"We Must Change the Ableist Language Surrounding Sandra Bland's Death"

"Folks are saying “Sandra Bland was mentally sound” and “Black women like her would never commit suicide”, etc. Not only are we upholding precarious and dehumanizing ‘strong black woman’ archetypes that neglect to hold Black women in the fullness and breadth that we embody, but our failure to operate within a mental health & disability justice framework by making the assertion that Sandra Bland was ‘mentallly sound’ in order to prove that she did not commit suicide is a dangerous narrative that both devalues black people who navigate mental health difficulties and trauma and also erases their/our narratives from the conversation...

Some black women don’t just wake up one day with mental health difficulties while the prized black women are strong, resilient, and beyond the impact of white supremacist state sanctioned violence. Black woman are not the curators of white supremacy and misogynoir, we are the targets. We can bring attention to the state-sanctioned violence of police murders against black women in custody while also understanding suicide as a manifestation of structural violence that is delicately crafted by a abusive sociopolitical context that is obscenely anti-black, wildly misogynist, and buttressed upon legacies of misogynoir."
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/we-must-change-ableist-language.html?m=1#axzz3gfxsvBZn