The Birth of a Nation: Krip Hop and the Art of Disability Activism

This presentation discusses the potential of art in promotion of social justice. This question is approached through the artist-activist Leroy F. Moore Jr., a poet and an activist who works in various fields and by a variety of ways to endorse disability rights, and to raise awareness of disability issues in the society. In his activist work, Moore employs the means of hip-hop and blues music, documentary film, lectures, poems, non-fiction books, disability studies, and performance art. Moore's perspective to disability issues has been influenced by his first-hand experience of growing up with cerebral palsy in New York City in a working-class African American family. His experiences as a colored person with a disability provided him a perspective to the discrimination and oppression targeted at the two different minority groups, and he draws from this experience in his work.
Since the late 1990s, Moore has written a column Illin-N-Chillin for POOR Magazine, in which he critically discusses topical questions of disability. He has recently co-produced a documentary film on police brutality against the disabled titled “Where Is Hope? The Art of Murder,” and currently he serves as the chair of the National Black Disability Studies Committee. Moore is the co-founder of the Sins Invalid, a performance collective which focuses on issues regarding disability, sexuality, and gender.
Krip Hop Nation is a collective and a movement which employs rap and hip hop music for promoting disability rights and awareness of the injustices experienced by disabled people. Krip Hop also criticizes mainstream hip hop’s use of ableist rhetorics, and the music industry which fails to recognize the disabled people as artists and as an audience. Krip Hop is an endeavor of exploring the possibilities to engage in disability activism and disability research through artistic methods.
The œuvre of Leroy Moore offers insights into how interdisciplinary approaches can produce meaningful insights into important social and cultural issues; his work can be utilized in art education practices, and, on the other hand, his work can be perceived as art education par excellence