Disability pride flag with a new meaning system
Happy disability pride month! After many months of discussions and three rounds of polls, we have new meanings for the disability pride flag! Thank you to @capricorn-0mnikorn (the flag's designer!) for all the suggestions along the way, and everyone else who gave input! 💚
In this system, rather than have each stripe represent a different category of impairment (physical, sensory, etc), each stripe represents a different model of disability ❤️💛🤍🩵💚
They are:
🩵 The social model of disability (blue): understanding disability as something that is caused by societal factors like lack of accessibility, rather than as a medical condition. For example, many wheelchair users consider what is disabling about being a wheelchair user is the lack of ramps, elevators, paratransit, etc.
The social model differentiates disability (which is social) from impairment (one's physical/mental limitations), inspired by the idea that gender is social and sex is biological.
The social model is kind of the OG model, and was big with the early disability rights movement. It influenced so many others that came after it, because it doesn't work for all disabilities, or even for all situations.
💚 The political minority model of disability (green): understanding disabled people as an oppressed minority who experience societal ableism, and who are working collectively to resist this oppression. This model isn't concerned with how or why people are disabled, it focuses on the ableism we experience. For example, folks with ME/CFS trying to get medical care and being dismissed, and the blind community suffers from braille illiteracy.
💛 The affirmation model of disability (yellow): disability is an identity worth taking pride in! Deaf gain, not hearing loss. Neurodiversity as something that enriches humanity. Whereas the social model is opposed to the medical model of disability, the affirmation model is opposed to the deficit model of disability.
❤️ The debility model (red): this is a postcolonial model that focuses on how colonial and racist violence cause disablement; like people who are injured by war, or preventable diseases like AIDS. This model differentiates disability, which has a clear before-and-after, from debility, which is a slow wearing out through repeated colonial/racist/etc violence. Unlike the affirmation model, this model views some disabilities as worth preventing, and focuses on how disability is used as a tool of racist/colonial/etc oppression.
🤍 Other models (white): there are lots of other models of disability! Like the medical model (disability is a medial problem), the human rights model (disabled people need human rights laws), and the cultural model (disability is a social construction). Models are lenses used for understanding disability, and one might use one lens in one context, and and another in a different context.
Why these colours? In brief:
⚪ White is often considered the combination of all colours.
🩸 Red has associations with blood and violence.
😁 Yellow has associations with happiness.
♿ Blue is associated with accessibility.
🟩 Green is a combination of yellow (affirmation) and blue (social), or for how the political minority model has grassroots organizing, in contrast to the human rights model.
🖤 Dark grey (or black) continues to represent our collective mourning of disabled lives lost to ableism, eugenics, violence, suicide, abuse, and neglect.
SVG version of the infographic here. ❤️💛🤍🩵💚
Tagging for archival: @disabilitypride @disabilityflagsarchive @radiomogai @liom-archive
