Today's DIW interview is with Vilissa Thompson, LMSW, and creator of Ramp Your Voice! and #DisabilityTooWhite. She is an amazing writer and activist. Join us as we talk about living a "crippled and intersectional life," what disability means in different communities, her policy passion - black disabled women's health, and how she gets into "good trouble."

To learn more about Vilissa, check out her website at: Ramp Your Voice or connect with her on Twitter @VilissaThompson. Bonus! Vilissa just started a Patreon! If you want to support disability activism at the intersection of race and disability and health, here is your opportunity - Ramp Your Voice Patreon

Transcript
DAY: Hello, and welcome to Day in Washington. I'm your host Day Al-Mohamed, and I'm really, really excited to expand the show to including interviews with some amazing people with disabilities. Today's guest is Vilissa Thompson, a licensed master social worker from Winnsboro, South Carolina. Hi! How are you?

VILISSA: I'm great, Day. I'm so happy to be on.

DAY: Awesome. So just as a quick, short introduction. Vilissa's the founder and CEO of Ramp Your Voice as well as a disability rights consultant, writer, and activist. She's been featured in Essence magazine, Forbes, has appeared in The New York Times and BuzzFeed and The Atlantic, among others. And in addition to her advocacy work, I wanna give a little shout out to the fact that she cohosts a podcast as well, which is Wheelin’ and Dealin’. And it looks at politics from an intersectional lens. Whoo! When do you sleep?

VILISSA: I make time to sleep. Self-care is a priority because of all the hectic-ness. So I make time. I do. It's hard, but I do.

DAY: I first learned of you through Ramp Your Voice. And those of you who don't, go check out the website right now at RampYourVoice.com. The curriculum that you built. And I was kind of hoping you might tell us a little bit more about that because I'm not sure enough people know about it.

VILISSA: Oh, yes. You're talking about the syllabus?

DAY: Sorry, yeah. The syllabus as well as a little bit about your website in general. Just the syllabus in particular is one of those things that I think doesn't get enough visibility.

VILISSA: Well, with Ramp Your Voice, I created it, soon to be five years on July 19. So I'll be celebrating the 5th anniversary this month. And it was my way of creating a space that was a reflection of the world that I want to see, which were more diverse disabled voices. So it was my way of providing the things I was interested in as a black disabled woman, a social worker, and just someone who's living this very crippled and intersectional life. And with the black disabled woman syllabus, I really created it out of frustration of, particularly white disabled folks asking me why do you focus on black disabled women? Or why the harp on the need to discuss intersected identities by disabled people of color? And I got tired of people asking for this 101 information.

So in 2016, and right before #DisabilityTooWhite hashtag went viral, I created the syllabus as a way of being a reference point so that if people had questions, I could be like, "Here. Here's a starting point for you to educate yourself and not ask me to do the labor so that you would understand why black disabled women [unclear] and the black disabled experience as a whole matters and why you need to be more conscious of the way that way that you talk about disability, the way that you bring about disability topics in conferences and panels, etc." So it was my way of not having to be pressured to do the labor that people fail to go to Google for. So I figured just put something together that mattered and that has been widely shared within the past two years, particularly within academia circles,