Opinion
Alice Wong Showed Us What Disability Justice Could Be

By Abiodun Ojo

Earlier this week, news spread that Alice Wong had died at 51, a loss that struck with the force of someone whose imagination had already shifted the future. Her passing reverberated across the disability-rights movement, the Asian American community, and every corner of public life where people have fought to be seen. Wong, who lived with spinal muscular atrophy and used a powered wheelchair and ventilatory support, spent her life refusing to accept invisibility as the price of survival. (Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/11/15/disability-activist-alice-wong/)

She was best known as the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community built around a radical idea: that disabled people should control their own stories. It was not a branding exercise or a social media campaign, it was a reckoning with media, politics, and a culture that had long flattened disabled lives into metaphors for charity or courage. Wong created a platform where disabled writers, artists, and thinkers did not have to translate themselves into palatable inspiration. They could simply speak.

For Asian Americans with disabilities, her presence was transformative. Wong often wrote about being one of the only disabled Asian American girls in her school, and about how culture, language, and disability shaped her in ways she rarely saw reflected back at her. In a country that frequently treats Asian Americans as interchangeable and disabled people as invisible, she insisted that neither identity should have to disappear into the other.

Young activists saw themselves in her. “As a disabled Asian American young woman … there were not many role models,” one mentee said after her death. “Alice made me feel seen.” (AsAmNews: https://asamnews.com/2025/11/18/alice-wong-disability-visibility-legacy-asian-americans/)

Wong’s work was not limited to culture. She understood that narrative shifts must be matched by structural ones. She served on the National Council on Disability, helped shape federal policy, and in 2024 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for her sweeping influence on the national conversation around disability and justice. (Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/11/15/disability-activist-alice-wong/)

Her politics were not incremental. Wong believed that disability rights were inseparable from immigration, health care, racial justice, and language access. She collaborated with organizations such as the Asian Law Caucus, which provides legal support to low-income Asian and Pacific Islander immigrants, many of whom face disability-related barriers across systems. She found allies in groups like OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates. And she was honored by Disability Rights California, which credited her with “transforming how our state understands disability, storytelling, and power.” (Disability Rights California: https://www.disabilityrightsca.org/latest-news/disability-rights-california-mourns-and-celebrates-the-incredible-alice-wong)

Wong often said that compliance was the bare minimum, but justice required much more. It required disabled people to define the terms of policy, culture, and community life. It required society to stop treating disabled people of color as afterthoughts. And it required joy, not as escapism, but as survival.

She modeled that joy with disarming ease. She loved bold lipstick, dim sum, and her cats, Bert and Ernie. She relished the internet as a place where disabled people could build friendships unconstrained by the inaccessible world offline. In her writing, she balanced sharp political critique with humor, tenderness, and a refusal to compromise on dignity. (DREDF: https://dredf.org/in-memory-of-alice-wong-1974-2025/)

Her death is a rupture, but the world she helped build, one in which disabled people lead, create, and organize without waiting for permission, remains.

In remembering Alice Wong, we are left with her most urgent lesson: that justice is not given, it is authored. And in her absence, the pen is now ours.