Introduction
On March 9, 2024, police officers killed Ryan Gainer, a Black teenager with autism,
in his own home after his family called 911 for help.
Gainer’s family reported that he was experiencing a disability-related behavioral crisis, breaking things at home and hitting his sister, though she was unharmed.
The family later called, saying that Gainer had calmed down and help was no longer needed.
Still, within seconds of arriving, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s deputies shot and killed Gainer, who was holding a gardening hoe.
The police body camera footage shows a deputy immediately firing as Gainer appears to run toward him.
This tragic death parallels another in Illinois just months later, where police fatally shot Sonya Massey, a thirty-six-year-old Black woman experiencing a mental health crisis in her home.
Despite her mother’s urgent plea to the 911 dispatcher for noncombative officers, police arrived and killed Massey within minutes.
After weeks of seeking mental health support, officers shot Massey when she needed help the most.
These cases are not isolated. They reflect the broader, systemic issue of a shoot-first mentality in law enforcement, particularly when dealing with the Black community.
But these incidents also highlight a critical, yet often overlooked and unacknowledged, issue: the violation of the privacy rights of disabled individuals of color within their own homes. Scholars frequently tout privacy as a fundamental civil right,
yet its protections and benefits
are unequally distributed,
especially for marginalized groups like disabled people of color.
Despite the universal promises of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, the physical and decisional privacy of disabled individuals of color is too often breached by those meant to protect them.
This Comment advocates for an intersectional
approach to privacy law,
grounded in Critical Disability Studies (DisCrit),
to highlight and address the compounded physical privacy harms disabled people of color face during police interactions. By applying DisCrit, this Comment reveals how the intersections of race and disability lead to physical and decisional privacy violations routinely overlooked within the traditional legal framework. The central thesis of this Comment is that the current privacy law framework in the United States fails to protect the rights of marginalized individuals, especially racial minorities and disabled people. Through a DisCrit lens, this Comment demonstrates that these groups experience significant breaches of their privacy rights with limited avenues for recourse. Consequently, this Comment calls for urgent reform of privacy law to explicitly account for the intersections of race and disability, ultimately proposing an abolitionist approach to reshape the privacy law framework.
Part I underscores the need to integrate a DisCrit perspective into privacy law, arguing that the current framework inadequately protects racial minorities and disabled people. This Part begins with an overview of privacy law, then examines its shortcomings through two key lenses: an evidentiary lens, which exposes pervasive privacy violations against disabled Black and Brown people, and a theoretical lens, which critiques the ableist and racist foundations of privacy law. The Part concludes by introducing DisCrit as a critical framework for reimagining privacy law to ensure more inclusive protections. Part II applies DisCrit to two case studies—the recent killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey—surfacing how privacy law in the United States systematically fails to protect the privacy rights of individuals who are disabled, racial minorities, or both, and argues that these two killings were not mere mistakes by law enforcement but are indicative of a privacy law framework that inherently excludes disabled people of color. Lastly, Part III argues for a privacy law regime that explicitly accounts for the intersections of race and disability, advocating for the systemic upheaval of the current privacy law framework and proposing an abolitionist approach to comprehensive reform.
I. Why Privacy Law Needs DisCrit
This Part establishes the critical need for integrating a DisCrit perspective into privacy law, arguing that the existing privacy law framework fails to sufficiently protect those on the margins, particularly racial minorities and disabled people. This Part begins by analyzing different conceptualizations of privacy law and examines their shortcomings from two critical perspectives: first, through an evidentiary analysis; and second, through a theoretical critique. Both approaches reveal how privacy law continues to marginalize and exclude vulnerable groups. This Part concludes by introducing DisCrit as a vital framework for analysis of privacy law and underscoring the importance of reimagining privacy law to ensure more inclusive and equitable protections.
A. Defining Privacy
When discussing privacy harms, it is important to specify the type of privacy at issue. Privacy law scholars propose a framework that breaks privacy into five distinct dimensions: physical, informational, decisional, proprietary, and associational.
This approach helps clarify the multifaceted nature of privacy concerns.
For example, intrusions into physical privacy include nonconsensual intimate touching or unauthorized entry into someone’s home.
This aspect of physical privacy is especially relevant in instances in which disabled individuals of color are killed in their homes because the physical, tangible violation is particularly severe. Decisional privacy, on the other hand, protects an individual’s ability to make choices about how they live their life without unjustifiable interference from others or the state.
Examples of decisional privacy intrusions include state bans on medically safe birth control, abortions, interracial marriages, and same-sex relationships and marriages.
This dimension of privacy is also implicated in the killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey because these killings clearly interfered with their ability to manage their personal disabilities independently of state intervention.
Although several amendments to the U.S. Constitution imply a right to privacy, its strongest legal protections are rooted in the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, safeguarding privacy in one’s home, possessions, and person.
The Fourteenth Amendment extends these protections by broadly securing substantive liberties and equalities, establishing privacy as a fundamental right.
Together, these amendments affirm the existence of an underlying right to physical privacy. The right to decisional privacy has been affirmed in numerous Supreme Court Cases, including Loving v. Virginia, which upheld this right in matters of personal lifestyle and interracial marriage,
and Eisenstadt v. Baird, which upheld it in matters of family planning and contraception.
B. Gaps in Privacy Jurisprudence: Evidentiary and Theoretical
The inadequacy of current protections for the privacy rights of disabled people of color is glaringly evident. This issue can be analyzed through two lenses: evidentiary shortcomings and theoretical biases.
I. Evidentiary Shortcomings. — The widespread violations of disabled people of color’s privacy rights highlight the systemic failure of the current privacy law framework. The statistical data is grim: “In the United States, 50 percent of people killed by law enforcement are disabled, and more than half of disabled African Americans are arrested by the age of 28.”
This is double the rate of white nondisabled people.
These figures likely understate the true scope of the problem due to insufficient federal recordkeeping.
The lack of comprehensive data on police violence against disabled individuals presents a significant barrier to addressing the disproportionately high rate of deaths among disabled people of color resulting from police killings. The Ruderman Family Foundation’s report emphasizes this data gap, noting that estimates of the percentage of police shooting victims who are disabled vary widely—from twenty-five percent to over forty percent.
Given that over twenty-five percent of adults in the United States are disabled, these figures are disproportionately high.
2. Theoretical Shortcomings. — Discussions of privacy harms for disabled people of color must acknowledge that the historical development of privacy rights in the United States did not prioritize their protection. In fact, the origins of American privacy rights were significantly shaped by racism and ableism.
Such prejudices were used to justify the systemic violation of African Americans’ privacy rights during slavery, underpinned by the erroneous belief that enslaved individuals were intellectually and morally inferior.
Early American property laws further reinforced this dehumanization by treating enslaved people as private property, denying them any autonomy or right to privacy due to their perceived racial and intellectual inferiority.
The late nineteenth century brought about efforts to formalize privacy rights, most notably through Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’s seminal 1890 article, The Right to Privacy, which proposed a definition of privacy as the “right ‘to be let alone.’”
These efforts were primarily aimed at shielding the elite
—predominantly white, wealthy, and able-bodied individuals—from the intrusions of the press.
This focus on protecting the privileged few largely ignored the severe privacy violations endured by marginalized groups at the time, such as the horrific infringements of lynching and the ongoing genocide of Native Americans.
As privacy legislation evolved throughout the twentieth century, it continued to largely overlook the rights and needs of those outside the societal majority, particularly in terms of race, disability, gender, and power. The definition of privacy as the “right to be let alone,” as articulated by Warren and Brandeis, became widely accepted and was eventually recognized by the Georgia Supreme Court in 1905.
Yet the broadness of this definition left significant ambiguity regarding what constitutes a privacy violation and failed entirely to provide protections for marginalized individuals.
Scholars also put forward other definitions of privacy. Professor Alan Westin defined privacy as control over personal information.
While influential, Westin’s definition faced criticism for its narrow scope, particularly as it failed to account for physical and digital intrusions that are increasingly prevalent.
Professor Ruth Gavison offered an alternative perspective by characterizing privacy as a limitation on others’ access to individuals and information as part of a privacy “complex” made up of three “irreducible elements: secrecy, anonymity, and solitude.”
But some similarly critiqued Gavison’s approach for excluding critical personal decisions, such as those related to reproductive rights, from its scope.
Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum proposed the concept of “contextual integrity,” positing that privacy is inherently normative, involving judgments about the appropriateness of information flows within specific contexts.
But this framing is not without its drawbacks, particularly the risk of becoming overly recursive, such that privacy is seen as a state of affairs dependent on contextual judgments. Moreover, this definition likely fails to protect disabled people of color because privacy norms can be shaped in ways that overlook their interests. Similarly, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of privacy as a “penumbra” of rights
under the Bill of Rights is inadequate for disabled people of color.
The penumbra approach neglects the unique needs of disabled people of color, leading to definitions of privacy that inadequately protect their rights and interests.
Most relevant for acknowledging the privacy needs of disabled people of color is Professor Anita Allen’s “critical facilitation” definition of privacy.
This definition emphasizes understanding and addressing the specific privacy needs of at-risk communities.
This approach advocates for moving away from prescriptive definitions and toward a more inclusive dialogue that centers the voices and concerns of marginalized individuals.
In doing so, it fosters a substantive understanding of privacy that reflects the lived experiences of those most vulnerable to privacy violations.
For example, community members in predominantly minoritized areas might view the overuse of stop-and-frisks as privacy violations.
Similarly, debates on reproductive rights often face dismissive critiques that separate privacy from liberty. These critiques weaken the privacy claims of women, especially women of color.
Recognizing these concerns as legitimate privacy issues, the critical facilitation approach offers a more equitable and comprehensive understanding of privacy that serves all individuals.
When discussing privacy and the specific breaches of privacy affecting disabled people of color, this Comment focuses on the physical and decisional dimensions of privacy, as defined by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. This Comment adopts Professor Allen’s nonmainstream “critical facilitation” definition of privacy because it more effectively captures the unique privacy harms experienced by disabled people of color.
C. Introduction to DisCrit
Current legal frameworks fail to protect the privacy rights of disabled people of color, highlighting the need for approaches
that address the intersecting impacts of racism and ableism.
DisCrit provides a helpful methodological framework for this analysis, drawing from both Critical Race Theory (CRT) and disability studies.
CRT posits that race is a social construct, with the law historically playing a central role in defining racial categories.
It argues that racism is not just a matter of individual prejudice, but a pervasive force shaping legal systems and policies.
Similarly, disability scholars like Arlene Kanter contend that disability is socially constructed.
Drawing on these two fields, DisCrit specifically examines how societal norms label certain traits as disabilities, focusing on societal and environmental barriers over individual limitations.
DisCrit builds on an expanded social model of disability, positing that disabled individuals often face challenges due to societal barriers rather than their impairments.
By integrating additional critical perspectives, DisCrit acknowledges that the social model alone cannot fully capture the complexities at the intersections of race and disability.
This framework uniquely addresses the compounded discrimination that disabled people of color face, highlighting how racism and ableism interconnect to perpetuate exclusion and systemic injustice.
For example, DisCrit examines how the law has marginalized disabled people of color. Historically, racial ideology justified the enslavement of Black people and the dispossession of Indigenous land, with ableism playing a significant role.
The United States economy valued enslaved Black individuals primarily for their physical and mental abilities, with disabilities lowering their value and often sparking disputes at slave auctions.
DisCrit thus surfaces how racism and ableism together shaped and reinforced norms of whiteness.
DisCrit is grounded in a set of guiding questions outlined in the foundational text by Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri, titled Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the Intersections of Race and Dis/ability.
This text lays out the theoretical underpinnings of DisCrit and introduces seven key tenets:
1. DisCrit focuses on ways that the forces of racism and ableism circulate interdependently, often in neutralized and invisible ways, to uphold notions of normality.
2. DisCrit values multidimensional identities and troubles singular notions of identity such as race or dis/ability or class or gender or sexuality, and so on.
3. DisCrit emphasizes the social constructions of race and ability and yet recognizes the material and psychological impacts of being labeled as raced or dis/abled, which sets one outside of the western cultural norms.
4. DisCrit privileges voices of marginalized populations, traditionally not acknowledged within research.
5. DisCrit considers legal and historical aspects of dis/ability and race and how both have been used separately and together to deny the rights of some citizens.
6. DisCrit recognizes Whiteness and Ability as Property and that gains for people labeled with dis/abilities have largely been made as the result of interest convergence of White, middle-class citizens.
7. DisCrit requires activism and supports all forms of resistance.
These tenets coalesce into a guiding question: “How might DisCrit further expand our knowledge (or understanding) of race and dis/ability?”
DisCrit provides a practical framework that uncovers systemic inequalities often overlooked by other methodologies. DisCrit’s effectiveness has led scholars to apply it across a range of legal and societal contexts. Race and disability scholar Jamelia Morgan takes up this question in her work Toward a DisCrit Approach to American Law,
and disability law scholar Katherine Perez similarly explores it in A Critical Race and Disability Legal Studies Approach to Immigration Law and Policy.
Additionally, Annamma and Morgan apply DisCrit to issues of youth incarceration and abolition, revealing how policing and enforcement disproportionately target Black and Latinx students and how Black parents face systemic disadvantages in advocating for their children under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
These examples demonstrate that ableism, especially when combined with racial bias, can manifest differently across systems and situations. But DisCrit reveals a core similarity: Legal systems often assume that people of color are less capable of thinking, learning, and behaving—and are therefore more dangerous.
D. Applying DisCrit to Privacy: Analyzing the Intersection of Disability and Race in Privacy Contexts
This Comment applies the DisCrit methodology to privacy issues affecting disabled people of color in their homes, focusing specifically on the recent killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey. DisCrit’s value lies in its ability to illuminate the intersections of race and disability in ways that traditional models cannot. By integrating DisCrit into the analysis of privacy issues within legal frameworks, advocates can contribute to more inclusive and equitable decisional and physical privacy protections for disabled people of color. A DisCrit lens identifies gaps in privacy jurisprudence and challenges underlying assumptions, exposing both who is and is not afforded privacy rights and the reasons behind these disparities.
Most importantly, a DisCrit framework demonstrates that privacy violations against disabled people of color are not isolated incidents resulting from inadequate training programs or individual misconduct by “bad apple” police officers. Instead, it shows that these infringements are systemic, functioning as expected within an ableist and racist privacy system, and can only be addressed through comprehensive, systemic reform. It strengthens the case for the abolition of privacy regimes by underscoring how deeply entrenched ableism and racism are within the privacy system.
While employing a DisCrit perspective in examining privacy offers significant insights, it is not a panacea. DisCrit shines a light on how prevailing privacy practices often fail to protect the compounded experiences of those navigating both racial and disability discrimination. But DisCrit, with its focused lens, might not encapsulate the full breadth of issues permeating privacy law. History has repeatedly shown that infringements on privacy rights in the United States span beyond the intersection of race and disability to many other marginalized groups.
Admittedly, this Comment does not fully engage with the intricate challenges of privacy’s overlap with additional factors such as socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, religion, and transgender experiences.
Consequently, this DisCrit study can offer only a segmented solution to the comprehensive challenges within privacy law.
Nonetheless, a DisCrit approach to privacy marks a necessary step in the push for comprehensive reform of privacy laws. This Comment lays a foundation, advocating for further nuanced, intersectional, and critical evaluations of privacy. It builds on and broadens the academic dialogue initiated by legal scholars such as Anita Allen,
Khiara Bridges,
Danielle Citron,
Mary Anne Franks,
Jasmine Harris,
and Scott Skinner-Thompson,
who have explored the intersections of privacy and identity. This Comment encourages deeper examinations of how privacy intersects with various identities, steering us toward more equitable and just legal privacy protections for all. Although this Comment alone does not solve every privacy concern, it plays an important role in shaping a privacy framework that better meets the needs of diverse individuals. Adopting a DisCrit approach to privacy is an important first step toward advocating for significant reforms that will make privacy protections more meaningful for everyone—especially for disabled people of color like Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey.
II. Applying DisCrit: Case Studies
Applying a DisCrit methodology to American privacy law reveals that disabled minorities experience privacy breaches in their homes with limited recourse. This Part conducts a DisCrit analysis of the 2024 killings of two disabled individuals of color: Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey.
A. Ryan Gainer
1. Gainer’s Killing. — A DisCrit analysis of the tragic death of Ryan Gainer, a disabled Black teenager, uncovers the profound and often overlooked privacy violation that occurred during his killing. Police killed Gainer, a fifteen-year-old boy with autism, in his own home in Apple Valley, California.
The incident started when Gainer, experiencing a behavioral crisis aggravated by his disability, broke the glass in the front door of his family home during an argument with his parents about chores.
Although he had calmed down by the time police arrived, the situation escalated rapidly when officers entered the Gainer family home aggressively, shouting, “[W]here’s he at?”
Startled, Gainer—holding a gardening tool—charged at the officers.
Within seven seconds of seeing Gainer, the police shot and killed him.
The Gainer family had regularly relied on law enforcement for help with Gainer’s behavioral crises and believed that the officers understood his disability.
Despite local police’s familiarity with Gainer’s family and possible awareness of his condition, the police rapidly opened fire on Gainer.
This shoot-first response to a behavioral crisis reflects a broader societal bias that frequently erases the needs of disabled individuals, particularly disabled people of color, during law enforcement encounters.
The officers immediately chose to use lethal force instead of employing de-escalation techniques, failing to recognize and accommodate Gainer’s disability. They misinterpreted behaviors often observed in autistic indi-viduals—such as difficulty maintaining eye contact or responding to commands—as defiance or aggression rather than understanding these behaviors as behavioral or communication differences.
Racial stereotypes likely further compounded a misinterpretation based on disability, framing Gainer, a young Black boy, as inherently dangerous and justifying the officers’ use of excessive force.
2. Privacy Violations. — How Ryan Gainer was killed represents a significant violation of multiple aspects of his privacy rights within the context of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. First, the use of lethal force against Gainer violated his physical bodily privacy. The officers’ immediate resort to lethal force showed a complete disregard for Gainer’s personhood and physical privacy, particularly considering his disability. Second, the intrusion into Gainer’s home—a space where he had a heightened expectation of privacy—constituted a severe breach of his physical privacy. The officers’ aggressive entry, marked by shouting and threats, transformed what should have been a safe, private space into one of danger, reflecting intersectional biases that devalue the Fourth Amendment protections and the privacy rights of disabled Black individuals in their own homes.
Lastly, the killing infringed upon Gainer’s decisional privacy, stripping away his right to manage his disability and behavioral crisis within the safety of his home.
Professor Devon Carbado’s critique of the “reasonable person” standard in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence supports this analysis.
Carbado argues that the reasonable person standard is a normative construction that fails to account for the lived experiences of marginalized individuals.
Just as Carbado argued that the “reasonable person” standard burdens people of color,
it also burdens those with intellectual, developmental, or physical disabilities, effectively holding them to a potentially unachievable standard. The police officers’ failure to consider Gainer’s disability within this standard underscores the systemic flaws in legal protections for disabled individuals of color. Police officers may not consciously apply the legal standard, but Carbado’s analysis provides a guide for understanding how normative assumptions about reasonableness might still shape officers’ decisions in practice. In Gainer’s case, the police officers exhibited an expectation of compliance that was disconnected from his identity as a person with a disability.
Applying a DisCrit lens to Ryan Gainer’s case not only highlights the racial and ableist prejudices that led to his death but also reveals the privacy violations that often go unnoticed in discussions of police brutality. DisCrit brings into focus the stark invasion of Gainer’s privacy as a disabled Black teenager experiencing a mental health crisis, who was fatally shot within his home after possibly struggling to understand or comply with police commands.
This incident represents both an intersectional harm and a profound breach of privacy.
Some may assert that Gainer’s privacy rights were revoked when his family called the police onto their property. But this perspective overlooks the police’s inherent responsibility to respect individuals’ privacy rights, regardless of the circumstances that led to police involvement.
The fact that Gainer’s parents sought help does not absolve the officers of their responsibilities to assess the situation with care and to protect, rather than violate, Gainer’s rights. Gainer’s parents’ call for assistance was not an invitation for an invasion of privacy or an endorsement of lethal force to kill their son; it was a request for help in managing a disability crisis, a request that does not grant a license to kill.
DisCrit shows how race and disability combined to exacerbate the threat officers perceived. A truly intersectional analysis would demand that the law recognize how racial biases and ableism interact, leading to a heightened risk of violence against disabled people of color. This claim would challenge law enforcement to consider not just the visible signs of disability but also how racial stereotypes amplify perceptions of danger, resulting in disproportionate infringements of privacy. DisCrit uncovers the privacy issues embedded in such incidents and calls for the development of legal frameworks that address the compounded harms faced by individuals at the intersection of race and disability.
B. Sonya Massey
1. The Killing. — Applying DisCrit to the killing of Sonya Massey, a disabled Black woman, highlights the profound and often overlooked violations of privacy that occur at the intersection of race and disability. Police fatally shot Massey, a Black woman with a documented mental health disability, on July 6, 2024, in her Springfield, Illinois, home.
The incident began when Massey, experiencing a mental health crisis, called the police, fearing an intruder.
Despite pleading with the officers not to harm her, Massey was killed by officer Sean Grayson within thirty minutes of her original 911 call.
The killing occurred when Officer Grayson misinterpreted Massey’s routine act of boiling water in her kitchen due to racial biases.
As a Black woman engaged in a routine task in her own home, Massey was perceived as a threat, reinforcing harmful stereotypes that depict Black women as inherently violent even within their own homes.
Grayson aggressively ordered Massey to turn off the boiling water, and as she attempted to comply, he yelled, “You better f**king not or I swear to God I’ll f**king shoot you in the f**king face.”
He then fired at her, killing her on the spot.
His use of lethal force underscores how racial prejudice can have deadly consequences for disabled people of color, even within the privacy of their own homes. Grayson later made derogatory remarks, referring to Massey as “crazy,”
reflecting both his biased view of her disability and racial stereotypes that dismiss mental health issues in people of color as character flaws rather than serious conditions requiring proper care.
The officers also neglected to employ appropriate mental health interventions—such as de-escalation techniques or the involvement of mental health professionals—signaling a systemic disregard for disability rooted in ableism. Officer Grayson only inquired about previous mental health calls to Massey’s home after the incident, and initial radio traffic wrongly described her gunshot wound as “self-inflicted,” further exposing a deep-seated mishandling of mental health disabilities.
Officer Grayson considered Massey’s mental health disability as an afterthought, only after she was already dead. This ableist policing system denied Massey the care her disability warranted.
2. Privacy Violations. — Sonya Massey’s case exemplifies the compounded privacy violations experienced by disabled individuals of color during encounters with law enforcement in their own homes. When officers surveyed the perimeter of Massey’s home, they insisted on entering despite her visible distress, thereby violating her decisional privacy—a right particularly vital for individuals with mental health disabilities, who often require safe, controlled environments.
The officers’ insistence on entry disregarded Massey’s heightened need for privacy in her home, ignoring the specific vulnerabilities associated with her disability.
Once inside, the officers failed to consider Massey’s disability, even when she expressed fear by saying, “Please don’t hurt me.”
Instead of addressing her concerns with empathy, they responded with the disingenuous reassurance, “Why would I hurt you? You called us,”
a statement that minimized her legitimate fear and failed to acknowledge her specific anxieties as a woman of color with disabilities whose privacy was being violated. This response reveals a systemic disregard for the unique privacy vulnerabilities of disabled individuals of color, who are often subject to invasions that dismiss or invalidate their needs. By entering her home and taking control of her space, the officers stripped Massey of her decisional privacy—the ability to manage her own mental health needs and maintain control over her environment. This invasion ultimately escalated to the point where Massey lost not only her privacy but her life, the most extreme violation of her physical and decisional privacy.
Privacy law must more effectively address the intersecting impacts of race and disability, with DisCrit providing a valuable framework for this analysis. Sonya Massey’s case reveals the urgent need for systemic upheaval within privacy law to respect the decisional and physical privacy of disabled people of color. DisCrit critiques not only the officers’ immediate actions but also the broader structures that allow such violations to occur, advocating for a reimagined privacy system that fully recognizes and respects the privacy of disabled people of color in their homes.
III. Arguing for a Privacy Law Regime that Explicitly Accounts for the Intersections of Race and Disability
The case studies of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey highlight how DisCrit reveals privacy concerns by focusing on the intersectional vulnerabilities faced by disabled individuals of color. These examples expose the invisibility that often exists where race and disability intersect—a critical issue that DisCrit addresses directly.
DisCrit not only deepens our understanding of the privacy violations experienced by disabled people of color in their homes but also points to broader implications for privacy law. Building on this, Part III explores the benefits of applying a DisCrit approach to privacy and advocates for a legal framework that explicitly considers the intersections of race and disability. It ultimately calls for a systemic overhaul of the current privacy regime and proposes an abolitionist approach to fundamentally reshape privacy law.
A. Benefits of a DisCrit Approach
First, a DisCrit framework reveals that disabled people of color are particularly vulnerable to privacy infringements, thereby exposing the urgent need for legal reforms that comprehensively address these issues. Empirical evidence shows that disabled people of color face privacy violations more frequently,
reflecting patterns of marginalization that are consistent with other forms of discrimination, such as those based on gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status.
Such recognition is crucial for driving legal reforms that genuinely protect the privacy rights of these especially vulnerable groups.
But what kinds of reforms are necessary? The need goes beyond incremental adjustments to current privacy laws; it calls for a rethinking of the privacy framework itself. DisCrit prompts us to question whether existing privacy protections are sufficient for disabled people of color and whether these protections address the root causes of privacy violations within an ableist and racist privacy regime. Historical
and contemporary
case studies demonstrate that current laws often fail to account for the unique ways in which privacy is breached for marginalized individuals, particularly during encounters with law enforcement. For example, though both of the recent police killings discussed above spawned ensuing cases, neither of them incorporates an explicit privacy analysis.
Second, integrating DisCrit into privacy law offers a critical lens for assessing and critiquing existing legal doctrines. This perspective questions the sufficiency of current privacy protections and urges us to explore ways to enhance state and federal laws to remedy these shortcomings. DisCrit facilitates a critical review of whether privacy law equitably protects all individuals. It challenges the narrative that privacy violations against disabled people of color are isolated incidents resulting from insufficient police training or the misconduct of a handful of rogue officers. Instead, DisCrit emphasizes that these acts of law enforcement are entrenched in a privacy system designed to uphold ableist and racist principles. This insight strengthens the case for systemic reform, if not abolition, of current privacy frameworks that fail to adequately protect disabled people of color.
Third, DisCrit equips privacy scholars and practitioners with essential tools for understanding the specific challenges encountered by disabled people of color and advocating for solutions. This approach highlights how the intersectionality of disability and race influences an individual’s privacy rights, fostering a more inclusive and justice-oriented dialogue on privacy issues. By expanding the traditional definitions of privacy, DisCrit criticizes the narrow interpretations that have historically overlooked or invalidated the experiences of marginalized groups. It advocates for a broader understanding of privacy that includes issues such as police violence, thereby pushing for a privacy framework that more accurately reflects and addresses the multifaceted nature of privacy breaches across diverse populations. Further, a focus on disabled people of color’s specific privacy needs is imperative, as without it generic calls for privacy reform will not be able to meet their needs.
Fourth, DisCrit challenges the broader structures that enable privacy violations, advocating for a privacy regime that acknowledges and respects the humanity of disabled people of color. This approach dismantles the notion that privacy violations are mere exceptions within the legal system. Instead, it argues that these issues are intrinsic to the system itself, functioning as expected within an ableist and racist framework. Thus, the DisCrit approach not only challenges law enforcement’s immediate actions but also calls for the abolition of the privacy law framework that allows for such practices.
Fifth, incorporating a DisCrit perspective enriches our understanding of privacy doctrine and promotes a more inclusive definition of privacy. By extending privacy beyond traditional definitions, DisCrit encourages a deeper understanding of privacy concerns and criticizes the narrow interpretations that have historically failed to address the experiences of marginalized groups. This approach pushes for a more equitable legal system, one that fully acknowledges and respects the privacy rights of all individuals, particularly those from marginalized racial backgrounds and with disabilities. By advocating for systemic reform, DisCrit offers a pathway toward a privacy framework that is truly just and inclusive.
Conclusion
This Comment has argued that privacy violations against disabled people of color are not anomalies arising from insufficient training or the misconduct of a small number of officers. By applying DisCrit, this Comment shows that these violations are systemic, embedded within an ableist and racist privacy regime that inherently devalues the privacy of marginalized individuals. By exposing the deep-rooted intersections of race and disability, DisCrit reveals that the killings of Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey embody fundamental flaws in the current privacy regime.
The analysis presented in this Comment strengthens the call for the abolition of the existing privacy law regime, urging for comprehensive reform. Only by dismantling the current system’s ableist and racist underpinnings can we envision a future privacy regime that genuinely protects individuals like Ryan Gainer and Sonya Massey. The path forward requires not merely reform but a radical reimagining of privacy law—one that is abolitionist and that centers the experiences of disabled people of color and ensures their privacy rights are recognized and upheld.