![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
So Screwy was informally counselling a lot of the other patients, in effect. And it it turned out this guy, a lot of his problem was that he felt he couldn't be "a cripple" because cripples are... all these negative stereotypes. And Screwy was trying to tell him, look, you're tetraplegic as a result of spinal injury, in any reasonable definition you're disabled. The same applies to me (Screwy), and I'm not any of those negative stereotypes you're using, so why should you be?
I don't know what happened in the end, if Screwy managed to get through to this guy at all (he was also trying to do consciousness-raising about homophobia and racism and all kinds of other stuff). But anyway, I'm reminded of this by the situation you link to. Not to anything like the same extent; I'm not even slightly suggesting
I like the way you set out the issues here and your suggestion of how potential misunderstanding could arise and approaches to remedy the situation.
From:
no subject
When people ask me why I don't like being called "disabled," I say that it's for the same reason other people wouldn't like being called "cancerous." I have a disability; I am not a disability. Sometimes, wording can be so important.
I also believe — and again, this is kinda random — that there are a lot of people with disabilities who refuse to acknowledge them because of fear of being "disabled." If we got away from that word, I think people would deal with things in a much different way.
From:
no subject
From:
labels
I've known people who feel this way about a particular label-boundary, who are scrambling like mad to stay on the "safe" side of the boundary. It makes them defensive. I don't think it's label-stigma, particularly, that's responsible for the defensiveness or the scrambling. Approaching the edges of disability is pretty scary no matter what you call it, even when people are being courteous about it. As you know. It's not clear to me if that's what Journeyrose is doing.
I will now stomp my feet in general frustration and point out that physiatrists are NOT disability doctors! They are muscle specialists. Different people are disabled by different problems, which are appropriately treated by different doctors (including general practicioners, orthopedists, neurologists, and opthamologists. I suspect Journeyrose has seen more than one doctor who also treated disabled people, all unsuspecting.) Physiatry is supposed to be good for sports medicine and rehabilitation of injuries, as well as treating chronic pain.
From:
Re: labels
*ponders a whole pile of thoughts sparked by that sentence*
Hm. My mental map is way different from the one where that sentence might live. I can think of "disabled" and "non-disabled" (or "temporarily able-bodied"), but "functional" doesn't match either of them exactly; it overlaps with areas of both. I know lots of non-disabled folks who do not seem very functional in certain areas; one's reason for being non-functional is not always (and possibly not usually, or perhaps not very often at all) disability-related.
(Then again, I tend to say things like, "I have a messed-up hip, arthritis, and my hearing is lousy, so I lip-read a lot. Mr. X, on the other hand, is just plain fucked-up.")
From: (Anonymous)
Abortion choices
I discovered a few years ago that I was born 6 months after my parents wedding, not 18 months as I always had been told. I found out because a major anniverary came, and they said, oh we'll celebrate it next year. Which explains a lot about my mother's neglect, and my father's anger. But abortion wasn't legal back then. Mostly, I'm glad I was born, but I don't know if my mother feels that way. I'm not going to ask.
From:
Re: Abortion choices
From:
Re: Abortion choices
From:
Re: Misc. comments 22
now and again i like to bring up female privilege, but not today. :)
like
From:
Re: Misc. comments 22
From:
Re: Misc. comments 22
From:
no subject
I talked to C. Everett Koop back in 1990 or 1991, after he'd moved on from his Surgeon General post. He shared with me that Reagan had asked him to study "post-abortion syndrome," a condition which the religious right believed plagued women who had abortions: regret over their decision, depression, guilt, and so forth.
He found no evidence that such a condition existed. Instead, the common reactions to abortion his research found were relief, increased sense of control, sadness (but not sadness-with-guilt or sadness-with-regret, just sadness), improved self-image, and overall positive outlook.
His research was never published, needless to say, given who was funding it.
From:
no subject