Have you heard about Disability pride month? I’ll not be surprised if your answer is No.
Disability Pride Month is not as widely spread as Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month in January, LGBT history month in February, LGBTQ Pride month in June.
There might be a lot of questions in your mind like, is pride month about celebrating accomplishments of the disabled community? Or to celebrate its visibility? How did it all start? etc. Today we are going to answer all of your questions.
What is disability pride month?
Disability pride has been defined as accepting and honoring each person’s uniqueness and seeing it as a natural and appealing part of human diversity.
The month is celebrated to focus on the disability community and to celebrate disabled people’s pride. The whole purpose of this is to create more space for disabled people and create an inclusive society for them.
Activities that take place in the celebration are artistic and educational events, smaller community celebrations, parades in different cities, and articles using Disability Pride Month are discussed for a huge range of experiences and disability issues.
For the first time, Disability Pride day was held in Boston in 1990, and in the same year, The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed. To know more about its history you can go through this historic purview of Disability Pride Month.
Later, officially the first Disability Pride Month was celebrated in July 2015, the ADA’s(Americans with Disabilities Act) twenty-fifth anniversary.
How is Disability Pride Month related to LGBTQ Pride Month?
It is seen for obvious reasons that the activities involved in Disability Pride month are designed after LGBTQ pride events and also there have been attempts to come up with the Disability Pride Flags.
Somehow LGBTQ and disability pride’s some aspects are parallel to each other. And this is somehow true because of the fighting assumptions that the way they are is somehow pathological and the attention on joyful visibility that stresses on the differences instead of hiding or cluttering them. LGBTQ and disabled communities share these efforts and these generally overlap for disabled LGBTQ people.
Some people may view this as copying another movement’s practices and traditions. This is risky for the disabled community to depict the same practices.
What does the word ‘pride’ indicate in Disability Pride Month?
Some people may define this as a pride of a disabled person in any specific accomplishment or success. People also cite characteristics in people with disabilities like optimism, adaptability, and perseverance.
For disabled people, the month is about a ‘declaration of unconditional pride in being disabled’ embracing it and being a part of the disabled community. Their pride doesn’t depend on meeting anyone’s benchmark for how successful they might appear to be but because of what they actually are.
But if we talk about it generally then what is even the need of being proud of? Are the accomplishments not enough to be proud of? It is a taboo which is made by the people. It is as simple as providing the resources that they need, making the society inclusive, making all the facilities available which are disabled-friendly.
