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Disability Pride Month
Celebrating Diversity
When I told my gay brother July is disability pride month, he commented gays paved the way for everyone else referring to the month of June which marks the anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
I haven’t seen any flamboyant parades celebrating disability pride, but at the end of the month, I feel I should write something about it as a member of the disability community. I have a movement disorder from a long-ago stroke.
Like the ubiquitous rainbow flag for gay pride, we have our own version of one as shown in the image for this story. It was designed by Ann Magill, a painter.
The colors represent different types of disabilities as follows:
Red: physical disabilities
Yellow: cognitive and intellectual disabilities
White: invisible and undiagnosed disabilities
Blue: mental illness
Green: sensory perception disabilities
The black field represents disabled people who have lost their lives due to not only illness, but also negligence, suicide and eugenics.
This year marked the 32nd anniversary of the passage of the ADA which began the work of making the United States more accessible for people with disabilities.
