Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment.

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 alone feet any outrage about it.

Why is that? "From childhood, people are constantly bombarded with the values of the dominant culture," Charlton says. "These values reflect the `naturalness' of superiority and inferiority, dominance and subordination." In the Yoruba culture of Nigeria, Charlton notes, Obatala created humans out of clay. But one day he got drunk and that was the day he created albinos, cripples, and blind people. The word for disability in the Shona language is chirema, which means "totally useless, a failure." In the United States, there's still the aberration of the Jerry Lewis telethon, peddling pity by the metric ton. There is Jack the Ripper Kevorkian, on a crusade to convince us all that the sane reaction to the societal challenges disability poses is to eliminate disabled people.

But there's hope. Some people with disabilities reach a point of life-changing emotional liberation when they reject the shame program. They come to "recognize that their self-perceived pitiful lives are simply a perverse mirroring of a pitiful world order," Charlton writes.

This is the common epiphany of most of the activists leading the way in the disability-rights struggle around the world. Their demand for self-determination is reflected in the book's title, a now-common slogan of the movement that Charlton first heard in Africa.

Nothing About Us Without Us gives the reader a view of one of the most murderous yet subtle forms of discrimination. It makes us aware of the stereotypes we need to confront. And it shows the incredible potential power of the disability-rights movement.

Mike Ervin is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is active in the disability-rights movement.