Unraveling the Disability Pride Flag
Thank You For Your Feedback Loop is a monthly newsletter that will share previously unpublished reporting and analysis on the elite capture of disability movements.
by: Liz Jackson & Rua M. Williams
audio: Jules Good
Tucked neatly between the United Nations International Day for the Abolition of Slavery on December 2, and the International Day of Banks on December 4, is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities [IDPD]. Resolution 47/3 was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 3, 1992 “with the aim of achieving a society for all by the year 2010.” There is no tidy way of knowing what sort of consideration goes into the arrangement of United Nations observance days, even though their order risks echoing political histories. But, to culminate days that mark the abolishment of slavery and “a society for all” with the glorification of an economic system that ensures they remain unrealized shows how these observances aren’t actually intended for the populations they are naming.
Rather than focus on the disabled people this day is marked to observe, resolution 47/3 directed its attention to “governments, as well as national, regional and international organizations.” This strategy has seeded a landscape for corporations to signal, announce, and launch initiatives that raise stock points under the guise of raising awareness. And over the past few years, governments, organizations, and their corporate overlords have streamlined this disability version of rainbow washing by raising a disability version of the Rainbow pride flag.
Just as the ‘Gay Pride’ movement was beginning to wrestle with the Neoliberal cooptation of pride, a disability pride project was setting itself up for future Neoliberal capture. It began the same month the Reclaim Pride Coalition demanded “No corps, no cops, no bs!” at the inaugural Queer Liberation March in June of 2019. A disabled writer named Ann McGill registered her proposed Disability Pride Flag under the International Public Domain. It attracted little attention until a couple of years later, when McGill learned that her lightning bolt design was a trigger for seizures, migraines, and other visual disturbances in photosensitive individuals. She “piped up and said, “Okay.” I owned it. I didn’t get mad. I said, “Okay, this is a mistake. How can we fix it? What if I made these changes?” And because I said, how can we fix this, and didn’t get upset and didn’t get possessive, people started anonymously offering suggestions.”
This process, which we call ‘feedback design’, pantomimes a process of accountability in order to extract complaint as feedback. And because feedback design operates laterally across vulnerable populations instead of vertically through time, it extends an imbalance of power between the ‘community’ it’s supposed to serve and that which is sacrosanct, the virtuous designer at the helm – even if she is ostensibly one of us.
In an earlier telling, McGill described how “a bunch of us on Tumblr — this time, with a lot of input from vision-impaired and neurodivergent people (some of whom wished to remain anonymous), came up with this design.” The subtle change in story from some people wishing to remain anonymous — to suggestions being offered anonymously — shows what happens when disabled people find themselves in the designer's seat. McGill failed to grapple with, acknowledge, and divest from the privileges that have led to her being positioned as the voice of contributors who are anonymized through the attribution of “community”.
The “feedback from people within the disabled community” that McGill implemented involved scrapping the lightning bolt, softening the color palette, and rearranging those muted hues into a pattern that designers like to describe as being colorblind friendly. Yet, even though McGill’s role transitioned from creator to curator, “because the community came together to solve a problem,” the new “Visually Safe” Disability Pride flag wound up “in the public domain in my name” only.
Attributing the desires of one or a few to a whole group is a hallmark of contemporary design methods that are constructed to take advantage of a user or tester’s motivations for participating. Under-resourced and underemployed subjects are approached with or learn of opportunities to co-create, only for the resourced designer to conflate their reasons for participating with those who have no professional or financial objective. The manipulated subject will provide valuable information with the aim of building a professional relationship, only to be thanked for their feedback and shown the door.
These coercive practices lie at the heart of feedback design, which leverages global humanitarian and media networks to circulate depictions of responsive designers. Beyond their inaccuracies, these public records bury ongoing issues, such as how the Visually Safe Disability Pride flag still causes visual disturbances. Questions about how the flag was taken up without meaningful buy-in from the people it purports to represent are neutralized and no further complaints can be validated.
This is why it’s useful to operate vertically through time. History teaches us that the Disability Pride Flag is built on a chain of extraction from prior advocates whose stories seem to have been erased precisely because they didn't exploit the people they purported to represent and serve.
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In the aftermath of WWII, Spainiards unknowingly entered into a process of Americanization after the United States invested in their strategically located country’s fledgling economy. In exchange for Cold War military cooperation, “the United States acted as a catalyst of modernity by providing [the] loans, technical support, and business opportunities” Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco needed to achieve his pursuit of rapid industrialization. Upon Franco’s death in 1975, Spaniards enthusiastically embraced the “increasingly pervasive presence” of American culture in their efforts “to negotiate a new democratic identity through “inclusion,” namely the inclusion of Spain in the rest of Europe,” according to historian Hamilton M. Stapell. “Spaniards thus unquestioningly and unwittingly accepted the process of Americanization as “normal” in their attempt to identify themselves with the rest of Europe.”
Throughout the 1950’s and 60’s, Franco’s Spain “continuously interacted with American interests and projects,” including one that was spurred by John F. Kennedy’s commitment to his intellectually and developmentally disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy. The Kennedy Administration was so intent on intellectual disability as a priority that President Kennedy convened a panel to develop a "National Plan to Combat Mental R****dation” soon after assuming office. Within a year, the panel presented Kennedy with their findings, which he used as a blueprint to enact legislation, envisioning a day when "reliance on the cold mercy of custodial isolation will be supplanted by the open warmth of community concern and capability. Emphasis on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation will be substituted for a desultory interest in confining patients in an institution to wither away.”
The strategy of using rehabilitation to scaffold deinstitutionalization brought intellectual and developmentally disabled [IDD] populations into a narrative of “overcoming” that was already firmly entrenched amongst physically disabled patients. This appealed to Franco, who had become receptive to “ideas about intellectual disability that were circulating on an international level.” By aligning its policies and values with democratic European countries it had up until this point been isolated from, Spain found admittance into diplomatic and international organizations whose “objectives included establishing mechanisms to defend the rights of disabled people” – such as the United Nations.
Some sixty odd years later, on December 3, 2017, Eros Recio, a Valencian dancer with Down syndrome presented his disability “Flag of Overcoming” to the United Nations, where it was accepted as a symbol of “all people with disabilities.” But an American made “Disability Pride Flag” quickly gained repute as being the original and first-ever when it debuted two years later.
During a half-hearted attempt to correct the record, Ann McGill, designer of the Disability Pride Flag, forgot Recio’s name while failing to acknowledge the subordinate role IDD folks like him face as she referred to his flag as the “second one.” It happened during an interview on a podcast called The Accessible Stall, where she went on to deride the “Flag of Overcoming” for its word choice, reducing “overcoming” to a “cudgel that is sometimes used against disabled people.” The podcast host, Emily Ladau responded, saying “Oh my gosh, we talk about this all the time, because this is our least favorite narrative.”
That narrative was one of those formative “ideas about intellectual disability that were circulating” among American and Anglo-European powers during Franco’s regime. And because Franco never quite got around to implementing the measures that he introduced, the social isolation of IDD Spaniards only began to materially change after his death in 1975, as a result of Spain’s transition from an autocracy to a democracy. Given these circumstances, Reico’s message of “the collective's overcoming of obstacles” reflects America’s influence both in terms of how he could have interpreted the thing he was also trying to address.
McGill ultimately proposed a bilateral solution, in which Recio’s Flag of Overcoming could “represent our legal rights as citizens of countries” while her Disability Pride flag would “represent our pride as a global community, beyond our national rights.” Bilateral solutions are rarely the mutually beneficial propositions they claim to be. More often, they represent a bifurcation of what should be a collective movement, relegating one faction to a subordinate position, primed for eventual erasure.
During the writing of this piece, a new Wikipedia Editor account was created, seemingly for the sole purpose of editing Recio out of the disability flag Wikipedia entry entirely. Not only was his flag replaced as the Infobox picture, but his name is no longer mentioned.
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As early as 1985, even the Wall Street Journal was reporting on pride as an expression of the “growing disability-rights movement, which battles architectural barriers, promotes independent living and preaches self-pride over societal pity.” Five years later, on October 6, 1990, hundreds of disabled activists and their comrades gathered to march from City Hall Plaza to Boston Common in Massachusetts’ capital to protest a series of federal and state budget cuts that “would inhibit their ability to live independently.”
This “first Disability Pride Day” was organized by a broad coalition of AIDS, queer, and disability activist groups who refused to acquiesce to the inevitable cooling period after broad legislation has been signed and political capital is spent. As Ann Hausbrouk, a blind bisexual organizer said at the time, “It’s about pushing boundaries, now that the Americans with Disabilities Act ha[d] passed,” just three months prior. And even though the “first Disability Pride Day” was intentionally pegged as the “next step in the disability rights movement,” Disability Pride Month is now marked as an annual commemoration of the ADA, and conscripts the organizers of Disability Pride Day into embracing something they were, in fact, resisting.
News clippings from that time described how “Disabled Pride Day was patterned after the gay and lesbian pride events of the past decade,” but firsts are rarely ever what they claim, and almost always serve to distort history rather than to mark it. Two and a half years before the “first Disability Pride Day,” 3,000 protestors flocked to DC to march on the Capitol, for Deaf Pride Day. The march led to a demonstration on the National Mall, where Gallaudet students had mobilized to demand a “Deaf President Now.” There were celebratory elements to the action, because the newly elected, hearing president had just resigned. But it didn’t deter the strikers who “waited for the response to their other demands.” As a result, I. King Jordan became the first deaf president of Gallaudet University.
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‘Gay Pride’ is often linked to the attempted police raid of Stonewall on June 28, 1969. But the words gay and pride wouldn’t be chanted in sequence for another two years. Accounts from the Christopher Street rebellion instead recall the shouts of “Gay Power” and “Fag Power” as cops descended upon the primarily black and trans patrons within the Inn. According to Miss Major, who is “probably Stonewall’s best-known living participant,” Stonewall “wasn’t a monumental moment. Especially when it started, it was just another night–cops come in and raid the place, drag us out of the bar, and you’re just hoping it’s not your turn to get into the paddy wagon that night. It was just life.”
While early lore of Stonewall was rippling from NYC’s Greenwich Village, Thom Higgins — a white, gay, 19-year-old aspiring journalist — was lamenting his unceremonious firing from Llewellyn Publications, “the oldest and largest metaphysical publisher in the world.” The serendipitous (mis)fortune that delivered Higgins this job in the Twin Cities of his upbringing was a high profile suspension from the University of North Dakota.
Higgins’ transgression was partaking in a crudely written underground satirical student publication called Snow Job. Minutes from the suspension hearing make us wonder if Higgins was also punished for his affective and cognitive differences, because every other contributor survived proceedings unscathed. When discussing punishment, one faculty member vouched for the other implicated students, saying “she knows [they] are innocent because of their integrity,” but felt that Higgins “needed to grow up” and "should be referred for psychiatric help" on top of a suspension.
A series of chronologically inventoried folders containing Higgins’ personal papers – archived at the Minnesota Historical Society – chart how Higgins’ divergent expression came to foment the conditions of his own journalistic exile. A small, unsourced note reading “your garb today, I don’t feel, is appropriate for the office,” was tucked in a folder documenting this period in Higgins life. Harsh in its simplicity, it contributes to our sense that Llewellyn Publications was similarly punitive when it fired Higgins and terminated his health insurance while he was in the hospital. The official reason for Higgins dismissal was “lack of job,” prompting Higgins to ask the president of the company why he “personally and as an employer [has] such acrimony toward me?”
Higgins found a new job as chief announcer and program manager for the Minnesota Radio Talking Book Network, a State Services for the Blind broadcast. But history would again come to repeat itself when he was fired in early 1970. His supervisor claimed Higgins had already been fired “because of regular and sporadic work habits,” but Higgins insists he lost his job after informing his supervisor he was going to be publicly identified as the publicity director for Fight Repression of Erotic Expression [FREE], a University of Minnesota student gay rights organization.
If there was an archetype for the type of individual who is quickly embraced, yet easily discarded by the disability establishment, Higgins would embody that persona: He‘s easily derailed when the dynamics his work seeks to confront also play out within the institutions that are funded to address them. His firing from an employer that serves disabled people so soon after being fired and losing his health insurance while he was in the hospital surely became visceral material examples of power and acceptance from which to generate more rage-imbued work.
While Higgins facilitated a 30-person picket outside the State Services of the Blind offices in protest of his firing, organizers in New York were planning for the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day. This particular event “eventually became known to the world as ‘Pride’” according to Miss Major who has worked tirelessly to avoid sound bytes that would further muddle history, because Thom still hadn’t uttered those words. It would take another year for that clarity to arrive, in the form of a quip. According to Michael McConnell, who is best known as one half of America's longest-married same-sex couple after obtaining a marriage license on September 3, 1971:
“The term “gay pride” was invented here. Thom Higgins had been raised in the Catholic Church and decided to come up with a means of countering the negative energy coming out of the church. So he paired two of the deadly sins: gay [lust] and pride. That language was transformative. It is one of those things that opened the door and moved people forward. Jack [Baker, McConnell’s husband] went down in 1971 to Chicago, where he had been invited to speak, and took the term “gay pride” there. And the explosion began.”
There are significant differences in the purposes and functions of power versus pride movements, which can be found in how those who initially uttered them experienced violence. Gay Pride was initially taken up by integrationists, primarily white men, who resisted their exclusion from the American Dream. Fag Power was the refrain of black trans women, under attack, when they simply wanted to be left alone.
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When asked by the Accessible Stall podcast why she put the Disability Pride flag in the public domain, McGill said “I want there to be merch. I want stuff with this flag on it.” But the commodification of Gay Pride created a “nightmare” scenario for Gilbert Baker, creator of the Rainbow Pride flag. He dreaded the prospect of “a factory with nearly slave labor, forced to live within the factory complex and get up every morning and have to churn out more and more rainbow tchotchkes.” He recalled “walking down Castro Street, I can’t pay my rent, but I see rainbow dildos in the shop windows and rainbow keychains, rainbow rings, rainbow candles and so on.” Baker died in 2017, as a vulnerable cog in the machine of his nightmare.
The dichotomy of operating horizontally across populations at the exclusion of vertically through time is embedded in the aspirations of inclusion rhetoric, and presumes this time it will be different or it will be different when we do it. Earlier in Baker’s life, he saw flags “as just another icon to lampoon [...] and considered all flag waving and patriotism in general to be a dangerous joke” because flags were “nationalistic, territorial, iconic propaganda.” But that changed in 1976 under Harvey Milk’s tutelage, and Baker came to feel that “a gay nation should have a flag too, to proclaim its own idea of power.”
Baker and Milk met just two years earlier, in 1974, and bonded over their shared military service. Baker described feeling “proud to be a foot soldier in Harvey’s army” in “a battle for equal rights.” Baker often referred to Milk as his Commanding General, which, according to historian Jason Crouthamel, reflected “an intensely militarised rhetoric [that] permeated the language of gay rights organisations in the 1920s.”
After WWI, those gay rights organizations coalesced around “the fact that gay men sacrificed themselves alongside heterosexual men and shared the spiritual bond of ‘comradeship’, [which] gave them the confidence and credibility to ‘come out’ […] as legitimate, and equal, members of the nation.” Often described as the “first homosexual movement,” it was beginning to dwindle by the time Harvey Milk was born in 1930, as a result of “the Great Depression, an increasingly hostile political climate, and the failure of the movement's main goal, the repeal of Paragraph 175,” a provision in the German Criminal Code that criminalized sexual relations between men.
Mirroring the ways in which “the homosexual movement was never politically unified,” Thom Higgins did his best to opt out, even becoming “the first person in Minnesota to be granted a presidential conscientious objector draft classification” in 1969. In 1977, as Baker was putting the finishing touches on the Rainbow flag, Higgins was showing the world what he meant when he uttered Gay Pride, when he made headlines for treating Anita Bryant to a pie in the face.
Italian semiologist and cultural critic, Umberto Eco, described Semiotics (which studies how signs communicate meaning) as “the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.” Semiotics tends to draw a distinction between the signifier and the signified - what is being shown versus what is being told. The Rainbow flag as a signifier becomes a vehicle for the myth of a celebratory rather than paradoxical Gay Pride. Semiotics explains how the flag and the myth have worked together to spawn an industry that capitalizes on societally enforced shame. It also helps us understand why McGill created a standardized commodity, ripe for mass consumption while Recio has spent the past near decade traveling far and wide, bringing his flag to heads of state as he advocates for disability rights.
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In audio engineering, feedback is a nuisance phenomenon – a noise response to a signal processing error that creates an impulse to correct the flow of data in order to calm the din. In design, feedback comes from a ‘user’ who has taken on the labor of communicating product misalignments. Routing ‘feedback’ through protected channels into a controlled environment creates a risk tolerant way for resourced designers to acquire knowledge they do not carry.
That is why a recent campaign to create a “new disability symbol that represents all of us” launched with a ”call in” for “communal feedback“ — a likely derivative of community feedback, ostensibly to signify how those at the helm are ilk. When folks on Instagram publicly commented that the initial prototype caused many of the same visual disturbances as the original disability pride flag, they were told “we would love your feedback in the form so we can test out the next iteration.”
The feedback survey for the “new disability symbol” opens with a “Non Disclosure/Copyright Agreement” that ensures the designers turned curators “maintain creative ownership” of the proposal and design IP. Using language that is litigious toward the people they are soliciting ”feedback” from undermines the very spirit of communal, which by definition means “used or shared in common by everyone in a group.”
Respondents may experience their own Thom Higgins effect wherein they spend a lifetime gleaning a single, uniquely valuable insight that only takes a moment to convey, but gets taken in such a way that it seemingly has no origin. This is why Feedback design is so destructive; where are the provisions to ensure, at the very least, the sanctity of the Thom Higgins-esque idea or quip?
Under-resourced designers may beg what other choice they have — this is how it’s done, this is how it’s been done to them. But it doesn’t take much history to find some worthwhile questions left unasked that could offer an alternative to the structurally coercive practices that underpin existing methods. For instance, why is there such interest in discarding the Accessible Icon, even though it hasn’t yet been around for a decade and is still being incorporated into old cities and new builds all over the world?
The wheelchair user in the Accessible Icon is leaning forward, replacing the (in the mind of some) less active, more passive appearing wheelchair user in the International Symbol of Access. Like the Disability Pride Flag, the Accessible Icon is extolled in the media for its grassroots beginnings. But a frequent critique we encountered during the writing of this piece was the “unilateral” uptake of the Disability Pride Flag “by brands and disability influencers without the rest of us having a chance to weigh in.”
Bojidar Kolov, a seemingly unrelated expert on the political theology of the Russian Orthodox Church, identified a “legitimating nexus” that helps explain how disability iconography can take hold without buy-in of the very populations they supposedly derived from. According to Kolov, Mutual Legitimization may “remain dependent on public opinion and strive to appeal to the populace,” but makes “popular support less necessary,” because it “somewhat displaces the conventional dependence on the people as granters of legitimacy.”
Mutual Legitimization requires state actors “who make sense of and thus enable each other’s power.” This is how Sara Hendren — the nondisabled parent of a disabled child — managed to ascend alongside the Accessible Icon she became the face of. In this transaction, the state received a visual artifact that it could use to feed the illusion of progress. And because mothers of disabled children are appealing to state power as icons of conservative tradition, Hendren was granted the authority to uphold the status quo.
Like the women we described in our Counterinsurgent Mother Figureheads piece, Hendren “parlayed a single attention grabbing moment into a lifetime of repute” when she capitalized on the growing ubiquity of the Accessible Icon. Notably was her high profile book that has come to dominate disability design syllabi and curriculum all over the world despite remaining virtually unknown amongst disabled organizers who are working on the ground.
Paulo Freire puts this into context in his classic text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he described the educated oppressor who “approach[es] the peasant or urban masses with projects which may correspond to their own view of the world. They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people's stolen humanity.”
When someone is cast into a figurehead role, we, in effect, become governed by their beliefs and are compelled to act according to their norms. The figurehead works diligently to contain those of us, like Thom Higgins, who defy the status quo. It is heartbreaking to read through Higgins files and understand just how viciously he was punished by those, according to Freire, whose ”tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
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This is a story about the well worn paths and wireframes that dictate what information travels and where it goes. Because flags have existed since before measurements were standardized, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Original Pride Flag measured 30 feet by 60 feet, and while the sheer size is noteworthy, so too are its 1:2 proportions, which would need to be cropped or distorted in order to fit the 4:3 dimensions of one of “the most utilized sizes” of wireframe that exists. There are only four national flags with these “uncommon” proportions; those being Papua New Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, San Marino, and Gabon.
The American flag has a similarly uncommon size, measuring 10:19, “most likely influenced by the dimensions of the tissue used to manufacture it.” According to author Xawnia Wagner, Flag Aspect Ratios have historically been influenced by “constructions or proportions between their design elements.” This is likely why McGill registered her Disability Pride Flag at 400x300 pixels.
While LED screens have driven 4:3 displays into obsolescence, the aspect ratio still offers designers flexibility, as ubiquity itself requires corruption and cooptation. As we were researching this piece, we happened across the Disability Pride Flag on the New York Public Library website where it was tucked neatly underneath a promotion for their Disability Pride Month programming. Because the Disability Pride Flag operates more as a branding equivalent of a disability overlay, we propose it is less a flag and more an underlay, which we define as a stock image that packages disability under the guise of representing it.
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During Donald Trump’s biggest and most beautiful birthday parade on June 14, 2025, the Department of Defense attempted to acknowledge Flag Day when it wrote “Let us honor the emblem of our nation and the stars and stripes that unite us all.” The idea of a flag that unites us all is no different than a universally designed product that is intended for all. Both require the totalizing force of colonization to unify the masses through homogeny.
Universal design asserts that spaces, systems, and programs can be made perfectly inclusive and accessible through the right procedures, protocols, and adaptations. To achieve this, Universal designers collect, categorize, capture, and classify all possible forms of bodily and cognitive difference. The authority to conduct such work is reserved for the aptly conditioned moral exemplar who introduces a modernized series of best practices that guarantee the way things are done will remain.
The goal, they claim, is to ensure every possible reasonable accommodation can be deployed through a perfected system that is prepared for all contingencies. But once those forms of difference are captured, the rhetoric of inclusion proceduralizes outliers and deviants in order to subdue us. This is how empire works. By streamlining processes, it consolidates the power it then maintains through a culture of social control that involves, in the words of Freire, “education as the practice of domination.”
During the early stages of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, he “was promoted as a brilliant strategist, as visionary, fearless, gallant, fortunate, generous, profoundly religious, a loving husband and father, and ultimately, indisputably noble at heart.” According to Francisco Ferrándiz, tenured researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, a “dense rhetoric of divine providence, grandeur, and heroism” obscured the violence Franco enacted in order to present Spain “as an ethnically and politically homogeneous state.” One such example that’s relevant to our story involved the efforts he made to ban Catalan, the Native language of Valencia, Eros Recio’s home on the east coast of Spain, ”from public spaces and made Spanish the sole language of public life.”
While “colonialism has driven many Indigenous languages to extinction,” Franco’s order to “Hable el idioma del imperio,” or “use the language of the empire,” may have helped preserve Catalan. According to Catalan journalist Irene Boada, “speakers of a banned language feel resentful and resist authoritarian reach into their culture,” which is why Catalan speakers continued using their native tongue when and how they could, even if it was relegated to the confines of their homes.
As Franco’s “status as a moral exemplar dwindled,” his legacy of sacrifice and heroism morphed into “a bloody war perpetrator [that] squarely falls into the category of negative exemplarity.” That’s because the forces that dictate what constitutes a moral exemplar can shift “when the oppressed find the oppressor out and become involved in the organized struggle for their liberation.” This also applies to Universal design’s need for Mutually Legitimizing exemplars who “magnetize, recycle, and cluster moral values” in order to shroud its ideological quest for domination. Their seemingly unimpeachable reputations are now subject to the tides of public opinion, which, according to abolitionist Theodore Parker, are long, but ultimately bend toward justice.
These days Catalan is not only taught, but has been made compulsory, making manifest Freire’s point on “education as the practice of freedom” as the antidote to “education as the practice of domination.” There is one factor that separates the Universal designer from the user, and it is their proximity to power. This is why Recio’s flag is destined to remain a symbol of overcoming; the Disability Pride Flag and the Accessible Icon would never have come to dominate had they originated on the east coast of Spain rather than the east coast of the United States.
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