Disability rights advocate and writer Alice Wong has died at the age of 51. When Wong was born with muscular dystrophy in 1974, doctors said she wouldn’t live to the age of 18. Despite that prognosis, Wong went on to earn an undergraduate degree at Indiana University and a master’s degree from the University of California, San Francisco before founding the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture. This is Alice Wong speaking with Democracy Now! in 2021.

Alice Wong: “I think a lot of people in the public do not know what ableism is, and if they hear about it, they actually deny that it exists. … You know, ableism is systemic. And it’s really bound up with hypercapitalism and white supremacy.”