An illustration of two women–one Black and one White– shielding their eyes as they turn away from the viewer and look towards a verdant mountain range.
“Hold on to Hope” by Melissa Koby / Mkoby Art

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Spring 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “How Women of Color in the South Are Reclaiming Space.”

Rebekah Barber: Tell me how you got into disability justice work. How does your lens as a disabled person inform how you operate in the world of human resources and how you view diversity, equity, and inclusion?

Kehsi Iman: I had every intention of becoming a medical doctor, but after a series of unfortunate events, some of which were amplified by my disability, mental health challenges, and trauma, I pivoted to a career in higher education administration with a focus on nontraditional student populations. I worked in first-generation access programs, with offices of students with disability services, veterans’ services, international students, and multicultural affairs. I did that work for almost a decade. I also started my first nonprofit organization in 2009.

I left higher education in 2015 to work remotely full-time, and I continued to build out startups and scale-ups and work on organizational infrastructure, human resources, and strategy in a range of fields.

Disability is not a monolith. It is extremely varied, more so than many other experiences.

About three years ago, I helped launch New Disabled South and New Disabled South Rising [the organization’s advocacy arm] with my cofounder Dom Kelly, and I continue to support organizations doing work across the social justice ecosystem as an equity-centered consultant.

RB: We know for people with disabilities, taking up space has a very particular meaning. As a Black woman with disabilities in the South, how have you sought to take up space and amplify the concerns of yourself and others? 

KI: Personally, disabled is not the identity that has been most salient for me, the way my Blackness has been.

That has a lot to do with my cultural and family background and the types of disabilities I have, which are not physical and are considered “invisible.” It really was not until I started being required to disclose my disabilities about 13 years ago that I began to sit with what it meant to be in space or take up space as a disabled person.

Disability is not a monolith. It is extremely varied, more so than many other experiences. When you talk about the Black experience or the immigrant experience, they’re not all the same, but there are some very strong unifying themes. With disability, while there are some unifying themes, there are major differences between for example, someone like me, who has a chronic illness or mental health disabilities compared to, say, a person born with a more visible disability, such as cerebral palsy.

When you’re talking about anti-Blackness…anti-immigrant sentiment…climate justice, where is the conversation about the outsized impacts to the disabled people within those communities?

RB: One thing we’ve seen, especially with COVID, is that a lot of people are facing mental health challenges. In what ways has your life shifted even over the past few years and how have you seen other people’s life shift as a result of COVID and other racial and economic inequalities that we’ve seen in the country? 

KI: This question is hard for me because, as I like to say, “I’ve been Black my whole life.”

My life hasn’t shifted much. For disabled people, a lot of these issues are the same issues we’ve been fighting for since the Americans for Disability Act [ADA] first passed in 1990. We were fighting for funding, fighting for recognition—just basic recognition of the fact that we exist as part of every community.

When you’re talking about anti-Blackness, when you’re talking about anti-immigrant sentiment, when you’re talking about climate change and climate justice, where is the conversation about the outsized impacts to the disabled people within those communities?

Regardless of who has been in the White House, we’re still fighting a lot of the same fights. You mention COVID-19, and I don’t mean to discount or downplay the impacts of that, because…for a lot of people who haven’t [had] this lived experience with multiple marginalized identities, it was a wake-up moment.

We know that the big “racial awakening” happened simultaneously with that. For a lot of people, that was their first time having conversations about all of these things. For a lot of people, COVID 19—which we know has been such a mass disabling event—was the entry point for a lot of people.

They’ve had to navigate the healthcare system, the medical industrial complex, and what it means to have a disability for the first time.

Every single person living will become disabled if you live long enough. That is a reality check for a lot of people.

I was diagnosed with long COVID. For me, it’s prompted a deeper focus on community care and the lack of mutual aid infrastructure.

RB: For those that don’t consider themselves part of the 60 million Americans living with a disability, what does solidarity look like right now? In what ways does this current political moment offer an opportunity for solidarity among these groups?

KI: I think that solidarity is a hard topic because it kind of reifies this notion of “we’re standing with them”—as in “I’m not a part of that group, but I believe in what they’re doing, so how do I support them?”

I think there are probably some workable approaches within that framing that could result in an increase in the level of awareness and the action that we need, but what I feel is more useful is breaking down this idea that you’re standing with them—that you’re standing with a group that is somehow other or apart from yourself.

Every single person living will become disabled if you live long enough. That is a reality check for a lot of people. This moment offers as many opportunities for solidarity, awareness, action as every moment has.

I think people need to ask themselves, “What am I tuned into and why?” Is it just because my daughter identifies this way or because I’m a caregiver to an elderly parent now? Is it because I’m moved by the images that I’m seeing in the media around what’s happening, or I received some education about how many people are living with long COVID?

In short, can we just go a couple steps deeper? We have so much information at our fingertips now. It doesn’t require a formal education. Moreover, regardless of how you’re currently identifying, we are all living in these same systems. A broken healthcare system isn’t just an issue for disabled people; it’s an issue for everyone.

The lack of infrastructure to deal with climate disasters is not just an issue for disabled people. It’s an issue for you. Police brutality and how that intersects with disability is not just a problem for disabled people….I could go on.

Solidarity looks like saying, “Okay, this is the angle at which I’m going to approach this, and this is the action step I can take.”