Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present

The ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist, "Disabilities of the Color Line," argues that Black social life in America has been shaped by disability and disablement, casting Black people as innately disabled and unfit for freedom. However, Black authors and activists have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress to acknowledge the disabling violence perpetrated by anti-Black regimes and create new worlds that account for people of all abilities.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 15 February 2022
Publisher: New York University Press

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Finalist, Dennis Tyler, delves into the profound impact of disability and disablement on Black social life in America. He argues that, through both law and custom, the color line has portrayed Black people as inherently disabled and thus unfit for freedom, incapable of self-governance, and contagious within the national body politic.

Disabilities of the Color Line challenges this casting by highlighting the disablement of racism without disclaiming disability. Instead of a triumphalist narrative of overcoming, Tyler proposes that Black authors and activists have consistently acknowledged the "disabilities of the color line": the historical and ongoing anti-Black systems of division that maim, immobilize, and stigmatize Black people.

Through his analysis, Tyler unveils how Black writers and activists, such as David Walker, Henry Box Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, and Mamie Till-Mobley, have engaged in a politics and aesthetics of redress. These modes of resistance recognize the disabling violence perpetrated by anti-Black regimes and aim to conceive or engender dynamic new worlds that account for people of all abilities.

While some writers affirm disability to capture the vulnerability of their bodies, minds, and health to harm and impairment caused by the state and its citizens, others assert disability as a symbol of community and a willingness to imagine and create a world distinct from the dominant social order.

This book is a crucial contribution to the study of disability and race, offering a nuanced understanding of the ways in which disability has shaped Black social life in America and the ongoing struggles for racial and disability justice.

Weight: 516g
Dimension: 151 x 231 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479831128