Native identity is something that many non-Natives really struggle to understand. What has made anti-Native sentiment so difficult for people to talk about and confront?
Several thoughts come to mind. First, people are surprised we’re still here. They’ve bought into the idea that we no longer exist, so to suddenly find a Native person in their midst is a shock to them. If/when they get past that shock, they often go to their next idea—that we have to look a certain way. If we don’t, then we cannot possibly be Native. The expectation of what we should look like reflects predominant stereotypes.
Moving past that—trying to get them to understand that we’re sovereign nations and our identity is primarily about citizenship or membership in a specific nation—is beyond what some can handle in one sitting. All of this speaks to the power of stereotyping, bias, and misinformation in textbooks, children’s books, television, movies, etc. On top of that, when they finally are ready to believe we’re still here, so many move to the “Oh, you’re so wonderful,” which is icky because that sentiment is based on even more stereotypes.
When you try to gently move them out of that space and [ask them to] just accept us for who we are…well, that doesn’t go well. And those who believe you from the start, but then move to “I’m part Native” and go on and on about what they know…that’s rough, too. So many don’t know what nation. What they know is similar to what the senator from Massachusetts knew: a family story with not much factual information to support it, and no interactions with a Native community either.
You’re
almost there. You can feel the thrill of victory. It vibrates in the
keys under your frantically tapping fingertips.
You’re
sure, you’re sure, you’re
about to convince another blogger that doorknobs
exist!
Tumblr
user the-knob-is-a-lie has
argued hard, across dozens of reblogs, to prove their thesis that
doorknobs are nothing but a sinister myth. But they’ve slipped.
There’s a flaw in their logic. A contradiction. And you’re about
present that flaw to them and prove yourself the victor of this
ideological war, once and for all.
“If,
as you say, twisty things don’t exist at all,” you write,
“then how
did you unscrew your water bottle just now?Huh?
HUH?????”
You
post the reply and take a moment to bask in your genius.
The
trap is sprung. The day is yours. The only thing to be done is sit
back and wait for your opponent to come crawling over and kiss your
feet, to thank you solemnly for making them see reason.
The
response is not what you expected. There is no kissing your feet. No
groveling.
The
victory strikes oddly hollow. You’ve proven something you already
know, that the-knob-is-a-lie is
wrong. You’ve proven it to yourself, and you’ve proven it to the
other people who already know it. You’ve won, and you’ve won
precisely nothing.
Want
this situation to go differently? Want to communicate rather than
alienate? Let’s look at your question again:
“If,
as you say, twisty things don’t exist at all, then how
did you unscrew your water bottle just now?”
The
phrasing implies that you expect your question to come as a shock.
That… might come across as condescending. Consider,
instead, assuming that the question you
are asking is a question the other person has thought of,
and working forward from there.
Firstly,
take a moment to set aside your incredulity and think about possible
answers to your question. How did they
unscrew their water bottle without twisty things? Do they define the
word “unscrew” differently from you? Or “twisty”?
Were they exaggerating a bit when they said twisty things don’t
exist? And will you come across as pedantic when you use that
exaggeration against them?
Assume
there are reasons why a good, earnest, intelligent human would say
things that sound crazy to you. What might those reasons be? If you’re trying too hard to be in the right, it’s harder to make your point. It’s harder to understand where the other person is coming from so you can communicate your points in a way they will understand.
Okay,
now you’re ready to start your question over. Own your subjective
perception of the conversation, and inquire openly about theirs:
“You
said earlier that twisty things don’t exist. My
understanding of
the screw-top lids on water bottles is that they are a kind of
twisty thing. Do
you see them
differently? Or did
you mean ‘twisty
thing’ more specifically than I
interpreted it
when I read your earlier post?”
Now
the conversation can move forward, because you’re talking like you
care what the other person has to say. Like you know that there are
limitations to your own understanding.Your
goal now is not to be right, but to understand where the other person
is coming from so you can communicate your points in a way that they
will understand.
You’ve
set a tone of respect. That doesn’t guarantee you anything, but it
does make it much easier for the-knob-is-a-lie to
admit that they might be wrong, or might have communicated badly.
You’ve
created room for them to say, “Well now that you mention it,
I’m not sure how I reconcile those things. Maybe you’re right.
I’ll think about it,” or, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t really
mean that there are no twisty things at all. I was talking about a
certain kind of twisty thing.”
Remember,
if you’re arguing, then someone else is involved. Even if your
argument seems rock-solid to you, if that person doesn’t see it then
you haven’t proven anything to them. Maybe you just wanted to prove
to yourself how right you are, but if you want them to understand and
believe your point of view, trying to spring traps for them is not an effective strategy. Demonstrating an attempt to understand where
they’re coming from works a lot better.
Today’s upper middle class maintains the fiction of a meritocratic society, just as the Victorians did. This story allows them to shore up their economic position behind the backs of workers, who are taught that their health problems and dismal career prospects represent individual faults, not systemic dysfunction.
Of course, exercising, eating organic food, and pushing children to use their spare time usefully are not inherently bad things. However, they become markers of bourgeois values when they are marshaled to assert one class’s moral superiority over another and to justify social inequality. It was just as obnoxious in the nineteenth century as it is today.
We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone. Imagine if all of the energy used to get mediocre, upper-class children into prestigious colleges was redirected into making higher education more accessible and affordable across the board. Imagine if access to healthy food for all was prioritized over attaining status through buying the most virtuous products. Imagine, in short, what our world would look like if socialist values — not Victorian ones — dominated.
This is SUCH a good read, you guys.
No shit, I was in a Political Philosophy class my last year of college, and we were discussing this exact thing. My professor (who was a piece of work in and of herself, tbh) says something to the effect of, “This class divide is held up by the cultural idea that rich people are inherently more moral than poor people”
And this fucking polo-wearing shit sitting next to me mutters under his breath, “But they are, though” and keeps on taking his fucking notes. Like what the fuck???
But yeah. Apparently this is a real thing that people think.
Obviously the world has changed dramatically since you were shooting this film. I can’t imagine you could anticipate the way those themes would resonate …
I did. And the reason why is that I’m Mexican. I’ve been going through immigration all my life, and I’ve been stopped for traffic violations by cops and they get much more curious about me than the regular guy. The moment they hear my accent, things get a little deeper.
I know it sounds kind of glib, but honestly, what we are living I saw brewing through the Obama era and the Clinton era. It was there. The fact that we got diagnosed with a tumor doesn’t mean the cancer started now.
Hopefully one of the things the movie shows is that from 1962 to now, we’ve taken baby steps — and a lot of them not everyone takes. The thing that is inherent in social control is fear. The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else — whether they’re gay, Mexican, Jewish, black — and saying, “They are different than you. They’re the reason you’re in the shape you’re in. You’re not responsible.” And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.
I think the movie says that there are so many more reasons to love than to hate. I know you sound a lot smarter when you’re skeptical and a cynic, but I don’t care.
But you’re not on a mission to change the way people see genre?
No, I can’t. I know that what I saw when I was a kid had redemptive powers. Some people find Jesus. I found Frankenstein. And the reason I’m alive and articulate and semi-sane is monsters. It’s not an affectation. It’s completely spiritually real to me. And I’m not going to change.
@aprilwitching uhhh have you seen this interview because dang
“some people find jesus. i found frankenstein.”
i… i have never had my me put into words so well. “and the reason i’m alive and articulate and semi-sane is monsters.” fuck. fuck fuck fuck. it me. it’s my heart and my soul and my me.
The idea of otherness being seen as the enemy.
i can’t brain rn but i know what he’s talking about.
yessssssss. i have so many feels about that + “i found frankenstein” but no words. i just. ::inarticulate yearning noise:: it’s the inside of me. i wish i had words.
Reblogging because I’m so happy people are reading this article. Its so present, and relevant and on point. Guillermo inexplicably ‘get’s me’ in a way I’ve never been able to articulate, and he’s talking about himself.
“The records being broken year after year — whether for drought, storm surges, wildfires or just heat — are happening because the planet is markedly warmer than it has been since record-keeping began. Covering events like Harvey while ignoring those facts, failing to provide a platform to climate scientists who can make them plain, all while never mentioning Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, fails in the most basic duty of journalism: to provide important facts and relevant context. It leaves the public with the false impression that these are disasters without root causes, which also means that nothing could have been done to prevent them (and that nothing can be done now to prevent them from getting much worse in the future).”
Will Bradshaw is a writer and English language teacher living in the North of England. He regularly writes on political matters and will begin a Philosophy MA this autumn. You can follow him on Twitter at @_WBradshaw, and see his personal work at Angry Meditations on WordPress.
There are a myriad of accounts about Alan Turing’s life. You can read biographies, watch films, and browse entire websites dedicated to the man dubbed ‘the father of artificial intelligence’. But many of these accounts fail on a number of fronts. Some downplay his sexuality, others ignore it outright, and only a handful recognize that Alan Turing’s achievements are as much down to his early romantic experiences as they are to his intellectual prowess. (Read Full Article Here)
Is not about autism directly, but is about being a person described as female and getting their symptoms ignored by doctors because of it. I has mentioned before about getting similar treatment when I was a kidlet. If you gots a uterus (or had one at any time in your life) doctors don’t take you seriously.
I’ve been saying for some years now that we’re teaching science terribly wrong in schools, and quite possibly the wrongest thing we’re doing is making no distinction between “facts about the universe that we have observed” and “categories and models that we have constructed in order to organize the facts we have observed”.
Essentially, kids are being taught that “cats are mammals” is the same kind of scientific fact as “cats give birth to live young,” and it isn’t. At all.
Which is why we get discussions like the one linked above. Or like the ones about Pluto being declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet, where people assert that the change in nomenclature is because “we understand better now what a planet is” and not because we’ve chosen to narrow the definition to (disputably) better organize our constructed categories of Things In Space. Or, for that matter, like the ones that call out “scientific error” in the Bible by citing references to calling a bat a “bird,” or calling a whale a “fish,” as though the classification system we use today is objective scientific fact instead of constructed model.
Because nobody is teaching kids how to tell the difference, or even that there is a difference.
“Science is traditionally taught by blowing the minds of students who struggle to understand the workings of pepper grinders, and leaving them to pick up the pieces for themselves. The students then reassemble the fragments of their minds incorrectly, retaining the sexy and surprising bit, and filling in the rest of the gaps with porridge before going out into the world and smugly misunderstanding everything they see in it. Naturally, what they observe in the world does not match the porridge in their heads. Sometimes the students reassess their minds and realize that the world is infinitely more complicated than porridge and that most of their education was a series of easy lies, in which case they are usually doomed to be writers or scientists. Conversely, if they insist that the world actually matches the composition of their porridge, such that the observable world is wrong, then they will go on to be successful and influential.”
– me in 2014 (”The Bowl, The Ram And The Folded Map: Navigating The Complicated World”)
Please click that link@elodieunderglass posted you will not regret it. I mean, you might, you might end up all emotional about Knowledge, that’s never easy to handle, but I posit that it’s worth it.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 