If you haven’t already signed up, a group of us will be getting together next Sunday at 7pm eastern (6 central, 5 mountain, 4 pacific) to talk about the anthology Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong. (Here’s the link to sign up and get the link.) I wish we could have found a time everyone could attend. I promise there will be more! I’m wondering already if we might do a book group on Matt Desmond’s book Poverty, By America, in the new year! (Another one I got to read for school!)
The whole School of Social Policy and Practice where I study now were invited to read Disability Visibility and discuss it in small groups during our orientation day. Two things struck me:
How grateful I am the dean of my policy school told me I’d be happier at a social work school for my PhD. The twenty people in my discussion circle were gender and orientation and class and race diverse, and all of them, from the associate dean to the first-year MSW students, were there because we want to show up better in order to create a better world. People shared about their own disabilities, about things they had never thought about before from the book, about the intersections with disability and other experiences of marginalization they and/or their clients had to navigate.
How grateful I am for the community that has formed me in Oakland and the Bay Area over the past eighteen years. As I read the book, I came across people I know, people I consider to be friends and teachers, people whose work has shaped mine. The community we build really makes a difference in how we understand the world and our role in it.
I just discovered that Alice, the editor of Disability Visibility, has a substack (you may have been notified that I recommend it). In one of her articles linked here, she shares the following infographic (by Elizabeth Hee) for the book. (Note: the alt text comes from Alice’s newsletter.)
I can’t choose one essay that stands out — the artist who made a fashion line that is disability- and trans- and size-responsive, the lawyer navigating the intersections of racism, sexism and ableism while using paratransit in New York, the scientist whose blindness led to a whole different way of engaging in astrophysics, the essays by people sharing strategy, the essays by people sharing their lived experiences, the list goes on.
But as I re-engage a very fancy brand name educational institution for the first time in a long while, I find myself constantly re-visiting the first essay in the book. An attorney gets invited into public discussion and debate with a philosopher whose philosophy leads him to believe that her parents should have been allowed to kill her based on the demands her disability would place on them as well as how little value she would experience in life. He was courteous and respectful. He wanted his students to hear from her as well as him. He negotiated the appropriate accommodations in order for them to share a meal with other faculty. And he and his colleagues thought that their philosophical frameworks mattered more than her lived experience. In fact, they were disappointed her philosophical frameworks weren’t more rigorous. And isn’t that the tension we live with when we want to make sure we’re engaging in rigorous, well analyzed strategies to improve the world, and our most esteemed institutions hold great partners but also people who think your humanity, your existence, is a subject for philosophical debate.
I’m looking forward to discussing with you any and all aspects of this book next week if you can attend, but I thought I’d share a particular reflection on the text.
Also, follow Alice’s substack and twitter (@SFDirewolf) and IG accounts. She’s amazing.