Curriculum & Tools

Just a few of the terms we use on the timeline and how we understand them:

Ableism: A system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally-constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.*

Abolitionist Healers: Healers and care workers who are trying to abolish carceral systems (such as prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and detention centers) and understand the precarious role of working inside of these systems while also offering a critique of them.

Disability Justice (DJ): A movement and political framework conceived in 2005 by BIPOC and Queer and Trans people with disabilities in response to the gains and limitations of the disability rights movement. Disability Justice holds an explicit critique of ableism and its legacies of harm and violence as they relate to oppressive systems built around race, class, and other identities. It is a framework that examines access inside of ableist structures, especially in the context of capitalism.*

Eugenics: Sir Francis Galton created the concept of eugenics in 1883 to promote the idea of genetic superiority and inferiority. Eugenics creates a hierarchy between groups is seen as “desirable and fit” and groups seen as “undesirable and unfit.” It is used to create sorting and categorization systems that aim to exterminate and exploit the genetic materials of marginalized communities (including Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, immigrants, people with disabilities, and incarcerated people) to genetically “improve” the human race.*

Healing Justice (HJ): HJ seeks to intervene on generational trauma to build collective power towards resistance. It is a community-led response to interrupt, transform and intervene on individual/collective trauma to sustain our emotional/physical/mental/spiritual/psychic, environmental well being. This political strategy was created in 2006 by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective in the lineage of QT/BIPOC Southern strategies and traditions of resistance.*

Health Practitioners: Anyone routinely providing structured and boundaried care to another individual or individuals as part of a paid role that is recognized as legitimate and licensed by the Medical Industrial Complex through curative models of care.

Medical Industrial Complex (MIC): Refers to the interconnected public health care institutions, private medical industries, state policies, and academic sciences structured and led by white supremacy, scientific racism, eugenics, and capitalism. Its primary function is to generate maximum profit by targeting, exploiting, policing, and eliminating specific people, conditions, and behaviors marked as medically unviable, undesirable, and/or unintelligible.*

Racial Capitalism: Originally defined by Cedric J. Robinson via his work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Racial Capitalism articulates the inextricable link between capitalism and racism. This theory posits that modern capitalism evolved out of racialized Western European civilizations to become a global system fueled by slavery, imperialism, colonialism, and genocide.*

Survival Economies: As defined by the Young Women's Empowerment Project, “anything you can do for cash that is not taxable.” It is work that is necessary to sustain your survival and is often undervalued and criminalized (eg. domestic work, sex work, drug trade etc.). Also defined as an economy where individuals exchange goods, services, etc. for cash money that is not reported to or regulated by the government.*

White Supremacy: The historically based, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and Peoples of Color by white peoples and nations of the European continent, for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of power, exploitation, capital and privilege.*

*Adapted from Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads for Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety by Cara Page & Erica Woodland (North Atlantic Books, 2023).