Link to my realblog.
TW: swearing. mentions specifically ableist slurs.
Yes yes yes!
sticks and stones may break my bones but words are even worse holy shit please dont say mean things to me
TRANSCRIPT:
(Picture with the words: “The correct term isn’t black, It’s African American:”
…But this dude is british.)
I’m sure this will stir some debate but like ever have a time where someone trying to be politically correct just ends up being wrong????
We were reading “Heart of Darkness” in my senior year AP English class, and someone referred to a group of people in the book as “African-Americans”. My (old, eccentric white guy) English teacher basically lost his mind and started screaming, “THEY’RE SOUTH AFRICANS WHO ARE BLACK, URCHIN WEED!”
my (English) ex would refer to black people as African-Americans bcs she did American Studies at uni. hilarious confusion ensued.
This is pretty ridiculous. But I’m pretty sure that The Heart of Darkness is set in the Congo.
You are correct - it’s been the better part of a decade since I read it. D:
#olds
XD
I had an American ‘correct’ me in saying my friend is black, and he was saying “the correct term is African-American.”
Well, being as she’s British, and her family was from the Caribbean but maybe 3 or more generations ago, no, not at all. She’s Black British, mate. Not American, not African, and not duel-nationality (which is what African-American would be in British English grammar).
I vaguely remember an American journalist calling Nelson Mandela African-American. He was like lol no I’m African.
urchin weed
URCHIN WEED
Ohmigod.
Last year we had to do a group project on nonverbal communication in a variety of different cultures (which I was severely uncomfortable with, since it was 3.5 white people in our group, & I’m hapa, but grew up in a VERY white area, so…um yeah. There were so many ways this could go badly.)
So this girl starts talking to me about the “African-Americans in Africa”. Annnnnd I kind of couldn’t handle it.
Verbal communication is not a requirement for consent.
“
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-Rose (via harrycryirk) Reblogging my own quote because yes, people - important message! (via goldenheartedrose) |
Like is like my favorite word in english because you can be all like I like like liking shit on tumblr like really.
Are you like, sure of what you are like saying, like just right now ?
Well, like apparently you like, like like, I’m like I like don’t know like why I would like contradict you.
I’ve long resisted putting up in my tumblr description, a concise list of identities and ways that I do and don’t have privilege. I’ve done it in the past other places but it’s always felt wrong. It feels like taking a complex set of wavy lines tangled together and then reducing them to a grid….
This is a very interesting and valuable post… The first time I readed about privileges on social justice sites, it was something I found wonderful and very useful and important.
I live in Switzerland and France, and there it is not a notion that is used a lot.
In these countries, it tends to be considered that those who are the most apt to talk and debate on an issue, are those who are the most educated (on the subject or not), have a University diploma, talk well and so on…
The notion that those who don’t experience first hand a kind of oppression will never fully grasp what it’s like to experience it every day of your life, and that there are all kind of invisible obstacle that prevent most marginalized people from accessing to a lot of rights and possibilities and so on.
I always felt that this was very wrong, put I didn’t have the words to express it, the notion of privileges helped me a lot (sadly I still don’t feel the energy and courage to try to talked about it to people in my entourage/ websites in french…same about ableism and autism and neurodiversity.
This notion also helped me realized how I should react to expression of the oppression of others people, by recognizing all my own privileges, In fact this can also help me feel less culpability, When I f**k up, it’s not that I’m an horrible person, it’s that I was born with privileges in a f**ked-up society, so the best thing is correcting my mistake and listening to the people who reproach me to f**k up.
But I also realized that this notion is very complicated, It’s not always a clear cut between people who have or have not a privileges (and even when it is, there are often some complications too)
And it’s true that sometimes people seems to talked about privileges as if it was really more simple than it is.
There are the privileges in general, and then there are all the other circumstances, besides intersectionality, there is where you live, the way you present, who raised you, the luck you had (or not), the way you managed feelings, the people you met, and so on.
I think privileges is a very useful and necessary notion, as long as you don’t apply it as an exact science and a clearly quantifiable system of measure.
I hope I make sense.
Really Important
Caution Might be triggering, mention of bullying, abuse and hatred, also be cautious if you want to read the comments, thankfully, in this blog most are really decent right and encouraging, but some are infuriating and triggering (thankfully, the decent people reply to them to point how this is not ok.)
I thought about the model of disability that separates impairment from disability. Disability theorist Michael Oliver defines impairment as “lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism, or mechanism of the body.” I lack a fair amount of fine motor control. My hands shake. I can’t play a piano, place my hands gently on a keyboard, or type even 15 words a minute. Whole paragraphs never cascade from my fingertips. My longhand is a slow scrawl. I have trouble picking up small objects, putting them down. Dicing onions with a sharp knife puts my hands at risk. A food processor is not a yuppie kitchen luxury in my house, but an adaptive device. My gross motor skills are better but not great. I can walk mile after mile, run and jump and skip and hop, but don’t expect me to walk a balance beam. A tightrope would be murder; boulder hopping and rock climbing, not much better. I am not asking for pity. I am telling you about impairment.
Oliver defines disability as “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical [and/or cognitive/developmental/mental] impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of society.” I write slowly enough that cashiers get impatient as I sign my name to checks, stop talking to me, turn to my companions, hand them my receipts. I have failed timed tests, important tests, because teachers wouldn’t allow me to use a typewriter. I have been turned away from jobs because my potential employer believed my slow, slurred speech meant I was stupid. Everywhere I go people stare at me, in restaurants as I eat, in grocery stores as I fish coins out of my pocket to pay the cashier, in parks as I play with my dog. I am not asking for pity. I am telling you about disability.
In large part, disability oppression is about access. Simply being on Mount Adams, halfway up Air Line Trail, represents a whole lot of access. When access is measured by curb cuts, ramps, and whether they are kept clear of snow and ice in the winter; by the width of doors and the height of counters; by the presence or absence of Braille, closed captions, ASL, and TDDs; my not being able to climb all the way to the very top of Mount Adams stops being about disability. I decided that turning around before reaching the summit was more about impairment than disability.
But even as I formed the thought, I could feel my resistance to it. To neatly divide disability from impairment doesn’t feel right. My experience of living with CP has been so shaped by ableism — or to use Oliver’s language, my experience of impairment has been so shaped by disability — that I have trouble separating the two. I understand the difference between failing a test because some stupid school rule won’t give me more time and failing to summit Mount Adams because it’s too steep and slippery for my feet. The first failure centers on a socially constructed limitation, the second on a physical one.
At the same time, both center on my body. The faster I try to write, the more my pen slides out of control, muscles spasm, then contract trying to stop the tremors, my shoulder and upper arm painfully tight. Even though this socially constructed limitation has a simple solution — access to a typewriter, computer, tape recorder, or person to take dictation — I experience the problem on a very physical level. In the case of the bodily limitation, the experience is similarly physical. My feet simply don’t know the necessary balance. I lurch along from one rock to the next, catching myself repeatedly as I start to fall, quads quickly sore from exertion, tension, lack of momentum. These physical experiences, one caused by a social construction, the other by a bodily limitation, translate directly into frustration, making me want to crumple the test I can’t finish, hurl the rocks I can’t climb. This frustration knows no neat theoretical divide between disability and impairment. Neither does disappointment nor embarrassment. On good days, I can separate the anger I turn inward at my body from the anger that needs to be turned outward, directed at the daily ableist shit, but there is nothing simple or neat about kindling the latter while transforming the former. I decided that Oliver’s model of disability makes theoretical and political sense but misses important emotional realities.
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Eli Clare, Exile and Pride, 1999. [Anyone who still thinks the term ableism came from tumblr, please note the date.] (via youneedacat) That’s interesting to read, because it’s a very different experience from my own, this is probably because I have a differet kind of condition, and my life was quite different too. For me the social model didin’t oly looks right, it feels right, I can’t conect myself with the word “person with disability” but I can with “disabled person”, the notion of the social model really resonate with me. But I appreciate, reading this, to be able to understand that not every disabled person has the same feelings and experience of disability that me. I suppose I should take this in consideration when I talk or write about disability. |
I am evidence.
Oh my!, this is so true, I actually hate the original proverb since I first heard it.
PICTURED: Text says:
STICKS AND STONES MAY BREAK MY BONES BUT WORDS WILL ONLY CAUSE PERMANENT PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGE.
I think I still retain one of the skills I used the most often to handle language growing up. My language comprehension, as opposed to (superficial) expression, ranged from “meh” to nonexistent. And so did the ties between my superficial level of expression, and what I was actually thinking. I…
As usual all the post is worth reading.
The point that relate to my experience, is the part about associating something to an experience that is not always related directly to the something in question but to one’s first (or another) encounter with it and for ages.
I’m almost certain that I phrased this terribly.
