Alice Wong Dedication

I volunteered immediately to speak about Alice Wong because it would give me an excuse to revisit her passion for disability justice. I didn't know what I would say but I knew I wanted to honour her courage. 

Because it takes courage to speak up about ableism in a world determined to squeeze eugenics into every facet of life.

It takes courage to look at the social hierarchies we are all burdened with and say this absolute nonsense and agitate people who believe disabled people should be silent or erased. 

It takes courage to commit to using your creativity for the downfall of capitalism, white supremacy and ableism when corporations and governments would rather you take that creativity and put it into making endless distractions and weapons of mass destruction. 

It takes courage to create spaces and learn about the obstructions and challenges other disabled people face, amplify their stories and affirm their reality. That's courageous. 

Alice Wong did all of these things because she was extremely dissatisfied with the state of the world and she let it be known. And she was right to.

So we must honour her with our own courage. 

We must find the courage to resist the system that places value on people's 

 minds and bodies which are rooted in sadistic and banal ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity.

As disabled people, we must find the courage to broaden our consideration of discrimination under the umbrella of ableism - like saneism which is discrimination based on mental traits, and audism, discrimination against deaf people. 

We must find the courage to practice COVID safety and protect ourselves and others from respiratory viruses. 

We must find the courage to dismantle colonial conventions that have birthed systemic ableism, pervasive anti-Africanness, the deification of patriarchs, the insatiable consumption of natural resources, the subjugation of children, misogyny, queerphobia, wealth hoarding and human trafficking. These cruel conventions take courage to undo and resist, and I'm so grateful to Alice Wong for radicalising me and demonstrating how creativity and courage can undermine cruelty and corruption. 

Alice Wong may not be here with us in the physical realm but she left us plenty that we can revisit in her absence. The ways in which we may find courage is by listening to her podcast Disability Visibility, reading the books she edited and paying more attention to disabled people, that's disability visibility in action. 

Thank you Alice for being yourself.