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Disability and the Pandemic

Piper's picture

"It is a strange time to be alive as an Asian American disabled person who uses a ventilator," writes Alice Wong in the Vox article, I'm Disabled and Need a Ventilator to Live. Am I Expendable During this Pandemic? In the rise of hate against AAPI communities during the pandemic, accompanied by the fact that Alice Wong is a visably disabled person, she speaks on the pandemic from her lens of being a insectionally marginalized person. She brings up how medical racism, ableism, ageism, among more, are all contributing to the alive and well acts of Eugenics disabled people are being especially faced with during the pandemic. The article, Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic highlights the triage procedures in place that show disabled communities that hospitals find them expendible right now. Alice Wong in the same Vox article says, "For many disabled, sick, and immunocompromised people like myself, we have always lived with uncertainty and are skilled in adapting to hostile circumstances in a world that was never designed for us in the first place" but she also brings up that the way hospitals are treating disabled folks now sends a larger message of societal devalue of disabled lives. Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic also brings up this notion by discussing the systematic oppression that spwans from the idea that a body must fit an, "appearance and/or their ability to satisfactorily produce, excel and ‘behave." (Talila A Lewis, quoted in Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic.)