Skip to main content

Visibility



I’m getting a late start today. If I take the time to fully flesh out any of the ideas I have, I will miss the golden hour when people tend to read. And that means you won’t see it. 

It’s a quandary. 

On my mind this morning: 

Disability Rights Activitst and Author Alice Wong Dies at 51, Chloe Veltman, NPR

My knowledge of Ms.Wong is solely from Twitter. I somehow got disconnected in my move to Bluesky. She’s not someone I would have met in real life nor come in contact with on Facebook unless I had known to look for her. 

And that’s a loss. Her life was all about creating and supporting visibility for the disabled. She won a MacArthur grant in October of 2024 in recognition of her work, especially for The Disability Visibility Project. 

Increasing the political and cultural visibility of people with disabilities and catalyzing broader understandings of disability.

Please take a moment to read the NPR piece if you can.

Yesterday County Executive Calvin Ball announced the creation of  the Howard County Disability Hiring Initiative.



We have now launched the new Howard County Disability Hiring Initiative. This impactful program is expanding our commitment to inclusive employment. By creating supportive, accessible career pathways, we’re empowering residents with disabilities to find employment in County government. To learn more, email jobs@howardcountymd.gov.

There are many ways that people with disabilities are not visible to us. I’m going to be writing more about this. (If I forget, nudge me.) For today, it’s good to understand that one way to combat that invisibility is removing obstacles to participation in the workplace.

Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy. Disability is sociopolitical, cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risks as much as it brings pride.

― Alice Wong, Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century


Thoughts? Let me know.


Village Green/Town² Comments

Comments

  1. Julia A. McCreadyNovember 16, 2025 at 5:19 AM

    Please do not submit comments here. This function will be disabled shortly. Use the link above instead. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more