This weekend Alice Wong, one of the most prominent and impactful disability thinkers and activists of the last few decades, left this mortal coil. Through her extremely far-reaching and diverse work in the Disability Visibility Project, Ms. Wong built what every think tank and advocacy project aspires to—an incredibly rich, engaging, and revolutionary body of continuing work and writing that made leaps and bounds from past ways of thinking, contended with the tumultuous present, and cut various paths toward the future. Just since 2020 Ms. Wong has published the foundational collection Disability Visibility, her essential memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life, and most recently the follow-up collection Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care and Desire. This latest work taps into what was so powerful about Ms. Wong’s advocacy—she had an uncompromising demand for disabled people to be able to live their full humanity, including living fully in humor, anger, sexuality, and every other shade of human experience, and in the core of all her radical work was placing the highest value on love, connection, and real community. “Disability is so much more than pain, trauma and tragedy. There's creativity, adaptation and talent that comes from living in a nondisabled world.” Ms. Wong was tireless in developing our understanding of disability not as tragedy but as the loveliest expression of human diversity.

Wong styled herself a Cyborg Oracle. “Cyborg” for a basic acknowledgement (while claiming a cool and somewhat funny word) of humans whose lives demand assistive technology and “Oracle” for her belief that the experience of living disabled lives engenders insight and creative innovation that could both give early warning of society’s dark corners and provide guidance toward better futures for all. She had a deeply philosophical and radical idea of how disabled people could change and improve the world; in her excellent Teen Vogue column in 2024, shortly after losing her ability to speak, she wrote: “To crip something is to bend, compress, twist, subvert, and imbue disabled wisdom into systems, institutions, and cultures. As I’ve done before as a physically disabled person, I will now crip the world mightily with the multiple perspectives I have as a disabled, nonspeaking, ventilator-dependent, high-risk Asian American woman. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and physical labor to crip the world.”

Her immense personal light, humor, wit and charisma helped Ms. Wong reach such a high profile as an activist, but we cannot forget how truly radical and unbending she was as well. Her current projects at the time of her passing included #disabledrage, a powerful public messaging campaign to meet our current moment of fear and assault by the present Presidential administration, and the collaboration Crips for eSims for Gaza which has raised over three million dollars to provide phone and internet services to people living under the genocide in Gaza, another example of Ms. Wong’s deep and true intersectionality.

She left us with these words, “Don't let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

DRC will have more to say and do to uplift and carry on Alice’s work in the weeks, months, and years to come but for now, we wish her a joyous and honored rest.

Media Contact

Sam Mickens
Director of Communications
(646) 945-0918
Sam.Mickens@disabilityrightsca.org

Disability Rights California (DRC) – Is the agency designated under federal law to protect and advocate for the rights of Californians with disabilities. The mission of DRC is to defend, advance, and strengthen the rights and opportunities of people with disabilities.