Reflections on Crip Pride: After Our Nation’s First Parade
Reflections on Crip Pride: After Our Nation’s First Parade
After marching in the nation’s first parade to celebrate pride in disability on July 18, 2004 in Chicago, Illinois, I have come to a few internal questions: what does it mean to be disabled and proud? And how do you celebrate pride in everyday life? After chatting with several disabled people about what it means to them to be disabled and proud I believe that the meaning of pride and how one manifests it is wholly subjective, and thus I can only speak for myself. To me, pride means having love and a sense of joy for the thing that one is proud of. I have attained a sense of joy and love in being disabled, mainly because I have recognized that I am proud to be me. Being truly proud must include all of me, including my brittle bones disease.
For many years I internalized negative societal views associated with disability but I have rather recently reached a point in my path to self-actualization that has made me think these oppressive societal views need some evolution. Just as Mahatma Gandhi said, “you must be the change you wish to see in the world,” I have decided if society will not evolve, I must. What a liberating experience to begin this journey to self-actualization. However, I must confess I have not reached nirvana and thus still have a lot to work on concerning my humanity. Despite my relatively new feelings of crip pride I continue to sometimes feel sad, lonely, lost, and oppressed because I am forced to play the disabled role in society. Not to say I am fulfilling some role ascribed by societal doctrine, instead whether I want to be a person who is stared at or often presumed incapable does not matter, that is the identity I assume (at least on an immediate visual plane). I have recently found taking on the uppity crip role to be a liberating identity that has served to be life-affirming. Becoming interested in disability activism has given me a sense of purpose and accomplishment, which many of my peers yearn to find. I have felt some of the most rewarding personal highs related to facilitating positive change to occur for my population. With these awesome personal rewards I cannot help but emphatically exclaim I am disabled and proud.
Manifesting pride in my daily life entails being proud enough to have adventures on my own, to travel, meet new people, not to be afraid to fail or look crazy, say what I think (even if its a bit irreverent), feel like a whole human, and to living independently as much as I can. This last idea concerning independence and disability is something I have been intellectually grappling with for awhile, and I have realized there is a certain dichotomy to our need for independence. While we strive to be as independent as possible, there are times where we are all forced to accept our inabilities and ask for help, whether disabled or not.
I came to the notion of an independence dichotomy on my traveling adventures after I attended the crip pride parade this summer. My traveling adventures really taught something rather profound: while this disability issue is a political one, it is also a personal one. After leaving Chicago I went to Philadelphia, D.C., Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and West Palm and in each of those places I was forced to do something I do not really like to do: ask for help. My path to asking for help began in Philadelphia where I stayed with one of my best friends, Jordan, in a house which had three levels with many stairs connecting said levels, and because I use a wheelchair I am accustomed to pushing my physical abilities and climbing up the stairs on my own. But on this trip my left femur was hurting rather significantly and I knew I should not over-extend my body for fear of fractures, so I had to break through my own madness and ask my friends to help me. The interesting thing is that my friends (on all my stops) were more than willing to help me, with my friend Mike even stating that he had been waiting for years for my stubborn self to ask for assistance
It took pride in my humanity to be able to realize my own limitations and do what I had to do to preserve my body. It was immensely challenging to do so, but I am so glad I did. It was such a feeling of accomplishment, because I broke through a barrier that has loomed over my head for sometime now. The problem with asking for help was the fact that for some crazy reason I felt guilty and ashamed for doing so, like I was somehow playing into the disability model by being a helpless gimp. But a sage friend told me, it is not the person who asks for help who is weak, it is the person who does not. While I am still not completely comfortable accepting all of my humanity and inadequacies, I am one step closer to this acceptance. How amazing it will be to shed this feeling of shame for being me. After this reflection I have decided that I do need to take the notion of disability pride and not only apply to my life on an intellectual or public level, but also on a much needed personal level. A level that accepts all the parts of me, the multi-faceted, complex, crazy, radical, revolutionary, uppity crip, hell on wheels, fabulous woman that is me, Bethany!
While the crip pride parade experience spurred this amazing internal liberation, I do have a critique to offer, one for us all to think about. I am affirmed in the notion that we as a disability population are progressively moving along a path to real social liberation. But with this realization comes also the knowledge that we continue to fragment our community, and sadly thus our efforts. This was readily apparent at the parade and rally. While marching I noticed a schism of groups, people sticking to those who they knew rather than forging some sort of collective energy. During the rally the same thing occurred, but it was even more apparent as groups of people sat at tables that were separated spatially. These tables did not serve to represent separate disabilities (ie. one table for mobility impaired, another for visual impairments, etc.) instead it was just an obvious schism of different smaller communities. Maybe I am just too social, but I honestly thought we would all be together celebrating our identities in a collective manner.
There is nothing like a collective consciousness, it cannot be described adequately by words alone. I have felt it only once really and it was one of the most powerful experiences I lived through. It happened last fall when I participated in a historic march from Philadelphia to D.C. to support MiCASSA, The Medicaid Community Attendant Services Act. MiCASSA is a bill proposing the use of federal dollars to get the two million Americans with disabilities who are warehoused in institutions out of them. The march was 144 miles long with 200 people with disabilities marching along major highways through some hilly states. The most emotively powerful point in the march occurred when we marched into the center of D.C. for the rally and I was leading chants, screaming "Free our brothers, free our sisters, free our people now.” As I screamed these powerful words tears streamed down my cheeks. Finally I knew why I was marching, I knew why the words were so powerful and I knew what sort of impact I was hoping to make. As we marched into Upper Senate Park we were met with thousands of people thanking us for our efforts because it was legislation like MiCASSA that got them out of institutions. It was the most powerful feeling I have ever had, I felt like every cell in my body was spinning or vibrating. I felt alive and I felt ‘one’ with all the crazy dirty hippy crips I marched with.
While I knew that this parade would not be as emotively powerful, simply because of the conditions of the respective situations, I had hoped that there would be a collective feeling that would make me feel like we were building a proud cohesive community. The critique I have offered is not to say anything against the parade itself or the planners (who are amazing) because the event as a whole was awesome! The parade was an excellent embodiment of necessary positive ideals associated with being disabled and we really do need to get together to celebrate our identities in order for progress to occur. Without internal progress within our community, we cannot expect external progress within society as a whole. The critique is focused, instead on us, the movement and where my idealistic mind thinks we should head for a real social revolution.
We really need to come up with a way to forge some sort of collective identity that is willing and ready to encompass all manifestations of disability (whether apparent or not) and not stratify them in any way. I have noticed in my years of crip activism that there is a hierarchy of disability, where those who have less apparent or non-apparent disabilities reign supreme. Stratification only serves to exacerbate the social problems that face us. I encourage you to challenge this notion, because not only is this a pervasive notion that needs to be dismantled within us but also within society as a whole. Something I think we often all forget is the fact that we are ALL oppressed socially, each in different ways but similarly. When we realize our shared oppression we can harness the power of this huge population of people to change the world.
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