Important Dates in the Month of October

October is LGBTQ History Month.

 October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month.

 October 12th is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

To read about the LGBTQ candidates HRC is endorsing, check out the article “HRC Celebrates LGBTQ History Month By Honoring These Trailblazing Candidates.”

In the News Release “U.S. Department of Department of Labor Announces 2020 National Disability Employment Awareness Month Theme: ‘Increasing Access and Opportunity,’” I read, “This year is the nation’s 75th observance of NDEAM, which is administered by the Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP). The observance culminates the Department’s commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)...Each October, NDEAM celebrates America’s workers with disabilities and reminds employers of the importance of inclusive hiring practices. In 1945, Congress declared the first week of October ‘National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week.’ In 1962, the word ‘physically’ was dropped to include individuals with all types of disabilities. Congress expanded the week to a month in 1988, and changed the commemoration to National Disability Employment Awareness Month.”

Leila Fadel wrote, “Indigenous peoples first proposed the day during a 1977 United Nations conference on discrimination against them. But it wasn't until 1989 that South Dakota became the first state to switch Columbus Day to Native Americans' Day, celebrating it for the first time in 1990. And then Berkeley became the first U.S. city to switch to Indigenous Peoples' Day [in 1992]” in the NPR article “Columbus Day Or Indigenous Peoples' Day?”

As I read about these various dates, I thought of Ijeoma Oluo’s words in So You Want to Talk About Race from the chapter “What is intersectionality and why do I need it?” Oluo wrote, “How do our social justice efforts so often fail to help the most vulnerable in our populations? This is primarily a result of unexamined privilege. Because of how rarely our privilege is examined, even our social justice movements will tend to focus on the most privileged and most well represented people within those groups. Anti-racism groups will often tend to prioritize the needs of straight men of color, feminist groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white women, LGBTQ groups will tend to prioritize the needs of white gay cisgender men, disability rights groups will tend to prioritize the needs of disabled white men. Imagine where this leaves a disabled Latinx trans woman on any group’s priority list.”

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