I IDENTIFY AS BLIND

A musician/activist offers 10 personal essays that explore her life as a blind-identified woman.

Lachi knew early on that she wanted to be a singer. But because she had no low-vision Black female role models, she kept her dreams to herself, vowing instead to forge an identity “out of thin air, pure grit, and a touch of golden wit.” Then, in 2016, the year she seemed poised for a breakthrough in the music world, she went from being “blindish” to legally blind. Lachi leaned into the adaptability and resilience a blind identity afforded her and stepped into the self-loving, celebratory “Yaaas Queen Energy” that has fueled her success as an activist, musician, and entrepreneur. Rather than succumb to stigma, she made visual disability her superpower. That mindset in turn gave her the boldness to found RAMPD, a platform for amplifying disability culture in the music industry, and launch a successful line of “cute-ass Glam Canes” that “tell the blind and cane-using communities ‘You are worth being seen and feeling sophisticated.’” The author’s intersecting identities—blind, female, and Black—also allowed her to better understand a disability community/movement that tended to privilege and showcase disabled white (male) people and adopt a more all-encompassing disability justice framework to think about disability rights. Within that context, disabled people “rocking the most marginalized identities are the ones most impacted by systemic ableism.” That she lost what vision she did have at a young age made her more sensitive to the fact that “we’re all likely to transition into having a full-time disability one day, temporarily or permanently, because of injury, illness, or good old Father Time.” Lively, wise, and candid, this book offers profoundly necessary insights into the complexities—and joys—of living with disability.

A provocative invitation to rethink what it means to be disabled.