Qualitative Inquiry, Ahead of Print.
By driving U.S. residents to shelter-in-place, COVID-19 forces many to experience restrictions similar to those experienced by people with disabilities. This autoethnographic essay uses my experiences as a White disabled woman to discuss the communal disabling experience of COVID-19. I use rationing insulin and my sorrow over the lives lost from insulin rationing and COVID-19 to critique the U.S. focus on consumerism and its obfuscation of Black Americans. This essay ends by calling us to use the pandemic’s disabling experience in empathizing and standing in solidarity with Black Americans, and fighting for racial justice.