Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment.

• Author: Wasserman, Harvey

Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment by James I. Charlton University of California Press. 247 pages. $27.50

James Charlton, a longtime disability-rights activist, traveled around the world in the 1980s and 1990s to study from street level the depth of poverty and difficult conditions among people with disabilities, as well as the spirit of those who are working to change things. The word that best encompasses the status of people with disabilities worldwide--in capitalist systems and otherwise--is "outcasts," Charlton says.

The extent and form of our banishment varies widely. In some African countries, he reports, kids with disabilities receive no education at all. The same is true for disabled girls in India, while only 3 percent of boys with disabilities go to school there. And in parts of both Africa and India, infanticide of children with disabilities is still a common practice, Charlton found.

By comparison, things are generally more evolved in the United States. But that's damning with faint praise. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities here is still around 70 percent. And those who are dependent on others for daily assistance usually have no support options other than involuntary institutionalization in a nursing home. The Medicaid funds that pay their bills are corporate welfare for the $60 billion nursing home industry. Charlton writes: "The extraordinary level of wealth in modern industrial society coupled with the evolution of the welfare state had created an economic milieu wherein people with disabilities have acquired an exchange value." We're worth money to the health-care industry, but we have little economic power of our own.

People with disabilities are "surplus" people, ostracized by "a political-economic formation that does not need--and, in fact, cannot accommodate--a vast group of people," Charlton writes. It is an "extraordinary human-rights tragedy." But most people, including most disabled folk, have not even begun to recognize it as such, let...