Happy International “Crip” Day, 2017

By Diane Wiener, Contributor
The Huffington Post

International Day of Disabled Persons is today. December 3, 2017. Happy Day of the Crips. I celebrate this day, every day, not just on the 3rd of December. For those of you unfamiliar with this coinage, “crip,” the noun, as I am using it, here (also true of “crip,” the verb), is reclaimed.

Instruments are not people, but this music initiative and its related projects are replete with disability discourses. Do these instruments need to be “healed”? Yes, they do, if they are to be “wholly” played in most “typical” ways…and, yes, these Philly kids deserve to have the same *access* to instruments and musical orchestration as might anyone in a far more socioeconomically privileged school district. Class, race, and disability intersect in deep ways in this story.