What Disability Pride Means to Cambridge Leadership

Happy Disability Pride Month! I’m Rachel Tanenhaus (she/her/hers), and I’m the City of Cambridge’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Coordinator and the Executive Director of the Cambridge Commission for Persons with Disabilities (CCPD). 

This month marks the 35th anniversary of the passage of the ADA, a federal civil rights law protecting people with disabilities against discrimination. On Wednesday, July 23, Boston Center for Independent Living and the Boston Disability Commission are co-sponsoring an ADA35 Rally and March at Boston City Hall Plaza. CCPD staff will be there, and we would love for you to join us! Let’s get together to celebrate and rally for the ADA and show off our disability pride! 

Speaking of disability pride, a friend once told me that pride is the opposite of shame. 

From the minute we’re born, we’re told that disability is the worst thing that can happen to us. Even if you have been doing this your whole life and your life has gone on for a while, you are swimming in that ableist muck. It affects all of us. I need disability pride, and maybe you do too. 

Our bodies and minds do not conform to the standards found in medical textbooks, but they are absolutely a "normal" part of human experience, because human bodies and minds are widely and beautifully varied. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is spreading a lie that can break you. We live in a society that worships white, thin, abled bodies and clear, sharp (but not too sharp), neurotypical, sane minds. People debate our rights and our worth right to our faces.

Disability is real and distinct and not universal but also everyone has a body that does some things well and other things poorly. As people with disabilities, we are othered for the ways in which ours differ, particularly if those differences cost money. Sometimes our bodies and minds cause us terrible pain or inconvenience. Sometimes they scare us. These are not character flaws on our part. They do not erase our worth. 

Pride is the opposite of shame. 

I don't like to generalize, but as a community we have some real gifts. 

We are adaptive and resourceful. It’s true, we have to be in order to survive - because we live in a world that was not made for us - yet we still figure out how to get places, raise families, go to school, get food in our bellies, show up for ourselves and others, run gauntlets we were never meant to endure. We can be proud of that skill even if it’s necessary. Sometimes your beauty and glory will have dirt and stains on them because you had to dig them up out of the mud. 

Our ability to imagine ourselves as competent, even excellent, puts us way ahead of the ableism surrounding us and how it portrays us. 

Our emergency planning and management skills are second to none, because the obstacles put in front of us so often become emergencies. This is not just "be proud of surviving what’s thrown at you". We have skills. 

Our networks of care and mutual aid are phenomenal. In particular, Black, brown, and queer folks with disabilities have been building these networks for centuries.  

Disability pride is also for everyone. It’s for the people who didn't finish school, the people living on government aid, the ones who can only get the energy together to shower on a good day, the ones who ate cereal again because they're in a flare-up and anything else is more than they can do, the ones whose ostomy bags leaked on the bus again today. Disability pride is for all of us. All of us are deserving. And we need it now more than ever.

Because pride is the opposite of shame. Happy Disability Pride Month to all of us.

Join Us In Celebrating Disability Pride!

What does disability pride mean to you? How does the ADA impact your life?

Share your disability pride experience in 1-2 sentences or complete the sentence "Because of the ADA, I _____"! Email CCPD at ccpd@cambridgema.gov.

We will incorporate your experience (anonymously) into a social media campaign.