The goal of this chapter is to introduce accessibility, democracy, and the need to confront ableism. It begins with the story of Alice Wong, an Asian American disabled activist and bestselling author who wrote about the barriers to vote faced by People with Dis/abilities like her during the COVID-19 pandemic. The story of Alice illustrates the challenges with voting in the US, a country that is now considered a flawed democracy and facing many institutional barriers, including voter suppression laws. Informed by dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit), this chapter examines who are People with Dis/abilities, some popular myths about them, and how they are treated in the US when it comes to voting. Ableism, a system that treasures able-bodiedness and imposes it as the norm in society, is discussed as harmful to US democracy. To confront ableism and improve democracy we need accessibility, satisfying needs to allow full participation in a space or action. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on interdependence and solidarity, from San Francisco to Gaza. It ends with a discussion of Alice Wong and the disability justice movement.

During President Barack Obama’s second term, White medical students and residents at a prestigious public university participated in a research study exploring beliefs associated with racial bias in pain management, an area with well-documented racial disparities in clinical care. These highly educated doctors in training completed a questionnaire asking the extent to which they thought that fifteen factual assertions about biological differences between Blacks and Whites were true or untrue. They also read two mock medical cases about patients (one Black and one White) with a painful condition (kidney stone or ankle fracture), rated how much pain they believed the patients were in, and made recommendations for treating that pain.1