On Outlook this week, we’re talking disability pride during July’s Disability Pride Month.

Whether it’s us starting out the show talking about Brian’s recent musical practice with an old friend and society’s devaluing of music as an art and a skill, a skill many people with disabilities have. Or our recent guest, H May, whose short film Awaiting Tiresias highlights discussions of the continuum of both blindness and gender and the illustration of intersectionality with Hannah, a black and enslaved woman who had a disability in the 1800’s.

While we may not have a guest this week, it’s a themed episode of our regular Mixed Bag Monday shows, with an explanation of how Disability Pride Month began. With that, we’re sharing quotes from figures throughout history, organizations, acquaintances and friends, in the wide range of opinions on what it means to feel pride in living with disability or not.

Kerry feels that the opposite of pride is often shame and that’s something she sometimes struggles with. Brian wants us to become comfortable and confident in the use of the word “blind” to describe our disability, as the best way to arrive at feeling pride in who we are, instead of feeling shame for what we can’t control. This is the difference in the medical vs the social models of disability.

Pronouncements aside, disability Pride Month puts a focus on attempts to find pride in ourselves as people with disabilities (marked with a literal disability pride flag first created by Ann Magill in 2019), in how we can be proud of who we are, despite what we’ve been told and gone through. And in all we’ve contributed and continue to offer the world, that we’re valued as human beings.

Throughout this episode, we shared a wide array of viewpoints on whether to celebrate being disabled. If anyone has any feelings on how to better feel pride in being disabled (if you think Disability Pride Month should or should not be celebrated), or if you have any possible Outlook t-shirt design ideas, always feel free to email us: [email protected]

Check out the article quoted in this episode from The New York Times by friend of the show M. Leona Godin:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/opinion/blind-ableist-language.html

And listen to our recent appearance on the AT Banter podcast which we highly encourage you subscribe to here:

https://atbanter.com/2022/07/06/at-banter-episode-292-brian-and-kerry-kijewski