The False Radicalism of Corporate Disability Literature
I first encountered The Anti-Ableist Manifesto: Smashing Stereotypes, Forging Change, and Building a Disability-Inclusive World by Tiffany Yu when a comrade messaged me, writing “Ffs” before sharing a screenshot of an Instagram story that Selma Blair had posted. The newly irrelevant actress captioned her book selfie, featuring an advance reader copy of Yu’s forthcoming book, with “so looking forward to reading and sharing.” Blair was an outrageous celebrity to tap for this promotion, as she had just lost partnerships, sponsorships, her reputation, her agents, her publicists, her lawyer, her QVC clothing line, and who knows what else after I reposted a British Vogue cover announcement with a screenshot of an incomprehensibly hateful, Islamophobic comment that she had posted on Instagram.
Yu is a self-described “multi-hyphenate disability advocate, entrepreneur, and content creator” who previously worked as investment banker at Goldman Sachs. It was clear by chapter two that Yu’s manifesto would offer no reckoning with her past. Instead, she recalled how former Goldman COO, Gary Cohn’s disclosure of dyslexia made her feel she “could be more open about” her disability. Cohn is perhaps best known as the architect behind then President Trump’s $1.9T Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which has doubled the wealth of billionaires, who have been paying a lower tax rate than the bottom half of American households since its passage six years ago.
Yu’s choice of title plainly seeks to place her book alongside one of the world’s most influential political documents, the now mononymous Manifesto. Instead of promoting a new idea, as Marx and Engels did in The Communist Manifesto, Yu instead employed questionable methods to extract content from lesser resourced activists, as filler for the dearth of original thought. And because “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Yu has warped the ideas of disabled radicals to glorify the potential of corporate overlords to save disabled people by “including” us, without any critical acknowledgment that corporate practices are a root cause of disabled suffering.
Yu modeled her book after Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which “runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities” by positioning “anti-racism as a personal “journey” toward enlightenment,” according to literary scholar Tyler Austin Harper. For Yu, the personal journey to “become anti-ableist allies […] must start with language.” But Harper points out “it is relatively easy to get elite universities, corporations and rich progressives to buy into the idea that they personally can make the world better by tweaking their vocabulary and making minor adjustments to their interpersonal etiquette.”
Yu’s intended readers—who are employed by universities and corporations—are made to believe they can build a disability-inclusive world by doing such things as diversifying your feed or hiring what Carrie Sandahl, Professor of Disability and Human Development calls “the easily assimilated able-disabled.” Why not prepare readers for the myriad ways their efforts will be undermined and corrupted? Why not offer strategies to process contradictions and navigate institutional barriers? By rooting its tactics in personal responsibility, The Anti-Ableist Manifesto becomes the latest in a growing body of contemporary tomes for corporate disability inclusion that aren’t actually written, but are instead curated by disability consultant-advocates who use sleek aesthetics and revolutionary language to position themselves as translators of pseudo-radical ideas to corporate audiences.
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Advance reviews are praising the warmth and empathy of The Anti-Ableist Manifesto. But a fluent read reveals a cynical effort to incorporate the outdated belief system Yu finds herself ensnared into the emerging, radical frameworks she raises. In one instance, Yu contextualizes the disability justice principle of anti-capitalism as a “conflict of ideals, values, and methods” in her “Exist in the Contradictions” chapter, but leaves it to readers to decipher how her opinions diverge beyond expounding how she thrives under capitalism. So why entertain anti-capitalism as a topic?
Consultant-advocates for corporate disability inclusion play an important role in streamlining the cooptation process. Recently, Caroline Casey, an “award-winning social entrepreneur,” used her Forbes Contributor column (which it feels important to note is a deceptive, pay-per-click, blogging platform), to write that disability representation “requires businesses to honor the longstanding ethos of disability justice: “Nothing about us, without us.,” But “Nothing about us, without us” isn’t a longstanding ethos of disability justice, it’s a tenant of the disability rights movement, which was influenced by the civil rights movement and culminated in a genre of disability best understood as being protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed in 1990. Disability Justice was conceived nearly thirty years later by queer, racialized, disabled people to address the exclusion of “peoples who lived at intersecting junctures of oppression” from the disability rights movement, which historically worked to include people in systems disability justice was constructed to liberate us from.
Corporate tomes for disability inclusion often abstract these consequential differences in order to advertise the sort of passive consulting the author would offer. In order to avoid a rupture with a paying client, the consultant-advocate has been known to sanitize the work of ungovernable writers in order to introduce topics they are simultaneously distancing themselves from.
This is how my work wound up in Yu’s “What is Anti-Ableism?” chapter. She wrote that ableism—a word I can’t recall having used in my writing—creates “Negative stereotypes and misperceptions, [which] result in social exclusion and limited opportunities […] whereas anti-ableism allows diversity and creativity to flourish in a way that benefits everybody. As disability design advocate Liz Jackson wrote in a New York Times article, disabled people ‘are the original lifehackers.’”
Except my op-ed wasn’t about social exclusions and limited opportunities. We are the Original Lifehackers began with an instinct that I had the misfortune of developing to cope with systemic failures to recognize disabled contributions. If Yu had reached out, I would have asked how she was addressing power differentials. This is the very response I wrote to editor Elizabeth Guffey, after she approached me about writing an essay for her then-upcoming anthology, After Universal Design: The Disability Design Revolution, because “so many essays here cite” me. After a brief back and forth, Guffey spared no condescension as she retracted her offer: “You have such a wonderful way of expressing yourself and can be such a powerful writer. Academic prose will just suck the life out of it.”
Guffey then opened her book with the words “Universal Conundrum” to describe the “gatekeepers in design” her Disability Design Revolution purports to redress. To this, she insists “there is no single dominating voice,” even though the cover bears only one name, Elizabeth Guffey, the lone arbiter of my promotion from and precipitous relegation back to whichever reference sections I didn’t get cut from.
This perpetuation of the very dynamic corporate disability tomes purport to address leads to something cyclical — revolutionary, if you will—where my righteous disdain for irreconcilable hypocrisies is deemed unreasonably hostile, no matter how readily I conform to their preferred tone. And in their orbit, I again find myself consigned to the scrap heap of history after my contributions, shorn of the context from which they derive, have been plundered.
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I wasn’t convinced by the brand lore of OXO Kitchen products, which positioned Sam Farber as a savior who created an easier peeler for his arthritic wife, Betsey to use. For as long as I can remember, OXO has been heralded as the universal example of universal design. So one day, in 2018, I gave into my urge to contact Betsey, who graciously agreed to a phone call, during which she let me know that the idea for the peeler had, in fact, been hers. This was the story I shared in We are the Original Lifehackers.
I may have been surprised, 17 chapters later, to find this piece again quoted in The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, but I was utterly unprepared for what I read in the very next paragraph. Tiffany Yu cited an outdated OXO blog post, attributed to a no longer employed by OXO copywriter, that told the brand story of Sam Farber noticing Betsey was having a hard time holding a peeler, and decided to create a “better peeler” for her to use. Tiffany Yu had to read through my entire piece about the peeler being Betsey Farber’s idea in order to find the obscure anecdote she cited.
To cite my work when it calls the veracity of the very next paragraph into question requires both strategy and sloppiness. Yu’s strategy is rooted in a core tenet of entrepreneurial advocacy, in which wrongdoers must only be named when there is no hope or desire for future consultancies. Such an example can be found when Yu anonymized the corporation responsible for a “disability activist” who “died from complications of injuries sustained when an airline destroyed her custom wheelchair.” The sloppiness is located in the citation, where we encounter what Yu removed the identifying details from—a headline reading “Disability Activist Dies After United Airlines Destroyed Her Custom Wheelchair,” which she copy-pasted, omitting only which airline was at fault.
No matter how staunch my criticism of inclusive design or its “benefits everyone” logic, I inevitably find my work being absorbed by it, because this is what corporate disability has been systematized to blur. It’s how disability justice gets subsumed by disability rights.
This, unfortunately, wasn’t my first foray into the reckless haste of the disability tome publication process. That happened when author Ashley Shew bcc’d me on an early draft of her book, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. She asked that we “use the “find” feature on this copy of the book to find yourself and let me know whether 1) you don’t like it, 2) it’s fine, or 3) something else.” Before I could fully process how she uncritically flattened me into an angry and bitter trope, I let her know she misspelled the names of some of my peers. The unwanted experience left me wondering, what is the urgency?
In early 2024, after missing her manuscript deadline because she was struggling to make progress, Yu sent a mass email, inviting everyone she bcc’d to contribute their stories to her book, “in order to illustrate the points I make.” The person who forwarded me the email from Yu explained “I must stress the extent to which I don’t know her” before “messaging a bunch of people” writing “I can’t believe this email.” What my comrade refused to partake in was what Sujatha Fernandes describes in Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling as a “culture of storytelling that presents carefully curated narratives with predetermined storylines as a tool of philanthropy, statecraft, and advocacy” in which “histories, ambiguities, and political struggles are erased in an effort to”—allow me to copy and paste from Yu’s email—“humanize and endear the audience to the disabled experience.
Yu could solicit stories to bolster her thesis because, according to Fernandes, economic elites have “avoided questions of structural violence and a broader critique of power relations” by convincing historically marginalized individuals that “telling one’s story” doesn’t just offer healing, it can also lead to personal advancement. This helps explain why more than two dozen “email interview with the author” references, dated between the day Yu’s mass email was sent and her January 29th submission deadline a week and a half later, could be found in The Anti-Ableist Manifesto bibliography section. Unfortunately, Fernandes points out “the majority of those who tell their stories are not able to improve their conditions.”
Another comrade who was bcc’d went from questioning the ethics of Yu’s mass email to being “shocked to see the book finished so quickly.” Four months separated Yu’s deadline for disabled stories and the June 6 arrival of her advance reader copies. This is the amount of time it typically takes me to research and write just one of my articles, because the work of framing a piece that prevents the abstraction of structural critiques takes time.
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I wrote an article in which I asked if advocates for corporate disability inclusion are anti-worker. The piece highlighted a particularly corrupt organization, Disability:IN, which consistently aligns itself with corporations that harm workers. Not much has gone my way these past few years, but perhaps the best thing that has happened was an invite to strategize with DisabilityDivest, a group that has coalesced to demand, among other things, that Disability:IN end its partnerships with weapons manufacturers and other companies funding genocide. And yet, I find myself cited alongside Disability:IN in The Anti-Ableist Manifesto, as though our aims are morally equivalent.
This is the sort of slippage that happens to so many of us. I am only able to write this analysis of Yu’s book because another disabled activist who received an advanced copy was so startled to encounter a mischaracterization of their work that they sent me their copy, imploring me to review it. Reading this book has prompted me to initiate conversations with other comrades who are now also grappling with how their work has been co-opted and twisted without their knowledge or consent.
Slippage doesn’t just happen with citations. Yu’s second citation of my work can be found in her “Inclusive Design Benefits Everyone” chapter. No matter how staunch my criticism of inclusive design or its “benefits everyone” logic, I inevitably find my work being absorbed by it, because this is what corporate disability has been systematized to blur. It’s how disability justice gets subsumed by disability rights.
If there was such a thing as anti-ableism—and I’m not yet convinced there is, as even by the end of her book Yu has certainly not offered a discernible framework or coherent description of it—I would imagine it would require the principles of disability justice to incriminate the forces that extract disabled ideas and exploit disabled labor. In particular, I’m thinking of the publishing industry, which casts corporate approved brown bag lunch-and-learn book tour speakers to curate prototypical narratives on tight deadlines. This is the vulgarity of contemporary tomes for corporate disability inclusion, and why my comrades didn’t respond to Yu’s call for stories and now, her editor’s emails for positive reviews of the advance copies she mailed them—because “nothing about us” is preferable to something that will misrepresent our contributions without our consent.
