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More comments to other people:
This was in response to a friends-locked post on the various things different people want, or expect, in friendships, and may also have been influenced by recent email exchanges with Q:
Noodling in response:
My non-negotiables are mostly either meta-rules, things I'd consider basic decent behavior, or both. Two that come to mind right now are honest communication--which doesn't mean perfect self-knowledge, or revealing every detail of one's life and hopes, but trying not to mislead, even when it may mean saying "I can't tell you that" or "I don't know"--and one implied by your third paragraph: don't expect me to read your mind and know what you want where it's idiosyncratic.
Also, just because two people are both decent doesn't mean they'll be friends: they have not have time, or may not have enough in common, or one may rub the other the wrong way for reasons not entirely under their control, like the instructor at my college whose voice grated on me enough that I decided not to take that class. Politeness may, in some contexts, be an obligation. Friendship is not. None of us are public utilities, nor inexhaustible wells.
Someone on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
postqueer asked what was meant by white privilege:
Another piece of it is that, being (perceived as) white means that institutions and decision-makers are more likely to think of me as "one of us". Being "one of us" makes a person seem safe and trustworthy, which in turn can translate into everything from getting a better job (interviews being somewhat subjective) to not being hassled by the police.
I tend to think of white privilege (and, similarly, male privilege) as basically two things. One is that, in this society at least [1], certain things that everyone ought get are only by default given to white people: that ranges from not being assumed to be a criminal suspect to access to decent schools. The other part of it is that where there is competition for things--jobs, for example--whites (and males, and able-bodied people, and straight people) are more likely to be the ones who win the competition. I suspect that part of why people defend their race (and gender, and so on) privilege is that they're keenly aware of the competitive aspects, and don't care enough that their fellow humans are being mistreated in ways that don't even benefit the privileged class.
[1] I'm American, specifically a New Yorker.
In![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ozarque's journal, journeyrose asked Suzette to address labels, saying she had just lost a friend over language:
I'm not Suzette, nor am I a linguist, but it seems to me that you aren't denying the validity of the labels. If "disabled" didn't mean something to you, would you mind being sent to a "disability doctor"?
Saying that you aren't disabled--and that your friend is--says that you and she are essentially different in this regard. Given the amount of contempt for disabled people that exists and that your friend has almost certainly dealt with, I'm not surprised she read contempt into your making that distinction. An anti-label statement might be "I don't use the term 'disabled' because there is no standard set of human abilities." Three possible statements: I'm not fat; There's nothing wrong with being fat; "Fat" is a meaningless term. The first attempts to separate the speaker from a (generally devalued) category; the second says that the label shouldn't be devaluing; the third denies the label.
If you want to keep that friendship, a letter of apology and explanation might work. First, acknowledge that you hurt her feelings, and then explain that you're still stressed by the new situation, and that you didn't mean it that way, and you're sorry to have expressed yourself poorly. Then you can explain what you actually meant.
In response to a poll incatamorphism's journal, shannon_a expressed interest in "statistics on what percentage of people have an abortion, and then decide they shouldn't have." I wrote:
It would be difficult to collect those statistics without biasing the results. To start with, how certain does the woman need to be that she made the wrong decision?
I'd also be interested in statistics on what percentage of people carry pregnancies to term and then decide they shouldn't have. And those would be even harder to collect--very few people are going to admit that, because it's not something you'd want a child to hear, even if you've concluded that you shouldn't have had that child.
And what percentage of women who give birth after an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, and give the child for adoption, decide they should have raised the child themselves? Conversely, what percentage of women who decide to raise the child themselves decide they should have chosen adoption?
Now, compare that to the percentages who say they made the wrong choice in other cases that can change a person's life--whether to go to college, what job to take, who/whether to marry, whether to stay married, whether to move to another city or country for job or relationship.... and then you might have something meaningful.
oursin, who is a professional archivist, posted about the value of criticism, and the difficulty of coming to a text without preconceptions. In reply to my comment, she mentioned historians who are surprised by gaps and biases in archives of primary sources, and I responded by getting somewhat anecdotal and reminiscent:
Of course not everything is there. I was surprised at least twice at what was available to me just for the asking: junior year I was doing a paper on Henry George's campaign for mayor of New York City, and on Spring break I walked into the New York public library, went to the card catalog, handed in a call slip, and was handed printed copies of George's campaign speeches: in purple ink, with the page numbers added by hand in pencil. Senior year, when I was doing my undergrad thesis on the anti-Masonic movement (not nearly as well as I could have, because I had inadequate supervision and didn't realize in time that this was a problem), the Beinecke Rare Books Library turned up, among other things, an almost-complete set of yearly anti-Masonic almanacs for the period in question (a fascinating combination of propaganda and the usual almanac stuff of phases of the moon and advice on planting) and -- memory is odd, this is all I can come up with at the moment -- a relevant document printed on newsprint, broadsheet size. I don't remember whether it was actually a newspaper.
I had the good fortune to be using two of the four or five best libraries in North America. And part of what makes them good is that they've had the time and the space to collect such archives: you don't get the anti-Masonic almanac for 1829 by deciding in 1975 that you want it, you get it by buying it in 1829 and keeping it.
And that, in turn, takes skill, luck, and resources. Somewhere along the line, a librarian at Yale decided to keep those almanacs for that year, because someone might find them useful later.
This was in response to a friends-locked post on the various things different people want, or expect, in friendships, and may also have been influenced by recent email exchanges with Q:
Noodling in response:
My non-negotiables are mostly either meta-rules, things I'd consider basic decent behavior, or both. Two that come to mind right now are honest communication--which doesn't mean perfect self-knowledge, or revealing every detail of one's life and hopes, but trying not to mislead, even when it may mean saying "I can't tell you that" or "I don't know"--and one implied by your third paragraph: don't expect me to read your mind and know what you want where it's idiosyncratic.
Also, just because two people are both decent doesn't mean they'll be friends: they have not have time, or may not have enough in common, or one may rub the other the wrong way for reasons not entirely under their control, like the instructor at my college whose voice grated on me enough that I decided not to take that class. Politeness may, in some contexts, be an obligation. Friendship is not. None of us are public utilities, nor inexhaustible wells.
Someone on
postqueer asked what was meant by white privilege:Another piece of it is that, being (perceived as) white means that institutions and decision-makers are more likely to think of me as "one of us". Being "one of us" makes a person seem safe and trustworthy, which in turn can translate into everything from getting a better job (interviews being somewhat subjective) to not being hassled by the police.
I tend to think of white privilege (and, similarly, male privilege) as basically two things. One is that, in this society at least [1], certain things that everyone ought get are only by default given to white people: that ranges from not being assumed to be a criminal suspect to access to decent schools. The other part of it is that where there is competition for things--jobs, for example--whites (and males, and able-bodied people, and straight people) are more likely to be the ones who win the competition. I suspect that part of why people defend their race (and gender, and so on) privilege is that they're keenly aware of the competitive aspects, and don't care enough that their fellow humans are being mistreated in ways that don't even benefit the privileged class.
[1] I'm American, specifically a New Yorker.
In
ozarque's journal, journeyrose asked Suzette to address labels, saying she had just lost a friend over language:I'm not Suzette, nor am I a linguist, but it seems to me that you aren't denying the validity of the labels. If "disabled" didn't mean something to you, would you mind being sent to a "disability doctor"?
Saying that you aren't disabled--and that your friend is--says that you and she are essentially different in this regard. Given the amount of contempt for disabled people that exists and that your friend has almost certainly dealt with, I'm not surprised she read contempt into your making that distinction. An anti-label statement might be "I don't use the term 'disabled' because there is no standard set of human abilities." Three possible statements: I'm not fat; There's nothing wrong with being fat; "Fat" is a meaningless term. The first attempts to separate the speaker from a (generally devalued) category; the second says that the label shouldn't be devaluing; the third denies the label.
If you want to keep that friendship, a letter of apology and explanation might work. First, acknowledge that you hurt her feelings, and then explain that you're still stressed by the new situation, and that you didn't mean it that way, and you're sorry to have expressed yourself poorly. Then you can explain what you actually meant.
In response to a poll in
catamorphism's journal, shannon_a expressed interest in "statistics on what percentage of people have an abortion, and then decide they shouldn't have." I wrote:It would be difficult to collect those statistics without biasing the results. To start with, how certain does the woman need to be that she made the wrong decision?
I'd also be interested in statistics on what percentage of people carry pregnancies to term and then decide they shouldn't have. And those would be even harder to collect--very few people are going to admit that, because it's not something you'd want a child to hear, even if you've concluded that you shouldn't have had that child.
And what percentage of women who give birth after an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, and give the child for adoption, decide they should have raised the child themselves? Conversely, what percentage of women who decide to raise the child themselves decide they should have chosen adoption?
Now, compare that to the percentages who say they made the wrong choice in other cases that can change a person's life--whether to go to college, what job to take, who/whether to marry, whether to stay married, whether to move to another city or country for job or relationship.... and then you might have something meaningful.
oursin, who is a professional archivist, posted about the value of criticism, and the difficulty of coming to a text without preconceptions. In reply to my comment, she mentioned historians who are surprised by gaps and biases in archives of primary sources, and I responded by getting somewhat anecdotal and reminiscent:Of course not everything is there. I was surprised at least twice at what was available to me just for the asking: junior year I was doing a paper on Henry George's campaign for mayor of New York City, and on Spring break I walked into the New York public library, went to the card catalog, handed in a call slip, and was handed printed copies of George's campaign speeches: in purple ink, with the page numbers added by hand in pencil. Senior year, when I was doing my undergrad thesis on the anti-Masonic movement (not nearly as well as I could have, because I had inadequate supervision and didn't realize in time that this was a problem), the Beinecke Rare Books Library turned up, among other things, an almost-complete set of yearly anti-Masonic almanacs for the period in question (a fascinating combination of propaganda and the usual almanac stuff of phases of the moon and advice on planting) and -- memory is odd, this is all I can come up with at the moment -- a relevant document printed on newsprint, broadsheet size. I don't remember whether it was actually a newspaper.
I had the good fortune to be using two of the four or five best libraries in North America. And part of what makes them good is that they've had the time and the space to collect such archives: you don't get the anti-Masonic almanac for 1829 by deciding in 1975 that you want it, you get it by buying it in 1829 and keeping it.
And that, in turn, takes skill, luck, and resources. Somewhere along the line, a librarian at Yale decided to keep those almanacs for that year, because someone might find them useful later.