Collective for Racial and Disability Justice

10/07/2026

The Census Bureau is proposing major changes to the 2030 Census—including excluding many noncitizen residents from the population used for congressional representation and eliminating race and ethnicity questions from the decennial census.

One of the Bureau’s stated reasons for reconsidering race and ethnicity data is the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which narrowed the standards for bringing vote-dilution claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

But that raises a fundamental problem: a more demanding evidentiary standard requires better evidence, not less.

Callais did not eliminate Section 2 or make race irrelevant. Courts still need evidence about race, geography, voting patterns, and discrimination to evaluate these claims. Removing one of the nation’s most comprehensive sources of granular racial demographic data could make those patterns harder—not easier—to establish.

That concern is part of a much larger shift. After years of federal efforts to improve data disaggregation and make historically overlooked communities more visible, the proposed rule would narrow who counts for representation, collect less demographic information through the universal census, and rely more heavily on government and commercial records to classify people.

In our public comment, CRDJ argues for a different direction: count every resident, preserve disaggregated demographic data, ensure transparent and accurate classification, protect the ACS as a complement—not a substitute—and keep data power accountable.

Because the Census is not just about counting people. It shapes who is represented, what disparities we can see, and what our democracy is able to know about itself.

Read CRDJ's public comment letter:https://37003b98-a009-4c51-ace1-9fd474d7709e.usrfiles.com/ugd/37003b_2e054d67e91b4800a85a2e837e54a10c.pdf

Comments on the proposed rule are due October 13, 2026.

10/05/2026

Across California, disabled people, people experiencing homelessness, and people experiencing mental health and substance use crises can struggle for months or years to access housing, healthcare, peer support, and voluntary treatment. Yet, when those unmet needs become visible as crisis, an expansive system of police, courts, involuntary treatment, hospitals, and supervision can quickly take their place.

In “Care Without Coercion: What Disabled Californians Need from the Next Governor,” CRDJ collaborated with Disability Rights California to examine how California’s growing reliance on coercive responses can deepen the very inequities its systems are meant to address, and what it would mean to build something different.

As California looks toward its next administration, we call for a shift from crisis response to crisis prevention: making voluntary, community-based support meaningfully available before court involvement, institutionalization, arrest, or involuntary treatment becomes the pathway to care. That means giving radicalized disabled people and those with lived experience the meaningful power in shaping the very systems that allow anyone to life safely and with dignity in their communities, from affordable and accessible housing, to healthcare, to home- and community-based services and more.

Read the full piece from CRDJ on Medium: https://medium.com//care-without-coercion-what-disabled-californians-need-from-the-next-governor-d44329293cff?sharedUserId=crdjustice

And from Disability Rights California on Substack: https://disabilityrightscalifornia.substack.com/p/86af235c-ab33-4428-a1d2-3d5f145ef16a

10/02/2026

Federal agencies have spent years trying to fix longstanding gaps in data about people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD).

As recently as April 2026, ACL highlighted new NHIS questions developed with CDC as the first national survey effort since 1994–95 aimed at improving I/DD data collection. Now, the proposed 2028 redesign would remove several of those measures.

CRDJ submitted public comments raising concerns about what that reversal could mean, especially as other parts of the federal disability research and data infrastructure are also being restructured or proposed for elimination.

Our comment asks a larger question: Will the federal government retain the kinds of data needed to understand who its systems are serving, who they are missing, and what consequences its policies have?

Read our letter:https://37003b98-a009-4c51-ace1-9fd474d7709e.usrfiles.com/ugd/37003b_689c5737921b4f1eb5ada81f636b4444.pdf

Submit your own: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/20/2026-17040/proposed-data-collection-submitted-for-public-comment-and-recommendations

09/25/2026

CRDJ strongly supports the vision shared by our peers at Disability Culture Lab and its insistence that disabled people deserve more than survival, accommodation, or inclusion within unjust systems. We share its commitment to collective liberation, leadership by those most impacted, cross-movement solidarity, and recognition that racism, capitalism, colonialism, state violence, and other forms of oppression are themselves disabling. These principles are central to CRDJ’s work connecting racial and disability justice across law, policy, research, and community-led action.

The memo also offers something needed in this moment: a vision expansive enough to name the violence disabled people face while directing us toward interdependence, autonomy, repair, material security, and joy. We are especially encouraged by its call to embed disability justice throughout every movement for social change.

CRDJ welcomes this invitation to build beyond fragmented rights and isolated reforms toward communities and institutions in which everyone can belong, lead, and thrive.

Disability Community + MovementNorth Star Memo We are living through overlapping crises that threaten the very fabric of our democracy, our freedom, our health, and our lives. Yet disabled people — who have long navigated, resisted, and reimagined systems that were not built for us — are too oft...

09/25/2026

Music has always traveled beyond the borders drawn around us.

For Hispanic Heritage Month, our latest CRDJams playlist, Sin Fronteras, moves across countries, generations, and genres to explore the sounds through which Latin American and Latine communities have remembered, resisted, migrated, belonged, and imagined otherwise.

From Indigenous resistance and the songs of the Chicano Movement to Nuyorican salsa, son jarocho, hip-hop, Afro-Latino traditions, and contemporary anthems, Sin Fronteras brings together music shaped by struggles over land, labor, migration, colonialism, racial and gender justice, and cultural sovereignty. These histories also shape experiences of disability and access, from the conditions of labor and migration to the borders, institutions, and environments that determine whose bodies can move freely, safely, and with dignity.

Disability Justice reminds us that liberation is interdependent. Resistance is not expressed through protest alone. It also lives in the languages we preserve, the rhythms that cross borders with us, the histories we refuse to forget, and the joy communities create and carry forward.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, Sin Fronteras celebrates a heritage that has never been contained by a border. 🎧 Listen now on our CRDJ YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJjsi4CAikpw&si=0PpSETqTvOvdl9fP

09/07/2026

is often a celebration of workers. This year, we are also asking: What is work allowed to demand from us?

Research on disability and labor reminds us that “ability to work” has never been a neutral category. Labor systems have helped define whose bodies are productive, employable, dependent, or disposable—and racialized workers have disproportionately borne the injuries, illnesses, exhaustion, environmental exposures, and instability those systems produce.

That history feels especially important right now. Public support for unions is near historic highs even as federal labor protections are under attack. In California, workers are continuing to organize—and some of the most important fights concern staffing, heat, scheduling, care, immigration, surveillance, AI, job security, and control over the pace of work. These may not always be described as disability struggles. But they are struggles over human capacity, bodily autonomy, care, and who bears the costs of work.

This Labor Day is also meaningful for us at CRDJ because our staff recently became members of UAW 4811 at UCLA. Recent UAW 4811 wins remind us what becomes possible when workers move questions of flexibility, security, healthcare, caregiving, immigration, and workplace power out of the realm of individual negotiation and into collective action.

Disability justice has something important to offer the labor movement—not simply a call to include more disabled workers, but a challenge to rethink what worker power is for. And labor organizing has something equally important to offer disability justice: a way to turn demands for access, care, safety, and bodily autonomy into collective power over the institutions that structure our lives. The movements are closer than we sometimes imagine.

This Labor Day, we are interested in what becomes possible when we organize that way.

09/04/2026

What does freedom look like when disabled people help define it?

As the United States reflects on 250 years, CRDJ's Declaration of Interdependence invites disabled people, disability communities, organizations, and collectives to help imagine the next 250 years of disability freedom and liberation.

Add your voice. Share your perspective. Help write what comes next.

🔗 Link: Padlet.com/crdjustice/interdependence

08/27/2026

Black August is rooted in remembrance, political education, resistance, and Black liberation. This Black August, we’re using DisCrit to look at how racism and ableism shape who is surveilled, punished, segregated, and confined, and what abolition asks us to build instead.

Abolition is not just about dismantling systems of confinement. It is also about building the conditions people need to live, move, learn, communicate, and thrive with access to care, resources, and community-based supports.

Study. Resist. Build. Abolish.

Check out the full carousel with the embedded links at tinyurl.com/BlackAugust-CRDJ.

08/24/2026

Professor Jason Arday was more than the headlines surrounding his death. He was a Black autistic sociologist whose work examined racism, neurodivergence, inequality, mental health, and belonging in higher education.

As calls for accountability continue, the conversation cannot stop with the media. Academia must also confront the racism and ableism embedded in its own norms, structures, and ideas of merit and belonging.

We’re also amplifying actions shared by Everyday Racism and Everything Good About Jason Arday, a student-created collection of memories from people who knew and learned from him.

Remember the work. Carry it forward.

Check out the full carousel with the embedded video and links at https://canva.link/xz2np7pcmcul07w