The Anti-Ableist Manifesto
Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Tiffany Yu takes readers on a revelatory examination of disability—how to unpack biases and build an inclusive and accessible world.
As the Asian American daughter of immigrants, living with PTSD, and sustaining a permanent arm injury at age nine, Tiffany Yu is well aware of the intersections of identity that affect us all. She navigated the male-dominated world of corporate finance as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before founding Diversability, an award-winning community business run by disabled people building disability pride, power, and leadership, and creating the viral Anti-Ableism series on TikTok.
Organized from personal to professional, domestic to political, Me to We to Us, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto frames context for conversations, breaks down the language of ableism, identifies microaggressions, and offers actions that lead to authentic allyship.
• How do we remove ableist language from our daily vocabulary?
• How do we create inclusive events?
• What are the advantages of hiring disabled employees, and what market opportunities are we missing out on when we don’t consider disabled consumers?
With contributions from disability advocates, activists, authors, entrepreneurs, scholars, educators, and executives, Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been “othered” and rendered invisible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Activist Yu debuts with an insightful guide adapted from her TikTok video series, which she created in 2020 to help others become "better allies to disabled people." Interweaving her own disability experience into the account—a car accident at age nine paralyzed the author's arm and led to a PTSD diagnosis many years later—Yu overviews many different aspects of ableism. For example, she explains how framing disabled people as "inspiration" perpetuates "the problematic narrative that we exist merely to... provide lessons" to the nondisabled community; how a so-called "disability tax" requires disabled people to expend more financial resources, time, and energy to simply exist; and how designing "for accessibility" fosters innovation that can benefit society as a whole (voice-activated technology was created for "people with limited mobility or vision disabilities" but has spawned digital assistants like Siri and Alexa). While Yu carefully untangles the ways in which ableism insidiously shapes everything from language and the economy to TV, her most valuable contributions are concrete tips for approaching others' disabilities with awareness and sensitivity, including scripts for asking people if their access needs are being met without demanding they explain their limitations. Readers will find this to be a sensitive and helpful resource.
