July is Disability Pride Month!
Disability pride month is a celebration of disability identity, history, resilience, and joy. Boston held the first Disability Pride Day and parade in 1990, following the legislation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Learn about disability justice this month
The Disability Justice Collective, a group of queer, disabled, women of color, initially envisioned and conceived the Disability Justice Movement in 2005 in the San Francisco Bay area. Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Park Milbern were the original founders, later joined by Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret.
Mia Mingus, writer and disability justice organizer, defines disability justice as “a multi-issue political understanding of disability and ableism, moving away from a rights-based equality model and beyond just access, to a framework that centers justice and wholeness for all disabled people and communities.”
Later, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha wrote Disability Justice: An Audit Tool, envisioned with Stacey Park Milbern. This audit tool includes six practice sections including:
- what disability justice is
- how to integrate disability justice into organizing
- examining the disability histories in our organizations and communities
- discussion questions using Sins Invalid’s 10 Principles of Disability Justice
- accessibility tools designed by people with disabilities
- stories about disability justice organizing
Leah defined the Disability Justice Movement as “a way of envisioning the ways people can organize around and think about disability that centers the lives and leadership of disabled Black, Indigenous and people of color and/or queer, trans, Two Spirit and gender nonconforming people.”
Updated disability pride flag in 2021. Learn more about the flag and what each line and color represent.
How else can we celebrate disability pride?
Read and listen to books by disabled authors and books about disability:
Follow these disabled activists, authors, educators, and advocates on social media:
- Imani Barbarin (@Crutches_and_Spice on Instagram): Here’s a message from Imani about Disability Pride Month in 2020.
- Black Disability Collective (@BlackDisabilityCollective on Instagram)
- Keah Brown (@keah_marie on Instagram), creator of the hashtag #DisabledAndCute
- Devon Price (@DrDevonPrice on Instagram), Autistic trans author and academic
- Mia Mingus (@mia.migus on Instagram)
- Leroy Moore (@KriphopNation on Twitter)
- Queer ASL (@QueerASL on Instagram), offers Queer ASL classes on Zoom
- Sins Invalid (@SinsInvalid on Instagram), queer, POC-led disability justice based performance project
- Alice Wong (@disability_visibility on Instagram), author and creator of the Disability Visibility Project
Find disability-led organizations and groups in your community and nation-wide:
- Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a national grassroots disability rights organization for the autistic community, and local affiliate groups,
- Green Mountain Self Advocates, self-advocacy organization in Vermont for and by people with developmental disabilities
- HEARD, a cross-disability abolitionist organization
- Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, a national self-advocacy organization for and by people with disabilities
- Southerners on New Ground, a multi-issue southern justice movement that unites people across class, age, race, ability, gender, immigration status, and sexuality
Do you have any organizations, articles, events, or resources to share for Disability Pride Month? Send them to ici@umb.edu and we can spread the word!
Is there a Disability Pride parade or celebration in your town?