Before examining how the regulation of bioethical matters impacts the equal right to live in the world for people with impairments, Chapter 1 elaborates on key concepts relevant for the book’s later chapters: disability, eugenics, ableism, and neoliberalism. It begins with a critical discussion of the medical and social models of disability, the two dominant approaches to understanding disability in disability studies. The chapter also highlights the troubled recent history of eugenics, the concept of ableism and the persistence of ableist policies and practices, as well as the importance and shortcomings of disability rights laws in furthering disability justice and equality.

Chapter 4 explores wealth inequality of the basis of disability, with particular concern for disparities in wealth accumulation, access to homeownership, and discrimination in financial processes such as rental sales, mortgage lending, and housing-related insurance. Contemporary Black disability justice activists announce a broad anti-capitalist critique of wealth inequality and call for the end of public assistance programs that hold disabled people in an economic underclass through asset tests and other means. This chapter presents an intersectional research framework for improved analysis of the wealth barriers faced by Black disabled Americans. Chapter 4 concludes with recommendations for structuring a baby bonds program to guarantee nondiscriminatory implementation and targeted equality of access for Black disabled program recipients.

The introduction outlines four major tasks of this study: (1) to present evidence of disability-based intergroup economic disparity in the United States; (2) to engage the lived experiences of individuals and communities experiencing multiple simultaneous axes of oppression, including disability-based oppression; (3) to contribute to emerging understandings of the importance of intersectionality to economic research and policy; and (4) to contribute to stratification economics in applied terms through direct engagement with policy proposals for a federal jobs guarantee and federal “baby bonds” program. It provides an overview of disability and the US economy, disability and economic research methods, common models of disability, and the challenge of race/disability analogies.

The conclusion reflects on compatibilities and tensions within stratification economics, disability justice, and intersectionality. It points to additional areas of inquiry beyond the scope of this study, including state violence, sex and sexuality, climate change, built environment, voting, and reparations. In so doing it offers an outline of future work that might advance an agenda of disability justice within the work of stratification economics in the years ahead.

Chapter 5 identifies disability-based educational inequality, which occurs in teacher bias, social stigma, classroom access, disability diagnosis, and school discipline. It attends to the education policy demands of disability justice activists and identifies dis/ability critical race studies (“DisCrit”) and critical race spatial analysis (CRSA) as two emerging intersectional research methods that can contribute to the intergroup analysis of stratification economics. Chapter 5 considers proposals for a federal baby bonds program and identifies program mandates and antidiscrimination requirements that would be necessary to guarantee equitable designation of eligible funds for college and university tuition.

Economic study of inequality and stratification often disregards the lived experiences of multiply marginalized people and communities, in particular Black disabled people. Chapter 1 makes a case for a different form of economic analysis that follows the lead of Black disability justice activists working for social equality. The argument proceeds in three parts. The first section of the chapter explains stratification economics and positions disability-based inequality within contemporary accounts of intergroup economic disparity. The second section introduces disability justice and activists who use the term to mark an alternative to traditional rights-based theories of social progress. It subsequently offers a justification and theoretical framework for conducting intersectional economic research on racism, misogyny, and ableism. The third and final section outlines the necessary components of our strategy for integrating disability-based analysis into the work of stratification economics, identifying essential steps that will guide our analysis of employment, health, wealth, and education in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 considers the interaction of disability and other axes of discrimination and oppression in areas of the labor market, including employment status, benefits, and workplace environment. It outlines disability justice activists’ demands to increase employment access and economic stability for people with disabilities and identifies intersectional research strategies for incorporating multiple interacting statuses into economic analyses of labor market outcomes. Chapter 2 concludes with recommendations for guaranteeing equitable treatment of Black disabled people in proposals for a federal jobs guarantee, starting with the elimination of segregated facilities, trainings, and placements for disabled workers through Section 14(c) certificates.

Chapter 3 examines structural forces generating health disparities and ableist maldistributions of care in the United States, particularly for Black disabled people. It attends to Black disability justice activists’ demands for improved health policy, facilities access, and economic protections for care workers. In doing so, it elevates corrective research methods that stratification economics can embrace to better understand intersecting effects of race, disability, and gender on health outcomes. Chapter 3 considers proposals for a federal job guarantee and elevates ways that a federal health insurance program associated with it can meet the needs of Black disabled workers and their families.

The rates at which Black people, disabled people, and disabled Black people have borne the brunt of suffering and death in the COVID-19 pandemic have made structural inequities visible. They also drive home the need to pay attention to and think more comprehensively about the lives of people who are both Black and disabled, who live at the intersectionality of race and disability: How are their experiences of the world different from and similar to those of nondisabled Black people and disabled White people?

Few people, if they paused to reflect on the question, would disagree with the idea that various aspects of a person’s identity have a bearing on their experiences in the world. There are differences in how a person of twenty-five years versus one of sixty-five years mediates a dispute, trains to run a marathon, or walks into a dance club. Completing a graduate degree versus dropping out of high school affects the opportunities a person has when applying for a job or running for office. Identifying as a woman, a man, or neither will affect a person’s experience of serving in the military, seeking a job promotion, or being the primary caregiver for young children (at least in many locales). Most of these variations in experience have little to do with persons’ biological differences. Instead, they grow out of social environments and others’ expectations. To the identifiers of age, education, and gender suggested above, we can add race, disability, immigrant status, sexual orientation, and other markers of identity. And it is the intersection of those multiple various aspects of a person’s identity, combined with personal choices and life experiences, that make each person distinctive and shape each person’s experience.

This chapter uses Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s 2009 performance piece “The River” to provide an overview of queer disability studies in the United States. As with many cultural workers writing about disability from queer perspectives, Piepzna-Samarasinha complicates concepts of pride and identity; explores the effects of diagnostic categories; and yearns for queer crip futures. Sexuality plays a significant role in her piece, but Piepzna-Samarasinha avoids a straightforward narrative of liberation; pain, precarity, and debility co-exist here with pleasure. In order to situate Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work within a larger context of disability justice and queer disability studies, the chapter supplements her narratives with those of other contemporary theorists, artists, and activists. With an emphasis on the questions that queer disability studies poses for the study of literature and other cultural forms, the chapter attends to both the resonances and the friction between queer studies and disability studies.