Content area
Full text
Recognized as a White House Champion of Change and one of Pacific Standard magazine's Top 30 Thinkers Under 30, Talila engineers and leads innovative and intersectional social justice campaigns that illuminate and address grave injustices within our legal system that have gone unaddressed for decades. Talila's advocacy primarily focuses on creating equal access to the legal system for people with disabilities and individuals who are Deaf, Deaf/Blind, Deaf/Disabled, and Hard of Hearing. As one of the only people in the world working on deaf wrongful conviction cases, Talila regularly presents at universities; testifies before legislative and regulatory bodies; and trains members of Congress, attorneys, and law enforcement about this and other disability-related topics. As the creator of the only national deaf prisoner database, Talila advocates with and for hundreds of deaf defendants, prisoners, and returned individuals.
Talila founded and directs Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf communities (HEARD), an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that works to correct and prevent deaf wrongful convictions, end abuse of incarcerated people with disabilities, decrease recidivism for deaf and returning individuals, and increase representation of disabled people in professions that can combat mass incarceration.
Talila is a visiting professor at Rochester Institute of Technology/National Technical Institute for the Deaf and a recent graduate of American University Washington College of Law, and she has received awards from numerous universities, the American Bar Association, the American Association for People with Disabilities, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Nation Institute, National Black Deaf Advocates, and EBONY magazine, among others.
When the state murders Black disabled people, media and prominent racial justice activists report that Black people lost their lives. Contemporaneously, reports from disability rights activists referencing the very same incidents, on the other hand, emphasize that disabled people have fallen victim-often absent any information about that person's race, ethnicity, or indigeneity.
In the wake of Charles Kinsey taking a bullet marked for Arnaldo Rios,1 I am renewing the call for Disability Solidarity2 to encourage a simultaneous effort between disability and racial justice groups to pursue justice for, and in conjunction with, one another-intersectional justice.
On 18 July 2016, Arnaldo Eliud Rios Soto, an autistic Latinx young adult who lived in North Miami unexpectedly left his group home.3 Charles Kinsey, a forty-seven-year-old Black...