![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This post is for blogging against disablism day. I'm pretty new to thinking about disability in any serious way so this may all be bunk.
I was plotting out a post in my head the other day and the phrase "I am rather tone deaf to the nuances of american cultures" popped into my head. "Hmm" I thought "Is that ablist language? Do tone deaf people really count as disabled? Would they care? Where do you draw the line?"
And I had a bit of an epiphany. To a certain extent it doesn't matter: while one of the major reasons for avoiding ablist language is to avoid contributing to social bias and discrimination against those disabled people who suffer them, the very idea of using a real illness as a metaphor for a negative trait is indicative of deep problems with the way our society views illness.
Unfortunately, I am low on spoons, so I can't quite articulate my point, but I'll take a punt and try to flesh it out another day.
I think a good example which illustrates my point is "colourblind racism". Briefly: This is when someone "doesn't see" the race of the people they interact with, and so ends up supporting the status quo ie racism and not making allowances for the different experiences people have because of their race.
The reason this term is unfair to colourblind people is that they don't go around saying "I don't see colour! We should all act like colour doesn't exist! You people insisting that red and green traffic-lights mean different things are the real problem!". In my experience they aware of and acknowledge that their vision is flawed, and learn to work around it.
Ablist language works on the assumption that people who have lack certain abilities (whether this makes them disabled or not) are inherently less worthy, and incapable of being as good as anyone else at things involving that ability.
Aaaand that's about the end of my spoons. If you're interested in the topic, have a look at Feminists are fine with being bigots if it’s just ableism which has links which lead to more links... and then I ran out of link clicking spoons :)
I was plotting out a post in my head the other day and the phrase "I am rather tone deaf to the nuances of american cultures" popped into my head. "Hmm" I thought "Is that ablist language? Do tone deaf people really count as disabled? Would they care? Where do you draw the line?"
And I had a bit of an epiphany. To a certain extent it doesn't matter: while one of the major reasons for avoiding ablist language is to avoid contributing to social bias and discrimination against those disabled people who suffer them, the very idea of using a real illness as a metaphor for a negative trait is indicative of deep problems with the way our society views illness.
Unfortunately, I am low on spoons, so I can't quite articulate my point, but I'll take a punt and try to flesh it out another day.
I think a good example which illustrates my point is "colourblind racism". Briefly: This is when someone "doesn't see" the race of the people they interact with, and so ends up supporting the status quo ie racism and not making allowances for the different experiences people have because of their race.
The reason this term is unfair to colourblind people is that they don't go around saying "I don't see colour! We should all act like colour doesn't exist! You people insisting that red and green traffic-lights mean different things are the real problem!". In my experience they aware of and acknowledge that their vision is flawed, and learn to work around it.
Ablist language works on the assumption that people who have lack certain abilities (whether this makes them disabled or not) are inherently less worthy, and incapable of being as good as anyone else at things involving that ability.
Aaaand that's about the end of my spoons. If you're interested in the topic, have a look at Feminists are fine with being bigots if it’s just ableism which has links which lead to more links... and then I ran out of link clicking spoons :)
Tags:
Re: Joint reply to make the conversation easier to keep track of
Secondly, I'm not arguing that this is parallel to "crazy", I'm just arguing that it might be parallel to crazy, or at least give you an idea why I'm still on the fence. Let's say I identify with "bitch" at least here as aquaeri: unashamedly opinionated woman who does sometimes hurt other people's feelings with her opinions. I think the number of times I see "bitch" used to mean something that looks awfully like that to me, entirely justifies that idea. But I don't think asking other people not to use the word "bitch" is remotely useful. Not in isolation. It has to be in the context of an awareness of social expectations about women as nurturing, supportive, and not so much not entitled to have strong opinions, as not needing to have strong opinions because surely a man can take care of that for her? And if a man isn't expressing those strong opinions, they're probably not important?
I think I either have to accept the way "bitch" is used by our culture, with an awareness that every time I am opinionated and female, there will necessarily be a lot of negative reactions, because of the way things are. It's not the way things have to be, but I can't see that I have any chance of contributing to changing that, without a very clear awareness of exactly how things are right now. Otherwise we get PrivilegeFails like 'colourblindness'.
Re: Joint reply to make the conversation easier to keep track of
You're right that stopping using a word without thinking about why you should stop using it is problematic. Better to think about it carefully and decide when it is and isn't appropriate.
But I wasn't trying to answer the question "Should everyone stop using the word 'crazy'?" so much as "Is the word hurtful to mentally ill people?", and the answer to that is "In a lot of cases, yes". Which for me, personally, is enough to make me stop using it even if I don't understand why it's hurtful.
Gaining that understanding is also important, because the problems with the word "crazy" are rooted in a lot of misconceptions about mental illness that won't go away just by changing the way we speak.
less "crazy"
I think we agree in principle. The way I want to go about it though is to think about social conceptions of mental illness and challenge them in my own thinking and I suspect/hope the frequency with which I call something "crazy" will naturally drop as a result.
(I also wanted to mention that I am in fact diagnosed with mental illness, but not one where "crazy" is usually applied. And talking about my own experience would be hijacking this so I hope (once the marking is done) to write something about it in my own space.)
Re: Joint reply to make the conversation easier to keep track of
(I also wanted to mention that I am in fact diagnosed with mental illness, but not one where "crazy" is usually applied. And talking about my own experience would be hijacking this so I hope (once the marking is done) to write something about it in my own space.)
*nods* I hope I wasn't erasing your experience by assuming you weren't, but asking felt like it would create a weird dynamic. I think these sorts of things are particularly nuanced with disability, which make's it tricky working out where one stands. While a lot of the same things apply, the experience of having cfs is very different to being blind is very different to being mentally ill and so on, and within that you have different diagnoses and level of severity etc. I mean I don't directly experience ablist language myself afaict (I guess I limp sometimes, but not enough that I take "lame" personally)