Components of Disability Pride
Disability Pride Month is more than just another “awareness” campaign meant to enlighten non-disabled people. It’s also supposed to help actual disabled people change how they view themselves and their disabilities in positive, liberating ways.
Everyone who thinks about “disability pride” has a slightly different idea of what it’s for. Disabled people themselves are far from being on the same page on what disability pride is, if it’s important, or even whether it’s based in any sort of feasible reality.
Nevertheless roughly speaking, disabled people’s efforts at encouraging disability pride are geared towards a pretty clear goal of shifting other disabled people’s perspectives from a bundle of self-defeating but oddly compelling common ideas and habits, to a more liberating set of ideas:
- From relentlessly ignoring, hiding, or trying to fix their own disabilities;
- From believing that in order to get the help and support, they have to constantly persuade others that they are worthy of support and opportunity;
- From viewing their own unique needs as “special” burdens, always to be minimized as much as possible for others’ convenience, and to buy personal and social acceptance;
- From thinking that each disabled person alone is responsible for their own wellbeing — that there is no true civic obligation to help them, beyond what sentimentality and compassion moves individual people to provide, whenever it happens to suit them;
- To instead embracing their disabilities and proudly living as their whole, authentic selves;
- To tackling the real hardships of disability more boldly and effectively;
- To asserting their right to better, freeer, more accessible lives as a basic human right.
It’s a complex set of ideas to communicate, and a challenging transformation to strive for. But taken together, they make a kind of intuitive sense for disabled people. These more positive ideas of disability not only feel better, they work better, too.
But how do disabled people get there? What are the philosophical building blocks this kind of internal empowerment builds on? There are too many to list completely. Each disabled person’s thinking is unique in their particulars, emphasis, and sequence. But there are a few fundamental ideas that distinguish this more liberated view of disability and the disabled people who have it.
Here are three of the most important:
1. Your disability isn’t just a medical condition, but also a kind of social status.
The more traditional understanding of disability is that it is solely a personal, medical condition. It’s the perspective on disability that tends to be most immediately apparent to people with disabilities from childhood, or soon after the later onset of disability for adults. It’s reinforced by the non-disabled people and professionals that tend to surround disabled people. And it’s not completely wrong. Disabilities are medical conditions that affect individual disabled people, regardless of their surrounding circumstances. But this “Medical Model” of disability is insufficient to describe or explain the whole experience of disability.
The “Social Model” of disability, which emerged from a variety of sources over the last several decades, crystalizes a central truth most disabled people experience, but often find it hard at first to understand and explain. That is, that the disability experience is made up of both individual mental or physical conditions, and the way disabled people are regarded by the people around them, and by the social structures that shape the social status of people with disabilities. Put more simply, your problems aren’t just a result of your disability. You are also held back and blocked by how other people and systems decide to respond to your disability, and how they view you as a disabled person.
For many disabled people, this is obviously true. For some, it may come off as abstract and puzzling. But for others, it’s a revelation. It’s a starting point for a much more freeing and empowering state of mind. You no longer have to look solely at yourself and your supposed “faults” and “impairments” to explain your situation. Some of it comes from other people, and the environment you live in. If we can change how people think, how buildings and communities are designed, and how social systems operate, life with disabilities can be different — maybe a lot better. And while social change is difficult, in many cases it’s more feasible and less taxing than curing disabilities. It’s also a team effort. Millions of disabled people working together can bring about changes that make millions of disabled people’s lives better. It’s not all on each disabled person to improve themselves alone.
2. Disabled people have a right to accessible environments.
Most people, disabled or not, agree that public spaces should be at least somewhat accessible to people with disabilities. Few people spend much energy thinking that replacing steps with ramps and making public restrooms accessible are bad things. But an almost parallel belief still exists alongside this thin consensus — the idea that accessibility is something of a luxury, and that disabled people should accept that some areas and activities open to others will always be closed to them. It’s thought to be “realistic” to acknowledge this. And it’s not just a recognition that accessibility is woefully incomplete — which in many places it certainly is — but an acceptance that this is just part of the natural order of things. There are some things “handicapped” people just can’t do, and there’s nothing to be done about it.
However, as technologies and techniques advance and improve, it becomes less credible to argue that some things can never be made accessible. Old buildings are gradually replaced with new ones, which can be easily made accessible from the start. Other older buildings are renovated and repurposed, opening more opportunities to improve their accessibility. Meanwhile, familiar adaptive devices are improved, and new ones developed, which at their best open up new areas to equal access, and make more goods and services adaptable to serve people with any kind of disability. This gives practical shape and realism to the assertion that mobility and equal access throughout society is a fundamental right, not a luxury, for people with disabilities.
This in turn does more than make the physical world more accessible for disabled people. It raises their expectations, and emboldens them to expect better. Accessibility and individual accommodation can be credibly called a right, because they are more and more possible. What can be done, should be done. And seeing more accessibility and adaptation at work teaches disabled people about how much of what they might have thought impossible is entirely possible.
3. You have a right to help and support for living a free and satisfying life.
Apart from the odd internet troll and contrarian, not many people openly argue that communities and governments should let disabled people starve or depend solely on family, friends, and voluntary help for survival, freedom, or quality of life. But there is still a powerful undercurrent of belief that what “society” actually owes to disabled people is —or should be — extremely limited. Even some disabled people think this. Disabled advocates may sometimes come across as demanding or “entitled,” as plenty of non-disabled people do, too. But most disabled people also tend to harbor a deep insecurity. It’s not necessarily about their disabilities themselves, but rather a feeling that underneath everything, people with disabilities may not really have any right to support and assistance from anyone.
Still, there is more support for the idea of support for disabled people than many disabled people think. Hard-core individualism is a component of several powerful and seductive ideologies. But most people actually do embrace the idea that some degree of mutual support should be legally guaranteed, and not left entirely to charity or family obligation. For example, Social Security for elderly retirees is widely supported in principle, if not always in specifics. And few people really believe that services like firefighting and national defense should be left to voluntary effort. So it’s not that far a step to suggest that people with disabilities deserve types and amounts of social support most non-disabled people don’t. The key insight here is that “deserves” doesn’t mean individual disabled people meeting some arbitrary criteria of virtue or value. Disabled people have inherent value, and inherent rights, just like other people. And that includes, or should include, help to live, be as free as possible to move about and make choices, and in certain cases cared for and sustained by their fellow citizens.
The implications here are simple but profound. Disabled people can seek and use assistance they need, and fight for it when necessary, confident that they can do so from a position of strength and justice. Disabled people can advocate for support as a human right and a matter of basic fairness, not as a kindness or matter of charity. And the help they do get doesn’t obligate them to do anything more than live a fair, free, and fulfilling life for themselves. Disabled people don’t have to personally justify their support. It’s hard to grasp how radical and liberating that conviction is unless you are disabled yourself and struggled internally with whether you really deserve the things that you need.
Realizing and embracing these ideas doesn’t solve any disabled person’s immediate problems. They don’t constitute practical advice or information. They can’t defeat ableism simply by simple assertion and repetition. They won’t win you a job or find you an affordable, accessible place to live. Nor are these concepts the first or best transformers for every disabled person. Disabled role models, strong, thoughtful allies, supportive families, and of course advocacy achievements like the Americans with Disabilities Act are essential as well.
But still, empowering ideas are among the most fundamental underpinnings of the kind of real, practical, and muscular disability pride that can make all the difference in disabled people’s lives. It’s why so many disabled person who have found these ideas and made them a part of their lives want to share them with other disabled people.
