Leroy F. Moore JR

Shades of Noir, UK

 

Interview by Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark.

Leroy F. Moore Jr., is Founder of the Krip-Hop Nation (a movement that addresses ableism, or discrimination against disabled artists, esp. Black musicians marginalized because of racism AND ableism internationally) and the co-founder of Sins Invalid.

 

Moore writes, lectures, and performs about the intersections of race and disability issues both in the United States and abroad.

 

Moore is a leading activist on issues of wrongful incarceration and police brutality against people with disabilities.

 

He writes, lectures, and performs about race and disability issues both in the United States and abroad. Moore is one of the founding members of the National Black Disability Coalition.

 

Shades of Noir sat down with Leroy F. Moore Jr. who is founder of the Krip-Hop Nation (a movement that addresses ableism, or discrimination against disabled artists, especially Black artists), the co-founder of Sins Invalid (disability justice performance project that centres people of colour, queers, nonbinary and trans people with disabilities) and one of the founding members of The National Black Disability Coalition (NBDC). Moore writes, lectures, and performs about the intersections of race and disability issues both in the United States and abroad.

 

We would like to thank Leroy for taking the time to speak with us.

 

Can we begin by finding out how Krip-Hop began?

 

I am a poet, writer. I also do what’s known as Krip Hop which is an international movement working with musicians with disabilities which I have organised for the last 12 years. I have been to the UK a lot. I was in the UK in the 90s where there were a lot of disability movements in London and it is there where the story came to life and totally changed my life because it was the first time I saw black disabled people organising. Currently, I am looking into the impact of poverty and race in disability, but more so poverty and race in the US.

 

So is Krip-Hop now more of an international with interactions from all over the world; how is it situated?

 

Yeah, so it’s very much interaction, we just had in July we had an all-African disabled musician tour in places like Uganda, Congo, Tanzania, South Africa and the whole bay area. I’m about to go to South Africa in December to do a festival there and we have talked about doing a book together in order to highlight black disabled artists. Now we have great partners in the UK, Canada and multiple places elsewhere.

 

Amazing! So how is the movement organised in terms of ‘space’?  As it is obviously a very wide number of places, is it a formation in which different pockets of the community come together and organise events? How does that play out?

 

Yeah. So it’s really different pockets of people and then we all connect through social media to see what each chapter is doing and that they’re doing their stuff. Krip has objectives and goals so we ensure that together we each reach our goals through our mission statement and from then there they take it on their own. Like in Uganda where we did a couple of protests against the government and we did a fundraiser too.

 

Amazing. So you yourself founded Krip-Hop and so can you talk to me about the name and why you decided to call it Krip-Hop specifically?

 

Yeah. Certainly so Krip Hop, and particularly people in the US believe that the word ‘Crip’ is representative of the Crips and the Bloods. But, if you look closely into history one of the gang members had a disability and so like the whole gang were like ‘Oh, we’ll just call you Crip.’ So what we’re doing is taking it back and putting it into a political stance in order to redefine the term.

 

How do you feel how the reception of the term ‘Krip’ and the movement as a whole has been received more on an international scale?

 

Locally, here in the US where it is so ableist it really subverts the notion of the historic use of the term ‘Crip’ or ‘Cripple’. It’s the best skill that we have. Especially in Hip-Hip, we most definitely get more love internationally compared to in the US.

 

And what ways have you found to combat – de-sensitivity even – the ideas people hold towards the term and the community more generally in the US?

 

Yeah, so we write a lot of articles and arrange workshops. One workshop we did 12 years ago when the Krip-Hop Nation community started was around disabled and queer Hip-Hop. Out there so when we come out and do our work it is very straightforward and plain speaking. We have the confidence and awareness to combat ableism. What I really do is education and advocacy around black and Brown disabled people particularly embedded within history and culture. In London, as you probably well know, there was a huge black disabled community in the nineties and now as it’s just gone, it’s like, cool. Yeah. So questioning what happened, why? Because they didn’t have any other space particular for that community due to the nature of their experiences.

 

Racism has really destroyed black disabled movements. So I really wanted people to take away that I do a lot around racism and disability not only in Hip-Hop but also in regards to advocacy and Black Disabled History that has been erased from the cannon. I wrote a book called Black Disabled History 101 which talks a lot about Black Disabled arts here in the US whilst also revealing the history of our Black Disabled ancestors. If you think we don’t have answers, you’re wrong as we do! We are very tough in comparisons to other communities and we are just trying to highlight this history. So we are trying to get in school and other organisations in order to have Black Disabled Studies.

 

I was invited to go to Leeds University and it’s been like a year and I was like, wow so many of the academic in disabilities studies are white and that was only in the 90s.

So you spoke quite briefly about your emphasis on education and some of your writing projects; are there any documents that can be publicly accessed for our audiences as I feel that they may benefit from and so in what ways, I’m just trying to think in terms of our audience for the document, is there any, um, is there any I can publicly access, cause I think it’d be very valuable for our audience and our students to see that, especially when it comes to these kinds of discussions. I think that’s always very valuable to see. I think just for anyone who was really interested in that, that aspect of disability studies.

 

Yeah, we have a lot of information and resources available on the Krip-Hop and I also have a YouTube channel where you can find out more about Disabled History and Black Disabled History 101.

 

I do agree with you that the way in which aspects of the disability narrative is modelled is so white facing and it really just neglects a lot of the intersections that happen within the wider discourse It was just really lovely to read about what you were doing and how. I was actually thinking in terms of students’ access and how valuable that could be in their studies.

 

Yeah, absolutely. It’s almost a full circle because, as I said previously, my education started in London surrounding black disability issues so thank you.