctor's behavior as especially egregious. First, her doctor downplayed her condition when she complained of a sharp pain in her neck. Then he wanted to prematurely send her home after only issuing her two drug treatments, stating that she did not qualify for more treatment because she did not appear to be out of breath. Finally, when Moore pressed the issue further, her doctor admitted that he felt uncomfortable giving her narcotics, making her feel as she put it like she was, quote, a drug addict, unquote. Only after Moore's stat CT scan revealed, quote, new pulmonary infiltrates all throughout her neck, unquote, was she able to receive the care and drug treatment she needed to treat her condition. For Moore, the entire ordeal clarified an ugly and painful truth about the discriminatory treatment black patients often receive from the medical establishment. Realizing, as the self-described black lesbian mother warrior poet and feminist Audrey Lord has argued, that, quote, your silence will not protect you, unquote. Dr. Moore decided to advocate publicly for herself. Despite her labor breathing, Moore went on Facebook to make everyone aware of what she experienced. I would now like to show two short clips of Dr. Moore, was a black woman speaking from a hospital bed with an oxygen tube in her nostrils. Next slide. You have to show proof that you have something wrong with you in order for you to get the medicine. I put forward and I maintained, if I was white, I wouldn't have to go through that. And that man never came back and apologized, is Dr. Banniguy. And near the end of her video, Moore added this statement. Next slide. This is how black people get killed when you send them home and they don't know how to fight for themselves. I had to talk to somebody, maybe the media, somebody, to let people know how I'm being treated up in this place. Dr. Moore's experience is a prime example of what the journalist and medical ethicist Harriet in Washington calls the United States' medical apartheid system. It is a system which is grossly mistreated and frequently with health care from black Americans to such an extent that their health profile stands in stark contrast to those of other Americans. Moore's story in particular captures the reasons for the health deficit experienced by black women who often bear the burden of having to prove their pain, who are accused of misrepresenting their condition or characterized as drug-seeking addicts and who are typically underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed because practitioners do not take their symptoms seriously. The stress of having to deal with these issues can be overwhelming. Although she advocated for herself and demanded better care, a practice that according to Moore's son, she has always done, given her profession, and her history of dealing with sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that commonly occurs in the lungs and lymph nodes. Dr. Moore did not win her battle against the coronavirus. Just more than a couple of weeks after she posted her video on Facebook, she died from complications of COVID-19 on Sunday, December 20th, 2020. Dr. Moore was one of many. The disproportionate rate at which black people are being infected with, hospitalized for, or dying from COVID-19 has been staggering. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the death rate for black people is 3.6 times that for white people. In April, 2020, the Washington Post observed similar disparities, noting that the percentage of black people dying from the virus is significantly higher than the percentage of the black population in several states. In Louisiana, black folks comprise 32% of the state's population, but have made up 70% of the deaths from COVID-19. In Illinois, black folks are 14% of the state population, but make up 40% of its COVID-19 deaths. In Michigan, a similar phenomenon has been occurring. Black people comprise 14% of the population, but represent roughly 40% of those who have died from COVID-19. These numbers tell an alarming tale of how to this day, the color line has severely compromised the health of black Americans, creating racial health disparities that make them vulnerable to a deadly virus. Yet what is also disturbing is how politicians and commentators have been using these statistics to blame black people for dying of the coronavirus. Next slide. This slide contains two items. The image on the left is of Eben Kendi, a black historian, a black man with dreadlocks, wearing a pink shirt and a blue jacket. The image on the right is a quotation from Kendi, which I'll read in a second. As the historian Eben Kendi observes, quote, to explain the disparities in the mortality rate, too many politicians and commentators are noting that black people have more underlying medical conditions, but critically, they're not explaining why. Or they blame the choices made by black people or poverty or abuse or obesity, but not racism unquote. Significantly, Kendi acknowledges that African Americans suffer disproportionately from chronic diseases, such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lung disease, obesity, and asthma, which make it harder for them to survive COVID-19. But he questions why politicians and health officials are not attempting to determine which structural barriers made it more likely for black people to suffer from such chronic diseases. For example, when the host David Green asked Republican Senator Bill Cassidy on NPR's morning edition, whether black people's underlying health conditions are, quote, rooted in years of systemic racism, Cassidy replied, unquote, well, you know, that's rhetoric and it may be, but as a physician, I'm looking at science, unquote. I would now like to listen to Senator Cassidy, who was also a US medical physician, tell us what the science told him. Next slide. The audio might be slightly delayed. There's audio clip in this slide, can you hear it? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be any audio playing on this slide. I will read it. Senator Cassidy says, if you have diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes and hypertension are clearly risk factors for problems from COVID, then African Americans are going to have more of those receptors that the virus likes to hit inherent in their having the diabetes, the hypertension and the obesity, and inherent in them having an overrepresentation of that. So there's a physiologic reason explaining this, unquote. With all the factors that could explain the racial health disparities of black folks, including inadequate healthcare, lack of medical insurance, a scarcity of hospitals in majority black communities, or the general racism and exploitation of the medical establishment, Senator Cassidy repeatedly chose to diagnose black people as having inherent health issues that make them more susceptible to COVID-19, rather than to discuss the precarious conditions set in motion by centuries of government to neglect, violence, and indifference. This is an all too familiar narrative of the disabilities of the color line, a phrase that captures the historical and ongoing anti-black systems of division that name stigmatize and traumatize black people and represents them as being at fault for conditions they have been made vulnerable to. As I watched the racial pandemic unfold within the viral pandemic and listened to the various commentators discuss the causes of our country's massive health deficit, I realized that the story my book tells is as important to our current historical moment, the time of COVID-19, as it is to the ages of slavery and Jim Crow, to historical periods that take up a large portion of the book. One of the goals of my book is to encourage others to reconsider the intersections of blackness and disability at a time and heart from narratives about racial health on the rise. Next slide. And here I'm showing a cover of my book for two reasons. First, I'm engaging in a little bit of shameless self-promotion. One to remind you all that my book is available wherever books are sold or you can buy it directly from NYU Press. But I also wanted to show off this wonderful cover which is by the black disabled artist, Jack Whitten entitled Black Monolith II. He used a mix of materials to put together including acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell. And if you were able to zoom in, you could see a razor blade in the middle of the mosaic. My book explores how black people from the antebellum period to the present have been cast as disabled, as unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance and contagious within the national body politic. Such casting has been frequently resisted within the black literary tradition to metaphorical reversals where the color line is instead the disability or disorder that demands careful scrutiny. Yet the key contribution of this book lies in an important observation that is overlooked in black studies and disability studies. Rather than simply engaging in a prevailing narrative of overcoming in which both disability and disablement are shunned alike, black authors and activists have consistently avowed disability in varied complex and contradictory ways. Sometimes their affirmation of disability serves to clarify their own experience of racial injury, to represent how their bodies, minds and health, how the bodies, minds and health of black people have been made vulnerable to harm and impairment by the state and anti-black vigilantes. Sometimes their assertion of disability symbolizes a sense of community and commonality that comes not only from a recognition of the shared subjection of blackness and disability, but also from a willingness to imagine and engender a world distinct from the dominant social order. There's then could be understood as an expression of inter-ability compassion, a compassion of people with mixed abilities that is rooted in the practice of care and the twin pursuit of racial and disability justice. Their approaches are part of the larger traditions of black radicalism and disability justice and the black writers and activists in this book employ the methods that make those traditions so formidable. The relentless pursuit for an elsewhere, the steady movement toward an elsewhere and the exceptional aptitude to envision and occasion otherwise. The color line has a long history and it has been shaped as much by disability as it has by race, sexuality, gender, geography and sound. It has been a serious delimitation on the health and life of black folks in the United States, stigmatizing their bodies, minds and blood. Through law and custom, it defined the blood of black people as diseased and tainted in the blood of white people as uncelled and pure. It named people by proportions of blood, full blood, half-breed, mulatto, mestizo, quadrion, octiron and mixed blood or nearly mixed. Words that attempted to make dissent legible to mainly maintain the lie of white racial purity and to separate and mobilize and contain non-white people along lines of color and race. It is why in some states, black blood quantum amounted to a socio-legal disability. A prohibition of black, a prohibition of or disqualification from citizenship, literacy and franchise. In others, any quantity of black blood, even if only a drop, was enough to deny a black person rights, privileges, access and mobility. For fugitives from enslavement, the cost of being caught was a loss of limb or a brand on the body. For those living during Jim Crow, lynching and racial terror looked large. And for those of us living in the present, the disabling systemic violence inflicted on black community stands as a dire reminder of the color line's continuity. They live in language. The contours of the color line have a discursive and material life. They live in language and they have been exacted on the body and mind as well. To locate the disabilities of the color line, you need to know only where to search or to examine and how to interpret the findings once you dare to look. Next slide. This is an animated image of Frederick Douglass. The slide is a black and white animated image of Douglass blinking his eyes and moving his head. It was created using animating technology from myheritage.com. Frederick Douglass, who was a political abolitionist author or writer and the most photographed person of the 19th century, was among the first who dared to describe the color line's continuity between the antebellum and postbellum periods in terms of its varied disabilities. In June, 1881, Douglass wrote an account of such continuity in his essay titled, The Color Line. Next slide. And this slide includes two items with a quotation on the left from Douglass and another quotation on the right. In the quotation on the left, Douglass wrote, quote, out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the Republic, unquote. The way Douglass saw it, slavery cast a stubborn shadow for it also poisoned the nation with the prejudicial color line during the initial period of emancipation. Douglass primed his descriptions of color prejudice and the color line with metaphors related to disability and ethics figuring white Americans as the primary agents of both forms of discrimination. Part of Douglass' goal was to dispel the racist idea that all black people are inherently disabled. He also wanted to highlight how these false narratives about black people work to maintain white supremacy and dominion by stigmatizing black folks as physically unfit, intellectually stunted and highly contagious. According to Douglass, there was hardly any place in the United States where black folks could turn without encountering this stigma head on. In the quotation on the right, Douglass wrote, in nearly every department of American life, they, black people, are confronted by this insidious influence. It feels the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory. When they apply for work, it meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the ballot box. And worst of all, it meets them in the jury box. In all of these spaces, the most treasured prized possessions, the right to health, to work, to worship, to shelter, to vote, to have a speeding and fair trial were either denied or regulated by the perilous color line. It restricted where black people could go, how they could move, what they could do and whom they could mingle with. And its toxicity and pervasiveness produced a suffocating effect. As Douglass observed, the color line reconfigured both space and weather, poisoning the atmosphere and polluting the air that black folks breathed. To misconstrue Douglass' remarks about the color line as merely a rejection of disability or of disabled people would be a mistake. Such an error would miss how his work and that of other black writers and activists affirms disability as part of black social life. Despite how the discourse and production of disability and disablement historically have been used against black people to implement pain and punishment, disdain and discrimination. Douglass' primary aim was to forge an affinity between disability and disablement and black life. Between a condition, injury or restriction and between the process by which black people or rendered disabled or injured through acts of violence perpetrated by anti-black regimes. Douglass, who was born in February, 1818 and died the same month in 1895, had a particular vantage point of such disabilities across slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow. Throughout the course of his life and career, his view of ability and disability shifted dramatically. While the younger Douglass in 1848 misguidedly thought it was necessary for individuals to prove their capacity for rights, the older Douglass in 1881 reframed disablement as proof of rights denied, owning disability in a way that gestures toward the kind of cross movement work that could beget liberation. Douglass' writing represents an early example of a public avowal of disability. The import and influence of his tape on the color line, however, are often neglected. Since most scholars cite WEB Du Bois, not Douglass, in their examinations of the color line. Next slide. This slide includes an image of WEB Du Bois, a black man wearing a brown suit is located at the top of the slide and at the bottom of the slide there's a quotation from Du Bois' Souls. In Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois famously declared, quote, the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea, unquote. You can sort of understand why Du Bois often gets credit for the concept of the color line. Not only is his language poetic and makes good use of alliteration but also the definition of the color line is transnational in scope, given its explicit reference to continents other than North American Europe. But what I want to point out is that Du Bois was also clearly a student of Douglas, whose words inform various parts of souls and whose considerations of the color line are evident in Du Bois' description. For Du Bois and Du Bois, the color line functions both as a metaphorical legal barrier and as a material little boundary of separation and division. And for both men, the color line is just as informed by disability as it is by race. In addition to the work of Douglas and Du Bois, I would like to add another important writer that is often neglected or under-examined in discussions of the color line and disability. And that writer is the poet fiction writer, journalist and activist, Francis Helen Watkins Harper. Next slide. This slide includes two images, one is of the author Francis Harper on the left, the other on the right is of the cover of her book, her novel, Ayola LaRoy. In 1892, Harper published a novel titled, Ayola LaRoy or Shadows Uplifted, which expands the meaning of the phrase, disabilities of the color line in one of its crucial scenes. Where the ex-slave Ayola LaRoy explains to the white disabled Dr. Gresham why their interracial marriage would inevitably fail. Dr. Gresham, operating under the false assumption that, quote, the color line is slowly fading in our public institutions, unquote, ask Ayola for the second time to be his wife. Dr. Gresham asked, quote, Ayola, will you not grant me the privilege of holding this hand as mine all through the future of our lives, unquote. Rejecting Gresham's theory that the color line is fading as well as rejecting his second proposal, which he couples with the thinly veiled requests for her to pass as a white woman. Ayola responds to his plea with the proverbial slap in the face. Next slide. In the novel, Ayola asserts, quote, no, Dr, I'm not willing to live under the shadow of concealment, which I thoroughly hate as if the blood in my veins would undertake the crying of my soul. In her view, quote, it is easier to outgrow the dishonor of crime than the disabilities of color, unquote. Despite her distinction between dishonor of crime and disabilities of color, Ayola's reference to disabilities of color is flush with ambiguity, rendering differences between the social and the physical, illegal and the corporeal, and the illicit and the injurious and difficult to delineate. Part of the challenge in deciphering Ayola's precise meaning stems from how Harper framed her dialogue with Dr. Gresham. Based on the sequence of events in the novel, Harper connected Ayola's response to at least three key moments. First, Ayola's lines follow a protracted series of flashbacks about her familial and racial background, which suggested her parents' interracial marriage, the subsequent nullification of their matrimony and their ill-advised decision to conceal the black racial identity of Ayola's mother, who was strikingly fair-skinned, have a significant bearing on Ayola's rejection of Dr. Gresham. Second, since her remark comes on the heels of a memory regarding the differential treatments needed out to an outcast black girl and an outcast white girl and an asylum for fallen women, it hints at Ayola's fear of misogynoir. According to the black feminist and disability scholar, Moira Bailey, misogynoir is described as, quote, the ways that anti-black and misogynistic representation shape broader ideas about black women, unquote, and make them vulnerable to the persistent dangers of racism and sexism. Third, Ayola's parallel between her romantic dispute with Dr. Gresham and the strife between the North and South as well as the disabilities of white and black male soldiers mixes the personal with the political, thereby connecting the drawbacks of interracial marriage to the injurious repercussions of the Civil War. Each of these plot details is a clear example of what I identify as the black literary traditions under-recognized and longstanding a vow of disability. These details pushed the reader to consider the entanglement of blackness and disability in more expensive ways, connecting disability to slavery, the color line, the nullification of interracial marital and sexual unions, exclusionary institutional asylums and the ravages of war. The novel, Ayola Lavor, is not merely a work preoccupied with conventional marriage plots and romantic couplings. It is also a political text of 19th century black feminist activism and dissent. It is a literary work of anti-slavery, anti-racism and anti-abolism sentiments swirl in abrupt and purposeful ways, but usually to dispel notions of inherent racial inferiority. In Harper's hands, the intersections of blackness and disability are voluminous and wide. The words of Harper, Du Bois and Douglas have resounded beyond the 19th and 20th centuries. If we listen closely to the commentary of black activists in the 21st century, we hear echoes of Douglas's and Du Bois's words with the nerve remarks about racism, police brutality and equitable access to health care and education and slavery's afterlife. Take for instance, the comments of the activist and educator Brittany Pachnick Cunningham, who was formerly an important member of President Obama's task force on 21st century policing and of the Ferguson Commission, which was an independent group that addressed the social and economic conditions in St. Louis that propelled the protests in the aftermath of Michael Brown Jr.'s death. Cunningham in 2020 cautioned the viewers of A.M. Joy, a political weekend show that aired on MSNBC, not to allow the looters or the anarchy of white supremacist group who infiltrated the protests in Minneapolis to derail a vital conversation about defunding law enforcement in the wake of George Floyd's death. I would now like to listen to an audio clip of Brittany Cunningham on the show. In the next slide, you'll see Brittany on the right and then her quotation on the, sorry, Brittany on the left and the quotation on the right. Next slide. Joy, this country was founded by looting. The, what happened in the Boston Harbor was that your founding fathers got on T-Shifts, looted land and was built with looted labor and it loots black life every day. Now that is not to excuse the white supremacists and the other forces that are coming in to take advantage of protests that are all about, protests that are all about systemic racism and ending systemic racism. But what is true is that what would set all of this to calm and actually to peace is to deal with the conditions that cause people to react in the first place instead of spending all of this time on the sentence. People are frankly tired of America dealing with the symptoms and not the virus. Cunningham's double entendre here is purposeful. For her reference to the virus demonstrates the entanglement of COVID-19 and systemic racism for black people. In particular, her comparison of systemic racism to a virus is similar to Douglas's comparison of color prejudice to a disease. The starkest difference between their two statements is the nearly 139 year gap that separates them. That isn't to say that the terms in this lexicon, disability, disease, injury or virus are the same but they are related. Moreover, what makes Cunningham's commentary so noteworthy is her acknowledgement of disability. Similarly to Douglas, she distinguishes the symptoms from the virus that produces said symptoms without shunning disability in the process. The circumstances that contributed to George Floyd's premature death are Cunningham's central concern and her allusions to settler colonialism, enslavement and police brutality implicitly outline the underlying conditions that led to Floyd's stolen black life. Reverend L. Sharpton, the civil rights activist and founder of the National Action Network also figured racism as a public health crisis. While delivering a eulogy at George Floyd's memorial service here is what Sharpton said. Next slide is a video of Sharpton. Reason it got to me is George Floyd's story has been the story of black folks because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. We were smarter than the underfunded schools you put us in but you had your knee on our neck. We could run corporations and not hustle in the street but you had your knee on our neck. We had creative skills. We could do whatever anybody else could do but we couldn't get your knee off our neck. What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country and education and health services and in every area of American life it's time for us to stand up in George's name and say get your knee off our necks. Really Reverend L. Sharpton had time on that day. This section of Sharpton's eulogy earned him a standing ovation. Nearly everyone attending the memorial held at North Central University studying platform. To drive his point home further, he would later I quote, the reason why we are marching all over the world is we were like George. We couldn't breathe unquote. Sharpton's eulogy captured how Officer Derek Chauvin was feeling kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes. In addition to the disabling and deadly pressure that racism exerts on the lives of black people at large. He has eulogy recalled not only Eric Garner and Garner's and George Floyd's dying declarations I can't breathe, but also the suffocation that black folks experience due to daily racial violence. And given that Floyd tested positive for COVID-19 Sharpton's references to obstructed breathing and systemic racism would have landed bitterly with black listeners living during a global pandemic. George Floyd's I can't breathe echoed in utterance of respiratory distress because of police brutality and the coronavirus and dual forces of destruction deadly enough to level his life. But Sharpton's empathetic pronouncement, we were like George, we couldn't breathe transforms Floyd's singular plea into a matter of communal and collective black suffering. Such declarations represent assertions of disability along with calls for mercy and justice. They are powerful reminders of the many ways black lives are at risk for and on guard against state violence and they are demands to address the terror that endangers black lives. All of this probably resonated with Sharpton's audience. Listening to Sharpton, I also heard the resonances of Douglas Du Bois and Francis Harper whose words are proven just as relevant in the 21st century as they were in the past. Their links between the disabilities of the antebellum color line and the post-bellum one are significant. Equally important though is the way they'll work both harks back to and foreshadows that of other black authors, abolitionists and activists who explored in my book including David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Kraft, Charles Chestnut, James Wharton Johnson, Mamie Till-Mowley and Patricia Williams. Their affirmations of disability might strike some readers as surprising or unexpected as an unpromising path toward combating the color line but it is not. This approach is shared by many black folks aiming for collective liberation and yearning for another place, another time and another possibility in the present and in the future. The remarkable stories of all the black authors and activists in my book stand as evidence of the promising work that has engendered racial and disability justice. Work that captures the full complexities of black life, the times of grief and the times of triumph. The pursuit of racial justice entails according to the legal and cultural studies scholar Amani Perry, holding the inescapable injustice of racism alongside the immense and defiant joy of blackness. Next slide. The image on the right is of Amani Perry, a black woman wearing a white shirt with her hand resting on her face and the, so the image on the left is Amani Perry, the image on the right is Perry's quotation. As Perry asserts, the trauma endured by black Americans is repetitive. We weep, but we are still even in our most anguished seasons, not reducible to the fact of our grief. Rather the capacity to access joy is a testament to the grace of living as a protest unquote. The work of disability justice involves affirming this kind of duality too. Next slide. The top image on this slide features a disabled woman of color in a wheelchair on the left and a depiction of a rose on the right with a white banner in the center with the words sins invalid written in black. The bottom image on this slide is a quotation from sins invalid. According to sins invalid, a performance project on disability and sexuality co-founded by Patty Byrne and Lee Roy Moore. Disability justice is an honoring of the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies or minds will not conform. Disability justice is a vision and practice of it yet to be a map that we create with our ancestors and our great grandchildren onward in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which everybody in mind is known as beautiful. This intergenerational dynamic framework effectively captures the work of the black folks in my book and the desire for liberation and coalition. Indeed, the practice of black disability world-making demands this kind of dynamism. As the feminist queer Cripp scholar Allison Kaffir argues, quote, a politics of Cripp maturity must hold on to an idea of politics as a framework for thinking through how to get elsewhere to other ways of being that might be more just and sustainable, unquote. The ties that bind the stories of the black activists and writers in my book or their politics of redress, the way they find light through darkness and healing through pain, and ultimately the way they avow the disabled beauty and abundance of black life. It is a life that though conditioned and constrained by the color lines longed gray, is so precious and so resilient, it cannot be torn asunder. Thank you. Professor Tyler, thank you so much for that incredible presentation. I think I am speechless after watching it and I think a lot of our viewers are as well. We're accepting audience questions. I want to remind people, so please put your questions in the Q&A so that Professor Tyler can help address your questions. I would love to start us off. I will say first of all, thank you for giving us more of the background behind the wonderful cover of your book. I will say that the richness of your book, which I very much enjoyed is even more highlighted now that I've had your presentation, so thank you. In your book, you talk about the fraught relationship between disability and race and delve into how disablement has shaped black communities. Why is the relationship between disability and race so fraught and what message would you want people here to take away from the dynamic between the two? Thank you for that question, Sarah. I think the relationship between race and disability is so fraught because racism and ableism are intimately tied together, especially during the period of slavery and Jim Crow. The errors of slavery and Jim Crow produce racist narratives and practices that attempt to cast people and other people of color as inherently or innately disabled, tried or as unfit for citizenship or incapable of self-governance. This rhetoric was a way to rationalize the mistreatment of and racist behavior toward black Americans. And I think what comes out of it in response to the rhetoric is that you have a lot of black folks who felt the need to challenge false biological narratives tied or linked to race. They wanted to dispel this notion that all black folks are inherently disabled. But one of the things I wanna emphasize is that that move, that need to sort of claim that one is not an eightly disabled because of their race, shouldn't be understood as an attempt to disassociate race or blackness from disability. For example, some of the writers in my book might make that claim that they're not inherently disabled because of race, but they also simultaneously are saying that they do feel like they've been disabled by structural systems of oppression, which is to say they recognize how disability is inflicted on them. So I think that distinction between disability and disablement becomes important, right? If you think of disability as a condition that restricts the movement, activities, or functions of a person, and as a legal and structural system, then disablement becomes a way for us to think about the process by which people are rendered disabled or injured. And I think that that distinction is useful insofar as there's something more expansive and intersectional about that approach. You're not just thinking about one's identity or condition, but thinking about the set of circumstances that are surrounding that individual or group of people as the case may be. Thank you. I think that leads me to a question I've been looking forward to asking you based upon my reading of your work and last November, we hosted on civil rights professor Dorothy Roberts on our genomics in the media video series and her books, Fatal Invention and Killing the Black Body. Our seminal works that show how the social concept of race has undermined equity and justice and scientific research and healthcare system through DNA databases, genetic testing, birth control and more. How does your scholarship into the history of disability extend our knowledge of race-based discrimination within the biomedical sphere? Thank you for bringing up the reference to Dorothy Roberts. Her work is incredible. I wish I could go back and look at her talk from that conference. I mean, I think the focus, my focus on ethnology, phrenology and eugenics as we're thinking about how race-based discrimination functions during the historical periods that I'm talking about in my book gets at some of the ways that this information of these practices that we might call harmful to the body, high behind disciplines of science. And I think part of what I'm trying to get at in my work and especially in terms of thinking about bioethics or even just sort of like genetics large is sort of like this move not to think about science or DNA testing or genetics as the holy grail at the sort of final arbiter of truth. And one example of that might be in the chapter I write on Emmett Till and color blindness just to sort of give an example. I think it was in 2005, the FBI wanted to exhume Emmett Till's body as a way to prove that his corpse was actually him that was buried. And one of the things they wanted to do was use DNA testing to prove that. And the argument I'm making in that chapter is that, while the family disputed whether or not that was necessary and while I understand the importance and significance and power of DNA testing, we didn't need the FBI to exhume his body in order to do DNA testing to prove that that was till, right? We already had evidence in front of us, particularly his mother made me tell Mobiley's testimony that that was her son's body. And so the DNA testing while useful up to a point wasn't gonna tell us anything new necessarily about the details of that case. And so I guess that's another way of saying that I think, you know, the move toward using, say these signs of technology that answer some questions around race and disability, only as good as the intent behind it, right? Or it's only good to the extent that we couple that use with other forms of evidence we have at our disposal. It can't be like the primary or the most significant thing at our disposal when it comes to uncovering aspects around the body and bodily variation. Thank you. And we'll be sure to send you to really, Dorothy Roberts talk afterwards if you still wanna catch it but that should be wonderful as well. So I think, you know, it's closer to following up on another theme emerging from your book and also from your talk is about, you know, that these concepts of innate and imposed disability that you mentioned earlier are distinct, but the latter is imposed by structural systems. Can you talk more about what that distinction is? You know, and how do you see it currently manifested in the genomics and genetics research communities or just communities, even maybe public communities at large who intersect with genomics and genetics? I mean, sort of at the most basic level, I'm trying to make a distinction between I guess different kinds of disability at work in the literature, right? So if we think of something as innate or congenital that's one kind of disability. And some folks were talking about this earlier in the symposium about the need to have, I guess a more robust conversation about the differences in our bodies and differences in our needs. Whereas imposed disabilities is the way of thinking about, I guess that distinction I was making earlier between disability and disablement, right? What are the ways in which structures are in place that impose barriers or inflict harm on certain bodies and not others? And I think holding onto that distinction is important because it attempts to give us a richer vocabulary of Mexican to think about a whole range of issues when it comes to differences in terms of not just one's disability, but also one's race, sex, class, religion, et cetera, right? So there's something about, I guess, the distinction I'm making between innate and impose that moves us toward an intersectional framework. And for that context is key, right? We need to know more details about what has happened to an individual within the system in order to understand or help or offer assistance to that person or the group, I guess, depending on the nature of it. So, and I think that move toward inter-technology is important. It's one of the key principles, in fact, of disability justice, right? The group I cited at the end of my talk, Sense and Valid, has this wonderful statement that's titled The 10 Principles of Disability Justice and at the top of it, intersectionality is key. They're pulling that term, obviously, I think, from Kimberly Crenshaw and others who talked about intersectionality. But the importance there is that, at least from Crenshaw's framing, is that intersectionality is about identity, but not only about identity, right? It's not an oppression Olympics, if you will, right? I have eight intersecting identities and Sarah, you might have 11, so therefore you win, right? That's not the goal that Crenshaw was trying to get at when talking about it. She was really trying to think about how systems of oppression make certain bodies vulnerable to discrimination, right? How structures make certain bodies vulnerable to discrimination. And to even try to address that issue, the context is important. You have to know what's happening, why it's happening, who it's happening to. And so I held on to that as a model, I held on to that as a model when writing this book to think about the importance of intersectionality at every turn when I'm talking about the writers and activists in the text. Was there, just out of curiosity, were there any writers or activists who you didn't include in your book, who has sort of emerged since then, before you went to publishing, who you would have included? How do you have the opportunity? I cut a lot of stuff out just because I was reaching my word limit. There was one writer, Elaine Locke, who I definitely wanted to do more work on. And I mentioned Frances Harper in the book briefly and I also mentioned her in my talk in part because I had an idea of an entire chapter around her work that also got cut. So she would have been another writer whose work I think I would have included had I had the space to write for a longer, a longer book. I can't imagine a historian writing too many, too many words, going on to a word count. So I, in reading the, just reading the news yesterday, a piece came up from the New York Times on medical care alone, on the spread of diabetes, scientists say. So this is about a new report to Congress on diabetes, the first of its kind since 1975 and it calls for more national policy to prevent and control diabetes, type two diabetes, rather than placing responsibility upon individuals, which has often been historically done. And they, of course, cite statistics for diabetes with most, the highest percentage of people affected by diabetes are black and Hispanic adults at 12 and about 12% respectively with 7.4% for white adults. Do you see stories like this or reports like this as positive indications of change? You know, I think considering present history, do things like this, how do they fall into the context of what you've examined in the history of the color line? Well, thank you for that. Yeah, and thank you for sharing that piece. I recently read it. I thought it was quite good. I do think that that is a positive direction or an example of us moving in the right direction, right? I think you're right to frame it as a move away from thinking about just the individual or placing responsibility on the individual and therefore blaming the individual for their condition or for their personal choices towards sort of thinking about structural barriers in place that prevent folks from getting access to fresh food and clean water and better healthcare and housing or even good air quality, right? I think our approach to disability needs to be expansive and inclusive in that way. And it needs to account for and embrace bodily variations. What we know is that disability is neither monolithic or homogeneous and attempts to make them so often diminish our ability to care for our heterogeneous body minds. And so, that New York Times piece and other work that's moving in this direction makes me think that one of the key questions we need to keep at the forefront of our minds is like, what would it mean to create a world where we had access to all the things that would allow us to live productive lives, to thrive and flourish, not just survive? And I think I got a bit of this from Rosemary Gullin-Thompson and the first sort of set of panels in the opening section, right? What it would mean to sort of do that work. I think, and the Sins and Valley gets at this in a slightly different way and when you talk about disability justice, they have this great quotation, looking forward now, sorry. Our question is, how do we move together as people with mixed abilities, multiracial, multi-gendered, mixed class across the sexual spectrum where nobody mind is left behind, right? I love that framing, because it gets at some of their goals but I think some of our goals probably at the symposium about what it means to engage in collective access and also collective liberation. But that's a, I don't know if we can really follow that but anything else, I think that's a really wonderful note to end on. Is there anything that we didn't ask you that you wanted to add before we wrap up for the day? Oh, no, not really, I just wanna say again, I'm happy to be here. I found the discussion early today to be quite rich and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the panels tomorrow. I really can't thank you enough for your wonderful talk and it was really so mind-opening and I'll turn it over to our historian, Christopher Donhue. Thank you again, Professor Tyler. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Professor Tyler. I don't think I can ever give a talk as good as that. That was just really unbelievable and incredible and so moving. So I just wanna say that the conversations that we've had with your presentation and the other presentations we've had really earlier today really underscore why these conversations need to happen now and really should have happened a long time ago. So I just wanna thank our presenters, our moderators, the NHGRI, NIH and our AV and event staff. Please join us tomorrow beginning at 10 a.m. First, we will have an incredibly important keynote, second keynote lecture from Jaypreet Virdi followed by an equally important discussion panel on the interconnections between ableism, scientific racism and colonialism, both historical and present day, particularly in the context of genetics and genomics. And then we will have a long discussion in the afternoon really about the irreducibility of disability in the context of genetics and genomics and really try to think about how to move forward and also we will have a wonderful panel presentation on how to really do and work in bioethics and in disability bioethics with the participation of disabled individuals for the first time ever. So I know that we have had a lot to think about and a lot to discuss. I really urge you to make sure that the conversations do not end here that you carry with you everything that you've heard and learned today and that you join us tomorrow for an equally informative and enlightening discussion. And we are very thankful that all of you joined us here today and we are very much looking forward to seeing you tomorrow morning and throughout the day. Thanks so much and see you soon. Bye-bye.