17 Quotes by Alice Wong

Just knowing your rights (or your worth or value) will never be enough if you are powerless to force someone else to respect them.

The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world.

I feel a little bitter that most non-disabled people do not have this dilemma of whether they will exchange their privacy to be seen as human. I am also aware that I am not alone in this experience, and that many marginalized people are put in the position of having to prove their humanity every day.

After a decade of all-volunteer advocacy, I have come to view every incarceration as a missed opportunity to love and transform; as a loss of time, life, and dreams of our community; and as state violence. Some of our greatest assets and resources in this struggle are exiled from our communities and languishing in this nation’s labyrinth of violent institutions.

I took a deep breath and – alongside the oxygen and the carbon dioxide – I exhaled tidbits of the intense shame and fear that I had carried as an extra weight on my backbone.

These stories do not seek to explain the meaning of disability or to inspire or elicit empathy. Rather, they show disabled people simply being in our own words, by our own accounts. Disability Visibility is also one part of a larger arc in my own story as a human being.

For a government that claims to seek to reduce and prevent violence, transformative and holistic measures like community conversations and community accountability should be at least a part of the solution.

Jessie Lorenz talked with her friend Herb Levine about his involvement in the 1977 504 sit-ins – the longest nonviolent occupation of a federal building. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was a federal law that outlawed discrimination based on disability in any program or activity receiving federal funding.

Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing,” says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.