We tend to treat disability politics as a modern phenomenon, the product of disability civil rights movements in the latter part of the 20th century. It’s not: the long arc of that history, in fact, goes back to the American Revolution, whose new ideas promised some disabled white Americans an unprecedented level of inclusion—and to the decades after, when the idea that some groups of people had inherent deficits became profoundly racially coded, setting up struggles around eugenics and full American citizenship that continue to this day.

In her new book Before Disability, Northeastern University professor Sari Altschuler, who studies American literature and culture, explores “how disability helped to shape US citizenship and, in turn, how the formation of US citizenship shaped disability,” especially in the lead-up to the Civil War, after which formerly enslaved Black people were recognized as citizens under the 14th Amendment.

It’s a complicated history, one that includes characters like John Jacob Flournoy, who pushed for a separatist Deaf state in the American West that would be exclusively white, and other advocates for an early disability politics that to rejected Indigenous and Black disabled people.

I spoke to Altschuler about legal efforts to classify Black and Indigenous people as disabled, the history—and limitations—of white disabled Americans’ activism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and what lessons it offers us today.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Could you speak to white Americans’ efforts to portray Black and Indigenous people as disabled in early US history, to deprive them of their rights whether or not they had a disability?

Probably the most infamous case occurred in the federal census of 1840, which appeared to show that freedom disabled Black Americans. While some disability-related categories had first appeared on the US Census in 1830—to fund, for example, schools for Deaf students—suddenly, in 1840, the results of the census appeared to show that Black Americans were more deaf, insane, and cognitively impaired by orders of magnitude in the North than in the South.

“After 1840, body and mind differences were increasingly understood as fixed, biological, and difficult to integrate.”

This was exactly the proof slavery’s advocates wanted to prove [that] Black Americans were unprepared for the rights and responsibilities of freedom and citizenship, and they recited the statistics triumphantly. What’s interesting is that even at the time, people knew the numbers were bunk. For example, the Census identified........

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