Event Recap: Disability & Reparations Panel — Centering Justice, Memory, and Transformation
A conversation on how reparations and disability justice can transform systems, redistribute power, and reimagine care.
By the Center for Racial and Disability Justice
On April 22, 2025, the Center for Racial and Disability Justice (CRDJ) convened a powerful virtual panel titled “Disability and Reparations,” featuring Professors Prianka Nair (Brooklyn Law School) and Eric Miller (Loyola Law School), moderated by CRDJ’s Faculty Director, Professor Jamelia Morgan.
Opening the conversation, Professor Morgan situated the urgency of the dialogue within today’s political climate:
“The United States is in a moment of retrenchment when it comes to racial justice, disability justice, truth, reconciliation, and repair. There are attacks on teaching about the history of race and racism in schools, attacks on meaningful efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. There is backlash to disability rights and civil rights, and the dismantlement of agencies tasked with enforcing them… Even in this moment of retrenchment — despite the backlash — campaigns for reparations are still ongoing and have achieved success.”
Together, the panelists explored how reparations — often narrowly understood as financial compensation — must be reframed as expansive, justice-rooted processes of recognition, repair, and transformation, particularly when applied to disability.
Redefining Reparations: Beyond Money, Toward Dignity
Professor Prianka Nair outlined three core themes that underpin a reparations framework:
- Reparations address the past. Effective reparations must acknowledge historical injustice and meaningfully depart from those harms. Without this reckoning, injustice continues to shape contemporary systems and policies.
- They expand how we define harm. Reparations frameworks allow for recognition of emotional, institutional, and systemic harms — particularly those that legal systems often overlook, especially when experienced by disabled people.
- They demand broader remedies. “If you have a broader conception of harm,” Nair explained, “you can also have a broader conception of remedies.” This includes not only legal redress, but also memorialization, education, and structural transformation — going far beyond what antidiscrimination law alone can provide.
Nair emphasized that disability justice movements challenge the state’s carceral logics and reimagine repair not as state control, but as resource redistribution, collective healing, and systemic transformation.
As Nair emphasized during the panel, “Reparations can’t just be about monetary compensation — they must instill power and autonomy, and fundamentally change systems that created the harm.”
Reparations as Radical Imagination and Community Power
Professor Eric Miller, drawing on over two decades of reparations work — including litigation on behalf of survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — offered a powerful vision of reparations rooted in both accountability and collective empowerment. He described reparations as not just a legal remedy but “a grassroots-led process of empowerment,” one that involves naming the wrong, identifying the wrongdoer, and affirming the equal standing of harmed communities. At its core, Miller explained, reparations are “both the process of making amends by repairing an injury… and the process by which victims and survivors make a demand for the repair they are due.”
He emphasized the need to confront the deep structural violence embedded in institutions — violence that disproportionately affects Black communities and disabled people, often in ways that remain invisible. “These structures were created by people, maintained by people, and used by people to empower themselves… They are often quite violent in ways we don’t acknowledge.”
Reflecting on his legal work in Tulsa, Miller pointed to the limits of the court system in delivering transformative justice. “If a court thinks what you’re asking for requires too much justice, they’ll kick you,” he noted, highlighting how legal institutions often resist claims that challenge dominant narratives. Still, he emphasized the broader value of reparations litigation — not just as a path to relief, but as a catalyst for movement-building: “Filling the courtroom with people supporting survivors can help build the grassroots movement that lasts long after the lawsuit.”
Miller closed by invoking the radical political potential of joy, drawing from the insights of bell hooks and Audre Lorde. He encouraged the audience to imagine reparations not only as repair, but as transformation — an opportunity to build public institutions and community spaces “not just of tolerance but in which folks are loved and experience joy.” His vision of reparations includes investing in communities, reimagining social infrastructure, and creating conditions where people can thrive — not just survive.
Disability Justice Meets Reparations: A Shared Vision
Throughout the panel, both speakers emphasized the importance of grounding reparations in the principles of disability justice — including interdependence, anti-carceral frameworks, community care, and honoring lived experience as a form of expertise.
Professor Nair highlighted the tension between state-centered reparations models and disability justice’s critique of state power. She encouraged reframing reparations not simply as compensation, but as resource redistribution, collective healing, and transformative justice. She uplifted the Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color Fund as an example that pushes back against medicalized definitions of disability and avoids gatekeeping.
“Just because you exist, you get it,” she said, describing the fund’s low-barrier approach and its rejection of harmful interventions like applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy.
Professor Miller echoed this expansive vision, drawing on hooks and Lorde to call for a reparations framework rooted in love, joy, and radical inclusion — particularly for disabled people and communities of color.
“What does it look like to have spaces not just of tolerance,” he asked, “but in which folks are loved and experience joy?”
Together, Nair and Miller presented a shared vision of reparations as not only a form of redress, but as a tool to reimagine society itself — one that dismantles structures of violence and builds systems that promote access, autonomy, and collective flourishing.
Looking Ahead
This panel was part of CRDJ’s ongoing commitment to deepening the conversation around reparative justice at the intersection of race and disability. As Professor Jamelia Morgan emphasized throughout the event, reparations and disability justice are not only about reckoning with past harm — they are about imagining and building a future in which all people are seen, valued, and free.
Stay tuned for resources and future events as we continue this critical dialogue and push for transformative change.
