Inarticulate
I just… I have no words. I’ve watched the Katie Jones stuff go ’round and ’round (this corner of) the blogosphere, and every time I watch a conversation degenerate into Disableism 101 it makes me tired. Bone-deep angry tired.
I’m not going to go too deeply into the case, as it’s already been covered by people more in the know (and less out-of-it, bleh) than I am. Little girl with DNR order taped to her wheelchair, stupid articles asking everyone but her about it, and random pronouncements of ableist rhetoric from all corners. You know, the usual.
Sure, there are plenty of innocuous interpretations for each of the troubling things (”maybe they sat down and had a long family talk about what she wants to do if her life is threatened, and she was given all the information about what her choices would entail before this happened, and it’s just clumsy reporting” “maybe after a bad hospitalization, she found herself terrified of noises that remind her of that setting and the family has silenced their ringers, muted their computers, and done away with everything that triggers her phobia… including some medical equipment that they’re happy to do the work to replace manually” “maybe the CP fairy will come and cure her overnight so we won’t have to talk about this any more…”). In this case, as with most others, I’m going to stand by my argumentative rule of thumb:
- If the mental gymnastics you have to go through to reason away the biased overtones in a given situation are complex enough to make hyperflexible contortionists wince, you should probably stop trying.
(Alternately: If you have to think that hard to make something sound good, it probably isn’t.)
It’s no Glosario entry, but still. Watching people hop up and down like monkeys on speed trying to explain away bias makes my head hurt.
(And before anyone starts going on about whether this specific fact or that specific phenomenon is rilly rilly rilly actually not a bad thing, let’s clarify: that is so not the point. That is precisely not the point. It is whatever the opposite of a point is. If you want to know what the point is, keep reading.)
… which brings me to my point. (See, you didn’t need to read far.) Why are we still doing this?
Let’s watch a conversation disintigrate:
- [Post]: Hey, this seems pretty fucked up. [A little girl gets sent to school with a DNR order taped to her wheelchair/they're hanging fucking nooses in some places/a (black) woman was kidnapped, raped, and tortured by some (white) people she kinda knew/some idiot judge said a 10 year old girl "might have consented" to getting gang-raped by adults/blah blah moderately complex situation with clear scary implications]
1: That’s pretty sick.
2: I don’t get it. Why are [DNRs/nooses/a little friendly rape and torture/bunnies] so scary? You’re overreacting.
3: [Long, patient, 101 explanation of what's going on.]
4: Have you ever considered [convoluted explanation of phenomena in which nothing at all even a little bad is going on]?
5: [detailed, slightly irate point about how unlikely/unsupported by available evidence/completly batshit that suggestion is]
6: I’ve never read anything about [disableism/anti-racism/feminism/whatever it is you're talking about], but let me tell you all about how you’re completely wrong.
7: [snippy response to THE STUPID]
8, 9, 10: [Reiterations of long, patient, 101 explanation (with links!) on the off-chance that THE STUPID is curable]
11 - 27: [Derailment over snippy response, while THE STUPID remains unchecked]
28: You know, I knew [someone who might share some identity markers with someone relevant to the conversation] and they didn’t think it was [evil/boring/offensive/difficult to deal with].
29: [Short, terse 101 explanation about why that's not a good argument.]
30: Well, the victim [can't think for themselves/consented to something related/did something bad once in the past/"consented"/isn't worth getting worked up over]. Let’s talk about all the reasons they should [be grateful for what they've got/shut up/be punished instead].
31 - 200: [Derailment into 101 concepts, acrimony, and completely useless yelling.]
… see how that works?
sly civilian said,
December 31, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
and this…is the machine that goes mmmmmping!
i wonder if it’s really that simple…that it’s nearly impossible for people to see the mind boggling callousness of it all because they too are so dependent on the system, and have no way of relating to it other than “do what the doc says.”
anyhow, yes, yes and yes to what you’re saying. no matter the reason, the commitment to willful ignorance is taxing at best.
sly civilian said,
December 31, 2007 @ 4:37 pm
gack. lost the link on that one…
http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/mol/m-03-i.htm
It’s the monty python skit about birth.
Sara no H. said,
December 31, 2007 @ 10:20 pm
I keep trying to slog through all those comments to get to the intelligent ones and it’s so … I don’t think I’ve had quite so many headdesk moments in this past week as I have all month, to say the least. Unless, well, you want to count kactus’ post at feministe about teh happy pills, which was its own kind of wtf. (But that’s pretty much been made up for with Ilyka’s post on not giving lectures on particle physics.)
And it’s just superannoying-er because it’s coming from people who’d be all kinds of up in arms if this were, say, degenerating into feminism 101 or whatever. I mean, I know places like Alas aren’t specifically geared toward dis/ability issues, but you’d think that people would know enough to educate themselves a bit instead of derailing the conversation by making pwd and their allies do it. Ugh.
Lisa Harney said,
January 1, 2008 @ 1:52 am
I think it actually is a pretty mundane wite-magik attak.
Maybe it is unfair, as Mandolin suggests, to expect people to treat other people as human beings regardless of anything because they haven’t educated themselves on that particular topic yet. Maybe it’s unfair to expect people when they collide with something they don’t understand to try to learn about it rather than parade their ignorant assumptions around. Maybe it is completely unfair to expect anything more than reflexive bigotry from people in the course of a normal day, but if that’s so then I’ll just have to live with being unfair.
matttbastard said,
January 1, 2008 @ 2:09 pm
Yup. Privilege run wild. Again.
Still recovering from last night (Happy NY, btw), and am feeling rather inarticulate so I’ll just say “ditto” to everything (including and especially the *headdesk*).
After a certain point, ignorance is a deliberate choice (eg *thunk*).
Mandolin said,
January 2, 2008 @ 9:44 am
I specifically tried not to use the word “unfair.” If I did use it, I apologize.
In any case, I think some of the suggestions that I’d be up in arms if this was about feminism and not disability rights are inaccurate. I do a lot of feminism 101 work — basically whenever I step outside of feminist spheres to discuss feminist issues. Alas is not a disability rights sphere; it will probably need disability rights 101 work until such time as the population is more educated, which should happen on its own as the posts are introduced.
Rachel S. for instance has talked about using Alas as a platform to talk to people who are woefully uninformed about antiracism; over time, the liberal population at Alas has become more informed about race issues — although of course not ideally so — and so the unmonitored discussions can acheive a higher level of discourse.
My point was intended to be both limited and practical — that 101 is probably necessary in the setting of Alas. It was not intended to suggest that it’s morally *right* that such 101 education is needed; in fact, I explicitly stated in the Alas thread that it is not morally right.
Sara no H. said,
January 2, 2008 @ 11:58 am
@mandolin: The biggest thing that bothers me about that, though, is that Alas is anti-oppression enough that most of its commenters should know how to educate themselves (i.e. not asking the oppressed to do it for them). It’s not the fact that they need disability 101 at all that bugs me, it’s the fact that they feel it’s perfectly all right to derail an entire thread to do it when they would tell anyone trying to do the same thing with feminism 101 to go someplace else, get educated, and come back to discuss. It’s that they’re not getting that there are other places where their kinds of questions are more appropriate and germane. I mean, there might not be an entire blog dedicated to Dis/ability 101 the way there is a Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog, but that doesn’t mean that people who are already versed in the language of privilege and oppression should get some kind of free pass to totally sidetrack a more “advanced” (read: having moved beyond the 101 stuff) conversation.