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Relating to Deaf culture as a queer man

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Posted by maxporter on January 24, 2012 – 10:14 PM
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Remember that post about an identity schism that I just put up? Well, more identity stuff happened today. I am just going to quickly type up this blog post to get it off of my mind, then head out to the barcade and shoot baddies.

Today I gave a presentation to a bunch of Hearing students in an ASL class with an older Deaf instructor. It went really well. After the presentation, the instructor and I chatted for a bit in the lunch room.

She said that cochlear implants are against God’s will – I have a cochlear implant and she knew that. It was quite upsetting because, as a queer man, I have had “it’s against God’s will” used against me. Like, people have sat in front of me with the Bible open on their laps while they quote Bible verses at me for hours (and several tissue boxes, all of which they ignored) to explain exactly why I am such a horrible person for exactly these reasons as stated in God’s book. It’s against God’s will to like people of the same sex, it’s against God’s will to have a gender expression contrary to what God “intended,” all that crap. I don’t want to have it used against me from the Deaf community, too.

I also don’t think that “it’s against God’s will” is the most logical and airtight argument in the world. I’m such an atheist that the notion of creating an ethical code based upon this imaginary person’s desires is just so foreign to me.

Another thing that bothers me about it is that religious notions in Deaf individuals just seems so foreign to me. Religion is something that Hearing people forced upon us. They didn’t – and often, still don’t – care about us until we said, “Okay, we will listen to your teachings of Jesus Christ just so that you can give us food/money/whatever.” So to hear a Deaf person, who probably would not have been religious if Hearing people had not forced it upon her ancestors hundreds of years ago, talk as if God was the only thing in her entire life that mattered – it was upsetting.

Also, this lady said that her body told her that she is deaf, so she obeyed her body and socializes primarily with the Deaf community. Again, this triggered me on the queer aspect. In order to have a fulfilling life, I have had to change my body to be more congruent with my identity. And, upon changing my body, I have been happier because now my body fits my identity. I tried to do it the other way around – changing my identity to match my body – but I was just so unhappy that I had to go ahead and change my body. So, to have this lady sit here and tell me that she socializes with the Deaf community because she has a deaf body – I had to take a headspace break before I could work again.

It also really highlighted some of the downfalls to having a complex identity. For the most part, I like having a complex identity. You can’t make any assumptions about me. That’s okay, because I don’t make any assumptions about you either – to the best of my ability. But it made me remember that nearly everyone else sees identity as a simpler thing. Either you are a man or you are a woman. Either you are deaf or you are hearing. That kind of thing.

I’m very definite in some categories, – I’m definitely that blue-eyed and blond whitey who could never be mistaken for any other race, for example – but I blur the lines on the categories in the minorities that I belong to. Do I act Deaf or Hearing? Neither/both. Do I act gay or straight? Neither/both. That kind of complexity may upset people who are used to a more binary mode of relating to others.

I mean… this lady was saying that I should have an interpreter at work and just sign all the time. Because I guess that being neither fully Deaf nor fully Hearing is too complicated. Which was rude – it’s my life, so let me live it. I tried to convey to this lady that I do share her mixed feelings about cochlear implants – it’s not right for everybody, and it shouldn’t be the first solution that parents go to – but I definitely did not share the fact that I personally appreciate my cochlear implant as a tool that enables me to function in the Hearing world.

Like, I don’t blame her for telling me to not trust Hearing people. She told me that her own brother would make fun of how she spoke. I can definitely see why she would be like, “Fuck the Hearing world!” after that. But the world is not the same as it was in her day. My problems are different than her problems.

It’s just all so complex. Other people see intersectionality as this kind of academic theory that doesn’t really apply to them – I don’t. It’s definitely very much a part of my day-to-day life, and sometimes that makes it harder to find people to talk to.

Alright, time to go shoot those baddies at the arcade.

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Identity schism

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Posted by maxporter on January 23, 2012 – 11:04 PM
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I’ve recently been experiencing this strange identity schism: I’m very not-privileged in some ways and I have experienced a decidedly non-privileged past, but now I am gaining way more privilege and the privileges that I have always had are becoming more important.

With regards to minorities, I’m deaf and queer. I’ve experienced so much crap with regards to both of those and I grew up decidedly differently than my hearing and straight peers did. But I am also white and have socioeconomic privilege.

I was born deaf – a fact that I’m cool with, because I wouldn’t change that aspect of myself in a million years. I was so difficult to understand as a kid that not even my parents could communicate with me sometimes, and I have had to deal with all sorts of crap like almost being barred from taking a required test to pass ninth grade because the proctor thought that I would be too dumb to take it. I still deal with crap in small ways – I can’t watch all the movies that I like, and some of my students (high school drop-outs, mind you) start thinking that they are so much smarter than me once they learn that I am deaf. But it’s not as bad as it used to be by any means.

My speech used to be pretty terrible – my speech therapist had to teach me basically every single sound in the English language from scratch, like so: “To make the sound ‘ee,’ you put your tongue here…” I learned all those sounds, then I had to learn how to say them clearly (like saying /j/ rather than /ch/), then I had to learn all this other stuff like where to put the stress in “OBject” versus “obJECT.” But, as my speech has improved, I’ve found that hearing people are so much nicer. They treat you so much better when your speech is clear. It disgusts me, to be honest, which may be why I don’t make speech therapy such a huge priority. I can be understood clearly, and that is enough for me – I don’t want to speak so well that people forget that I am deaf. I’m content speaking well enough that people think that I simply have an accent.

My hearing has also “improved,” thanks to technology, throughout my life. I was born almost completely deaf. When I got my cochlear implant at age eight, it dramatically changed how I interacted with hearing people. Throughout high school, I got used to hanging out with the hearing kids even though I said “what?” a lot. Then, last August, I got an upgrade to my CI. Boom, things changed way more. Now I can talk to people who are standing behind me(!!!), I can let the printer print 100 copies of the packet while I go do something else and then listen for the “print job done” beep, I can understand the lyrics of a rap song upon the first time ever hearing it… basically, I can do all this crazy crap that I could only imagine a year ago. It is like witchcraft.

So where does all that leave me? If I can interact with the hearing world so well, what am I? Am I Deaf or deaf? Can I even say that I am discriminated against anymore? What does my history of discrimination mean now that I am treated so well? Hell if I know!

As if things weren’t complicated enough, I am dealing with almost the exact same set of issues with regards to queerness.

I don’t even know what the hell I was born as – it’s never been a question that interested me, because I don’t care about the sexuality of children – but I definitely felt that something was going on right around the time that I started going through puberty and became aware that I was queer in some way when I was a teenager. I didn’t know what as, though, so I came out as the wrong thing. Not that it mattered – everyone identified me as ‘queer’ from a million miles away. They could see that I was queer when they looked at me, then they spoke to me and got to know me and my queerness became increasingly more and more obvious and readable.

And so that’s how I started socializing in the queer world – “Oh hi I can see that you are queer! Why, I am, too!” You know, all those little nods and winks and smiles that happen when you walk past another queer person on the street.

I’m not talking about sexuality here, by the way – I’m talking about gender presentation. I used to be very atypical in my gender presentation. Children would be like, “is that a boy or a girl?” and adult strangers would treat me like less than human because they couldn’t tell either. People took pictures of me and all that stuff. It wasn’t as horrible as some of the stuff that I’ve seen my trans woman friends go through (like random dudes hassling them) but it was not fun.

Now, however, my gender presentation is way more typical of my gender. I might act and look a little queer now and then, but if I didn’t tell you, you would (A) correctly assume that I identify as male and (B) probably not be able to tell what my sexuality was. Like, if I walked into a gay bar, I could smile at a dude and they’d smile back because it’s obvious in that context that I like dudes. But if you put me in the straight world? The majority of my kids seem to read me as straight. Which is just way weird beyond weird.

To be honest, sometimes I have difficulty with relating to my kids because I’m not used to looking so ‘straight.’ They look just like I did at their age – they look like strangers take pictures of them and ask them if they are boys or girls. I don’t think any of my coworkers, even the other queer ones, have had this experience. So when my kids go to the visibly queer coworkers, it makes me kind of sad because I do feel like I could help them out more. Like, my coworkers are all very knowledgable and empathetic and understanding people, but I do have that lived experience that my coworkers don’t.

I mean, when I see the kids walk in with all this amazing shit that I can’t even imagine – like feathers in their hair and eyeliner tears and shaved asymmetrical haircuts and clothes of the ‘opposite gender’ mixed with clothes of the ‘same gender’ – it just fills me with a kind of a happiness and hope to see that in the future generation. I don’t know. Like, I don’t have to surpress an immediate reaction of judgment like some of my coworkers do because my immediate reaction is approval. But the kids who walk in looking like that look at me and then assume that I’m gonna judge them because so many men who look like me have judged them in the past. In this profession, we talk about building rapport – well, how the hell do I build rapport with kids who have judged me for all the right reasons? Because, face it, men who look like me are usually the bad guys.

It’s all just so complicated. I do enjoy the privileges that come with looking and acting more ‘normal.’ And I do not miss being treated like less than human at all. But I also miss some of the feeling of belonging that came with being so far outside of the mainstream that I couldn’t hope to ever belong in it.

You know what this means? This means that we need to start truly valuing and celebrating diversity and leveling the playing field so that we live in a world where questions of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppressed’ are alien. We need to live in a world where everyone has access to a full life and the ability to be treated like a human being.

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Prejudiced students

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Posted by maxporter on January 16, 2012 – 9:20 AM
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In the past, I’ve talked about how prejudiced faculty members can be a barrier for students who are just trying to get through college without having to experience racism or sexism or whatever. But here is another piece: what happens when students alienate faculty members?

So, I used to go to a very intellectually-rigorous school; the student body was mainly composed of white upper-class individuals. Many were genuinely smart people who cared about intellectual discourse, but there were definitely some people whose parents had bought them education and schooling. One semester, I signed up for a course in African History that covered the slave trade, colonialism, and modern-day post-colonial issues. My class was pretty typical of the rest of the university: white upper-class prep-school graduates.

The professor was the chair of the department, and he had a PhD in the medical history of an African region (which I won’t name because I want to maintain my privacy). He had been studying African History for thirty or so years, and he had actually grown up in Africa, so I definitely respected his knowledge and range of experiences. One of my friends who had taken one of his classes said that he was very good at bringing in all of his knowledge and experiences – for instance, he told stories about the atrocities that colonizers had forced his grandparents to do, and then he’d tie it back to the lesson. So I was looking forward to the class.

However, from the very first day, many of the students acted as if they had superior knowledge to him. They were smart enough to get into this elite school, so they acted as if they were the smartest people in the world – which is a common problem at Ivy-League type schools. It’s just insulting how little they respected his expertise – it’s like a group of first-graders thinking that they are smarter than their teacher. Even if the student is naturally bright, the teacher still has more experience.

I don’t know if the students realized just how prejudiced and rude they were being, but they often would just keep carrying on the discussion among themselves instead of letting the professor chime in – they’d often talk over him, too. They would talk about their interpretation of the text, which was often full of racist and inaccurate notions that had absolutely no basis in fact. And they would often disrespect the terminology that my professor had outlined at the start of the semester – for instance, he pointed out that it is offensive to call African countries or ethnic groups ‘tribes’ because of the association of African peoples with primitive peoples, but the students would constantly say “tribe” in a context where it was not appropriate.

On the last day of class, our professor just didn’t moderate the discussion at all. He just sat back and let all the white kids say crap about Africa. That discussion was pretty horrible.

Throughout that entire semester, it was clear that the students’ unconscious or conscious racism – “black men are unarticulate and unintelligent” – was leaking through and affecting the class. It was awful. I had no idea how to handle it at the time. I ended up not doing anything, which I probably wouldn’t do today. Our professor often seemed weary in class, as if he dreaded coming to class – and, honestly, with that hostile attitude of the students, I don’t blame him.

It was disappointing because he couldn’t share his knowledge and expertise and experience. I did learn a lot from that class – for instance, we had to read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, which caused me to completely rethink the relationship between Europe / the US and Africa. But I really wish that my fellow students could have respected my professor enough to let him share the knowledge that he had gained over his life of studying African history.

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On a more personal note

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Posted by maxporter on January 14, 2012 – 12:19 PM
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So, I’ve been looking into my career options. I currently am in a service program (volunteer with a small living stipend) and am teaching at-risk youth. But now, I’m thinking that I might end up going for my PhD and becoming a professor.

I love my job, but I am realizing that some of my qualities are disadvantages in this field. For instance, I tend to overthink things at this job sometimes and I am more focused on the big picture whereas people who are happiest at this job value the little things (like getting a student to smile) more. But, in another context, those qualities could be advantages – really, maybe I’m made to write theory.

I’ve also been realizing that I really need to be surrounded by intellectual people for at least part of the time. My coworkers are extremely smart about things like how people work, but I want to talk about things like the freakin’ awesome books that I’m reading. Currently, I’m reading two: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks and The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City by Matthew C. Gutmann. I understand that the majority of people don’t like engaging with dense books or critical theory; they’d rather spend their time cooking or being with their boyfriend or walking their dog or whatever. So I try not to talk too much about nerdy stuff, but it does leak out sometimes. For that reason, I think that I need to be surrounded by other intellectuals during my work day, then I can just go out and have fun with my friends.

I also love to read and write. It’s becoming a pretty regular thing for me to chill and smoke on my balcony after work while reading bell hooks or whatever. It makes me feel so dorky, but I also just love it. If I got paid to read that all day long, instead of working in a job where I’m not supposed to read while I’m working, I would just be beyond happy. I write a ton – mostly in my personal blog and in emails – and it’s just easy/fun for me to get lost in writing something. So I realized that it’s time for me to step outside of this blog and start working my way towards bigger things.

Speaking of loving to read, I have realized that I do love to read academia: after years of thinking of it as a really dense and inaccessible thing, I recently realized that it’s a lot like poetry in some ways. Well, for me anyway. When I read bell hooks, for example, every sentence rings with so much truth and is so well-written; I just appreciate the way that she put together words and how she can open up my mind just like that in five words. I also enjoy the challenge of reading a dense text: “What is she trying to say here? Let’s look up this word/concept… OH! Now I understand it!” That sense of accomplishment is like solving a puzzle. And I feel that way about a lot of academia, not just bell hooks. I miss my days of spending hours in the library trying to find the source of the source of the source.

I also love to teach. I’ve talked in the past about how not every minority person should be expected to educate others about his or her minority, but it is the way that I make sense of the world – I process my experiences and then share them with others. Being able to do that in a more formal way would be awesome. And I just love the energy of young adults – some undergrads can be brats, yes, but at their best, they are just waking up to this whole new world and learning how to think after a less-than-satisfactory high school education & so they ask a ton of awesome questions that you’d never have thought of on your own. A lot of professors think of teaching as simply placing your knowledge in the student’s head. It’s not like that – the students are vital people with ideas of their own that are awesome. Actually, I think it’s kind of disrespectful to the student to treat them like a receptacle for your knowledge – they are there to learn; they aren’t gonna read your mind and immediately gain your knowledge. And they’re not gonna want to apply the knowledge in the same way that you do – so just teaching them the concepts will let them decide how to apply it their lives. I want to be able to interact with students in a dynamic way.

And the advantage to teaching undergrads as compared to, say, adults who just want to get their GED so that they can get a job, is that they want to be studying this stuff. Some kids think that “my parents made me go to college,” but really, they could have chosen not to go to college and worked instead.

I also love to learn. Which I already kind of said, but I would love to have a job where I could actually do research to have hard data to back up my facts. Also, there is some stuff out in the world that I haven’t seen research on – the earning power of white deaf people vs african-american deaf people, for example. The definition of a dissertation is ‘original scholarship’ – I personally think that I could find room in the margins of society to research something that would be original.

And I just love challenge and adventure. Most people try to be nice when they edit your papers or whatever, but I don’t want that. I actually find it kind of insulting when people are nice, to be honest – I am like, “Dude, my self-esteem is good and I feel like I am smart enough to stand up to scrutiny.” I want students to ask me questions from the new generation that may force me to completely change the course of my research. I want my peers to make sure that my work can stand up to the harshest intellectual scrutiny. I want people to be merciless with my work so that I can make it be the best it can be and so we can generate new ideas faster.

When I think about the lifestyle of a professor, a lot of it really appeals to me. For instance, travelling is something that I love. So being able to do things like go to conferences, do visiting professorships, etc are all things that really appeal to me. And the flexible work schedule is awesome. And the fact that you’re not gonna have the same exact job year-after-year; instead of teaching about the industrial revolution again and again; your classes change each semester. And the students change every semester, too. And just the small aspects of the lifestyle, like being surrounded by books all day, appeal to me. And oh my god, having access to things like Jstor, the online scholarly database – I miss it so much. That kind of thing.

I’ve struggled a lot with the elite nature of academia. To be a professor, you have to go through so much training that the majority of people don’t. I recently realized that, well, yes, it is a rarified career – but when I read some essays comparing being a professor to being an expert in a more ‘respected’ field (medical doctor, engineer, etc) it made me think of it in a different way. Then I read bell hooks, who says that coming up with theory is like coming up with a blueprint for society. Experts are important in order to advance society and ask the critical questions that need to be asked.

Academia does get elitist, I will admit. People start using jargon with non-experts just to look smart. People who spend tens thousands of dollars on schools then feel entitled to all the knowledge in the world, where it might not be appropriate to ask for that knowledge.1 People think that a degree from Yale means a certain thing compared to a degree from State. That kind of thing.

But, really, the way that I want to approach this is to try to change the elitist nature of academia. I want to be involved in university politics to change things in a meaningful way. I want to be involved in outreach, in retention (which I feel is often neglected), in all of that. I have been starting to see academia as not just a hobby (which is how some people treat it – “I like to read British lit, so I am going to get a PhD in 18th century British lit”) but as a way to create meaningful social change. Like I said, bell hooks said that theory is like a blueprint for an ideal society, and looking at academia in that way instead of just a hobby of the leisure class has really been helping me get more excited about it.

The only issue is what I want to study/teach. When I look at what I like to read, it has to do with issues of identity and how society marginalizes people. I am especially interested in the identity formation of people who experience intersecting minorities. Really, though, I am interested in so many things in the humanities and social sciences – I have a degree in film studies, I enjoy reading psychology case studies for fun, that kind of thing. So when I think of cultural studies, that’s one possibility that combines all of my interests and passions. Or I could get a PhD in sociology or I could get a PhD in … just a lot of things.

So, yeah. We will see.

For now, I’m going to be at this job until October – and it’s a really helpful experience for me. I don’t want to be that professor who just tells you what he knows instead of teaching it, so having the experience of teaching twenty-year-olds how to add is really helpful for me because I’m learning how to break things down to their absolute most basic concept. Then, after that, I want to teach skiing and snowboarding to at-risk youth for a season, then I will likely enroll in a PhD program in the fall of 2013.

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  1. For example, I was reading about how some indigenous cultures see knowledge as something that is collectively owned – in European-American cultures, knowledge is yours to acquire and then share, but in some indigenous cultures, knowledge is owned by the community and the community has to give permission to share that knowledge. [↩]
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“I’ve got to be independent – no matter what”

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Posted by maxporter on January 11, 2012 – 10:41 PM
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Recently, a family friend has been experiencing health issues, including chronic pain. She has great difficulty even walking across a grocery store. So she has been reserving a lot of her spoons – staying at home instead of going to school, that kind of thing.

Okay, I’m going to admit that I do feel some sympathy for her because it’s clear that it makes her miserable. It’s important to say that not all people with chronic pain think of their lives as suffering, but she has said, “This is unbearable.” However, I do think that the root of a lot of her problems is the very individualistic way in which our culture approaches things.

Let me explain. This friend has the option of using a wheelchair and being perfectly mobile. If she uses a wheelchair, she experiences much less pain and is able to travel longer distances throughout the day. It would be possible for her to go to school and everything. But she was socialized that to accept help is a weakness. She does not want to be seen as week, so she refuses the wheelchair. Arm canes worsen her pain, so those are not an option. So in the end, she accepts the limitations upon her life rather than use a wheelchair for greater mobility.

I mean, it is her choice. Each person with a disability should be allowed to define their body upon their own terms. The problem here, though, is that this story reflects a larger issue with society as a whole. I see this type of attitude in a lot of people who got a disability late in life, rather than being born with them. Some people who were born with disabilities do feel shame, yes, but I have observed that it is far more common in those who got a disability later in life.

I am guessing that part of the attitude of people who got a disability later in life is denial. Particularly people who were pretty privileged before. It appears to me that they think that they can maintain that individualistic way of living. The irony is that accepting “help” can actually go a longer way towards ensuring an independent life in some cases.

The thing is, individualism really only works for those at the top of the social ladder. If you are privileged, you can basically be as independent as you want. At the most extreme, you can build a castle and interact with only those who you want to.

But, if you are further down the social ladder, it becomes a lot more important to get over yourself. Individualism is a disadvantage. Support is a lot more important. In particular for those with disabilities, accepting “assistance” can enable us to live a fuller and richer life. For instance, I have heard stories of very deaf people who refuse interpreters at school and end up missing things. Then, when they finally said, “I will get interpreters,” boom, their life at school got so much better.

I don’t know. From the perspective of somebody who was born deaf, it can be difficult for me to understand the attitudes of people who got a disability late in life. I do feel a lot of, “Welcome to my life.” If anybody has anything to say on this, let me know.

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Disability as plot device

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Posted by maxporter on January 9, 2012 – 10:03 PM
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I recently read a wonderful sci-fi book by an older Japanese author named Hiroshi Yamamoto. Since he is getting older, he has started producing “late work” – eg, work that sums up everything that he had written about previously. This particular book, Stories of Ibis, contains a series of short stories that talk about humanity’s relationship to technology and machines. One story in particular, A Romance in Virtual Space, was very well-written and beautiful but the ending bothered me. Obviously, I will have to provide spoilers to this particular story to discuss it, so be prepared. I’m just spoiling this one story, not the whole book.

Darth Vader stands with his arm outstreteched, just as he is about to tell Luke Skywalker that he is his father. On the bottom of the image, the text says SPOILER ALERT.

Fair warning.

This story is about a virtual world – there is a special technology that literally immerses people in a virtual world. Like Second Life or World of Warcraft, users can live out alternative fantasy lives while interacting with others from around the world, but unlike those games, the technology is so advanced that people feel as if they have entered a completely new world and are actually walking around in it. Okay, so far, so good – that’s a cool concept.

But then, at the end, the protagonist turns out to be blind. Surprise! I think that the purpose was to surprise the reader and to make them reconsider the role that technology has in the lives of people.

My first problem with the story is that there’s something inherently offensive about making someone’s personal attributes into a “spoiler.” Being blind is just another variation in the human species. It might surprise some sighted people to encounter a blind person and they feel that the experience is unique. But from the perspective of a blind person, especially one who was blind from birth like the girl in the story was, there’s nothing special about being blind – it’s just a daily reality. The protagonist of the story is an ordinary girl who just so happens to be blind. Making her blindness into a spoiler is insulting because it emphasizes that she’s a “normal” girl – until the very last moment, when her inherent ~difference~ is revealed. By suddenly emphasizing her differences rather than her similarities, it makes blind people seem like alien creatures – or, worse, like a mere plot device that couldn’t possibly exist in real life.

I felt that the overall effect of the revelation is that it detached us from the girl because, up until that point, the author had not been telling the whole story about her life. Really, that’s why it’s so puzzling to me that the author chose to make this into a spoiler. If blindness is something that pervades every aspect of one’s life, well, why not mention it outright? Why hide it under the rug and make it look like something to be ashamed of? The author was able to get away with this complicated evasion because he just focused on her life in the game, where she is sighted, but I still felt that that was unfair and way too complicated. The story’s credibility began to stretch in some spots – it was obvious that the author was hiding something throughout the entire story. Just say she’s a blind girl that likes to play virtual reality games; simple as that.

Another aspect of the story that I had a problem with was that the girl’s attitude towards herself didn’t ring true for me. All throughout the story, the girl says things like, “I could run around in this game, but I couldn’t run around in real life.” Before I realized that she was blind, I thought that the girl had a disability that I would consider more serious than a mere sensory issue – something like chronic pain that rendered her immobile or full-body paralysis. Even with that mindset, though, I didn’t understand why the girl was so obsessed with running around – when I talk to people who have mobility disabilities, they don’t express a wish to go running around. They were born that way, so it’s just life – who could imagine being any other way?

In a similar vein, the protagonist of the story is obsessed with color. This simply doesn’t ring true for me, either. It reminds me of when hearing people wanted me to listen to music before I understood music. I didn’t feel that my life was devoid and colorless due to lack of music – I could go to a library and see all these paintings, feel all these old and new books, and smell a mix of musky books and coffee. I imagine that many blind people don’t feel a loss, either – they can probably find beauty in touch, sound, taste, even the way that they percieve light. When the author wrote this story, he didn’t notice his own vision-centricism and projected it onto the girl – he committed a classic privileged-person fallacy and assumed that, because he enjoys color, everyone will enjoy color. But that’s not true.

Heck, who knows? A blind person may find the sudden intrusion of new sensory input jarring/upsetting. And that’s another issue that I have with the story – how is it that this girl’s first experience with color and sight was awesome, rather than traumatic? Honestly, when I think about the first sounds that I heard with my cochlear implant – the garage door opening, voices of people around me, the car, etc – it was just upsetting and horrible because the sensations were so new and unfamiliar and frightening. I had to learn how to process the input; I couldn’t immediately say, “Yeah, music is awesome.” Likewise, I imagine that a blind girl who suddenly saw color in a computer game at the age of six would not have said, “OMG WHAT IS THAT? PINK??? OMG I LOVE COLORS PINK IS MY FAVORITE COLOR!!!” It just doesn’t seem credible to me.

Overall, the revelation that the girl is blind is insulting because it minimizes what actual blind people go through every day. Being blind isn’t just about not being able to see color – it’s about a whole bunch of other stuff, too. At the same time, though, it’s not the central feature of life. For instance, when I think about my deafness – yeah, deafness is huge, but it’s not like I think about deafness all day long. I think about small life problems like what time I should drop off the mail, when I should wash my car, etc. I imagine it’s the same for the girl – to minimize her life to make it look like her blindness is the only problem that she experiences is just insulting.

One thing that I will say for the story, in addition to being beautifully-written and crafted, is that it’s true that online games and the Internet do provide people with disabilities with an avenue to communicate more fluently. For that reason, the Internet can be important for some people with disabilities who have access to the Internet. I certainly used the Internet in a similar manner – it was nice to have text-based chat with others at a time when I couldn’t communicate verbally. So it was nice to read about technology’s positive role in the lives of people with disabilities in a science-fiction story. I just wish that the author had not exoticized and minimized the blind girl’s problems.

The thing is, by making the blind girl’s blindness a spoiler, the story just is not as strong as it could have been. The author has to cut out a lot of details of the girl’s life to make her blindness a surprise, which can make the whole thing feel a little rushed at times. And, at the end, when we find out that the girl is blind, it makes it look like technology enables dependency – the reason that she goes into the virtual world so often is because she can see and has greater freedom; the implication is that the girl does not like being blind. This story could have been a reflection of how empowering it is to have free access to the world for the first time ever thanks to technology – but instead, it just is this self-loathing narrative of how horrible disabilities are and how awesome it is that technology can help people. Ugh.

I hope that this blog post doesn’t turn anybody off from the book. It’s a freaking amazing book and was, honestly, life-changing. I added it to my list of my top ten favorite books and would love it if everyone went out and read it right now. Like the best of science fiction, it discusses some problems that we have right now – in this book, hundreds of years in the future, a lot of humanity’s current problems were solved, and this book shows how and why. It also has a lot to say about loving and respecting your fellow human, even if they were born in a different country or something. It’s just that this one story has very prejudiced implications, which is a real bummer, especially given the overall theme of universal love for humanity. There also is this weird undercurrent of benign sexism – “Women are so amazing at being nurturing!” – that underlies the whole book. What good is universal love if it only counts some individuals as fully human?

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Hierarchy as part of civilization?

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Posted by maxporter on January 7, 2012 – 3:26 PM
Filed under Uncategorized

A few months ago, we had a training about race. My program is housed in the city’s child/family welfare building, so the audience for this training was people who have the power to do things like take away children from “unfit” homes and place foster children with “appropriate” families. So the purpose of this training was to discuss how we can be aware of our racism so that we don’t confuse different-but-valid cultural practices with an “unsafe” home simply because the family’s traditions may not mirror white society’s.

During this training, we dissected the meaning of the word “civilization.” What is civilization / what is ‘civil’? The facilitator wrote ‘civilization’ on the board and asked us to call out words and phrases that we associated with civilization.

One of the audience members who just so happened to be a white male said, “Hierarchy.”

At that moment, I instantly felt uneasy. I looked around the room, and many other people (mainly people of color) shifted around uncomfortably in their seats in response to his statement.

See, the thing is, this is a privileged perspective: privileged people may not realize it, but it is easy to list ‘hierarchy’ as a ‘positive’ trait if you directly benefit from it. But, if you’re further down towards the bottom of the social ladder, hierarchy is hardly a positive trait of civilization – it is what causes suffering in your everyday life. In the end, it comes down to this: hierarchy-as-civilization is one ideology that directly informs racism.

I am the type of person who enjoys looking at the extremely big picture. I usually think about current events through the lenses of my knowledge of history within the last 500 years: how did the slave trade affect modern Africa’s development, for example? So, when I think about the implications that a specific definition of ‘civilization’ as a broad concept has had on the world, I think that it has really done a lot more harm than good.

For many hundreds of years, liberal philosophers and intellectuals thought of ‘civilized’ man – and, yes, he had to be a man – in terms of extreme individualism. In a dog-eat-dog world, it’s each individual man for himself. This justifies the exploitation and oppression of minority people. Furthermore, it promotes the individual man’s opinions as the most important in the room and allows him to reject alternative solutions and/or blind himself to possibilities.

I think that, if you look at some of the biggest events/trends that led to the current state of society, this theory of hierarchy-as-civilization was behind it. For instance: Native Americans don’t have the same conception of land as we do, so they’re not civilized, so they don’t count. That kind of thing. Even the treatment of people with disabilities is rooted in this logic: the idea is that there is something inherently wrong with being unable to gain independence. If ‘independence’ and ‘individualism’ weren’t as important in our culture, I think things would be different.

Humans are basically a social animal, and individualism can be fundamentally anti-social if taken to its logical extreme. Therefore, a civilization structured upon hierarchy and individualism promotes anti-social behavior like racism and sexism – it encourages people to emphasize differences rather than similarities.

When I think of an ideal society, I don’t think of a ‘civilized’ society as much as I think of ‘intentional community.’ In my head, most of my words for that group exercise were things like “non-violent communication” and “intentionality.” In order to truly progress towards that ideal, however, we should stop thinking of humans as an inherently cruel and opportunistic species composed of selfish creatures that try to scramble to the top of a ladder and instead focus upon how we can dismantle the structures of oppression in order to build community between all members of humanity.

Like I said, I’m the kind of person who enjoys thinking about the big picture.

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