Black Crip Modern
Race, Gender, and the Roots of Disability Consciousness

Jess Waggoner (Author)

9781479840090

Paperback / softback, published 21 July 2026

216 pages, 10 b/w images
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

"An important, beautifully written, and brilliantly-argued book. Black Crip Modern is an accessible and compelling read for both scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines. Jesse Waggoner's argument that Black writers from the early 20th century have much to offer contemporary theorizations of disability justice is innovative, insightful and original, and considers race and ethnicity, as well as gender, sexuality and class, in their intersections with disability, fundamentally reconstituting the archive of disability studies in the process." - Julie A Minich, author of Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico

"Offers important interventions in the fields of Disability Studies, Black Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies by considering an overlooked set of texts by black writers and cultural producers and their responses to the racialized ideas around post-WWI institutional rehabilitation. By featuring stories essential to critical conversations about black disability, race, and progress, this study offers readers a better understanding of the structures and belief systems that determined which wounded, disabled, and crippled soldiers and citizens were deemed worthy of recuperation after the war. And, in doing so, Black Crip Modern reshapes how we think about citizenship, social justice, and the legacy of medical apartheid in the U.S." - Diana R. Paulin, Trinity College

Asserts how Black artists and activists developed a disability consciousness in response to racialized disabling experiences in the early to mid-twentieth century

Black Crip Modern uncovers how early twentieth-century Black writers, artists, and activists laid the groundwork for modern disability consciousness. Under Jim Crow, Black disabled citizens were excluded from social services and medical reforms, even as racist violence, carceral surveillance, eugenic logic, and exploitative labor conditions deepened disabling experiences. Through literature, film, photography, and personal testimony, Black modernists registered these compounded injustices and articulated new ways of thinking about illness, impairment, and care.

Engaging the work of figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Pauli Murray, Langston Hughes and Marita Bonner, Jess Waggoner traces how Black cultural production challenged both white supremacy and ableist ideals of progress. In their writing, Waggoner finds an early "Black crip modern" consciousness – one that rejected eugenic reform, critiqued racialized caregiving hierarchies, and envisioned collective care grounded in feminist and anti-carceral principles.

In conversation with contemporary disability justice movements, Black Crip Modern reveals how Black thinkers and artists forged a disability politics before it was formally named. By assembling these overlooked histories of Black ill and disabled life, Waggoner reframes the foundations of disability studies and insists that Black cultural production has always been central to the struggle for bodily autonomy, access, and justice.