The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Alice Wong, disabled oracle and disability justice leader, died on November 14 at the age of 51. Alice, who had spinal muscular atrophy, will be the subject of a hybrid celebration of her life in the coming spring. She will continue to mean so much to disabled people, both those she counted as close friends and those acquainted with her via social media and her writings.
“What I will do is spend my time, energy, and labor intentionally with the people I care about,” Alice wrote in a Time essay last year. And based on loving tributes from friends of hers, she certainly did.
One thing, of many, that I very much admired about Alice was her dedication to helping Palestinians in Gaza. On her website, Disability Visibility Project, she wrote in 2023, “I know that genocide is a mass disabling event and a form of eugenics.” The same year, along with Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, she started Crips for eSims for Gaza, which has raised more than three million dollars to help Palestinians in Gaza have access to the internet.
Alice also highlighted the genocide in Gaza when accepting her 2024 MacArthur “genius” Grant, writing:
I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for freedom and self determination. In times of crisis, writers, like all artists, have a responsibility to speak truth to power—to say the unsaid, to think the unthinkable, to question narratives that frame what is considered the truth. Disabled liberation is intertwined with the liberation of all people. By being in community with others, I learned that mutual aid and community organizing are acts of love. I also learned that activism isn’t supposed to be palatable or convenient.
“She spoke up for Palestinians, and some people were not happy about that, and there were people who challenged her voice, that maybe her genius grant should be rescinded,” her friend Yomi Young recounted in an interview. “And Alice stood firm, and she was unflinching, and she would not back down.”
The grant was also very important to her independence, as her friend Rebecca Cokley wrote in the Nation: “It meant she could pay someone to receive the support necessary for basic functions like accessing nutrition, changing her clothes, and using the bathroom. I often wonder what her fellowship could have looked like if those basic needs were already met at the level and quality she needed.”
Alice was very attuned to how politics impact disabled people, as when she co-created the #CripTheVote movement with her friends Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan. As Pulrang said, “our goal has been to just foster discussion amongst ourselves and then to make that conversation noticeable by politicians, people running for office, people in office, and sometimes to reach out to them directly and give them an avenue to talk to us directly.”
In a July 2024 piece for Teen Vogue, Alice—who couldn’t mask to protect herself from Covid due to a tracheostomy—also passionately wrote against mask bans, writing that “the mask is the unsightly marker of deviant individuals: the sick, the immunocompromised, the disabled, and the protester who wishes to keep their identity anonymous.” She also supported Proposition 50 in California, which passed shortly before her death.
When I was very much an up-and-coming disability journalist, Alice was always kind to me, often reposting my calls for sources, which led more people in the disability community to trust me. I was fortunate to be part of a Bitch Media Access series she co-edited in 2021, and when I was ranting about the University of California graduate workers’ union representatives not meeting the needs of disabled workers, she invited me to write a piece for Disability Visibility Project.
In an obituary for Literary Hub, journalist Steven Thrasher recounted a story where Alice, who could no longer eat, gave Thrasher cookies. Thrasher said he needed to lose weight. Alice’s response? “EAT THE FUCKING COOKIES!!!!” What a nice, blunt, and enthusiastic friend she was.
I last saw Alice in person in August, when I was moderating a panel discussion she was on for the documentary Life After, which explores the ways in which assisted suicide programs and policies can be harmful to disabled people. “Ableism is everywhere,” she said at the time, “and it rears its head in legislation and the way society is constructed, interlocked with white supremacy.”
And yet, it’s still so important to have hope. As Alice wrote in an Instagram post that went up after her death: “I’m honored to be your ancestor and believe that disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.