The Walk

In a society where the able-bodied, capitalist status quo expects disabled people to exist as either inspiration porn or freaks of nature, it becomes a provocation to remember the complex truth of who one is outside of this conditioning. Under the modern colonialist determinates of worth, disabled people are invisible and misunderstood in most public spaces unless they possess agency within those spaces. Ableism is defined by disability justice worker Talila A. Lewis as a systemic oppression that allows society, systems, and individuals to assign value to people based on their appearance and their ability to re/produce, excel, and behave. These constructs of worth inevitably create mass violence and neglect toward the disabled population which makes up 20% of U.S. inhabitants, but account for 30-50% of individuals subject to use of force or killed by police have a disability. This risk cumulatively increases based on the person’s race, class, gender, and LGBTQ+ status. In the United States, 50 percent of people killed by law enforcement are disabled, and more than half of disabled African Americans have been arrested by the time they turn 28—double the risk in comparison to their white disabled counterparts. The government autopsy report for George Floyd, for example, highlighted that Floyd had “underlying conditions” including hypertension and a long COVID diagnosis. Following media reports on this information, some began to believe the inaccurate narrative that Floyd’s disability—as opposed to the officer’s knee on his neck—caused his death. This is a common tactic found in the wake of state violence, such as police officers blaming a Deaf man for not hearing an order to stop or assuming that an individual who is having a seizure has engaged in substance misuse. Ugly Laws were born in the post-Civil War Bay Area—These laws were intended to keep individuals deemed “diseased, maimed, mutilated, and any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” out of public view. Many of these individuals were also poor. The nexus of poverty, racism, and ableism was instrumental in the rise of institutions and sanitariums designed to keep the undesirables out of sight. Wide-scale systemic neglect and abuse are designed to keep the disabled invisible with the genesis of capitalism. Definitions of ableism and capitalism themselves frequently mirror each other in format and consequence. This film portrays a white disabled woman getting ready in their bedroom's posed private sanctuary, observing their scars and contortions in the mirror, and then stepping out into a public community space to be ignored or turned into something they aren't. It's a portrayal of the subtleties of everyday violence toward disabled people. In the end, when the main character arrives with her friend at a music show by the disabled artist Gabriel Rodreick or "Freaque" the camera pans to blaring music as Freaque sings "I can't make you love me if you don't" the goal is to remind the audience that disabled people have to learn to love themselves outside of the capitalistic defined standards of worth. Capitalism creates and recreates ableism. Finding ourselves and reclaiming agency outside of its constructs is the only pathway to disability justice and authentic worth. This film is a beckoning call to authentic community building through disability justice. As a form of transformative justice and abolition, disability justice seeks to redefine the logic behind everything we do. It requires a radically inclusive vision based on inherent human worth and the worth of nature. It is often thought that our oppressions exist in silos, especially with identity commodification and community isolation on the rise, but in actuality, our states of suffering are so inextricably linked that abolition becomes necessary to putting an end to any of the violence. In the words of disability justice pioneer Talila A. Lewis, “Abolition depends on racial, economic, and healing justice-- all of which depend on disability justice.” To me, this film is as much of a beginning filmmaker's first professional experiment in storytelling as it is a revolutionary call to action.