5:25am July 30, 2013

➸ Fragile White Ego Syndrome

adelene-dawner:

clatterbane:

adelene-dawner:

[snip]

If this is intended as an actual discussion of a pattern of things that happen: Yes! I agree and think that that’s an important thing to talk about - expecting people with this problem to just magically not have the problem any more is obviously not going to work, and the fact that so many people think it somehow will is really frustrating.

If, on the other hand, this is intended to shame those people by reframing that pattern as a mental illness… well, fuck you and your ableism, OP. :\

I was taking it as similar snark to Neurotypical Syndrome, used to describe patterns. (And I could be totally wrong there; that’s just why I reblogged. Also having seen the blogger’s sense of humor before.) But, good points. And I would not want to suggest that trying to shame people through comparison to mental illness is OK. :/

Thing is, in the case of neurotypical syndrome, reframing it as a disability thing doesn’t bring disability into the discussion; it just takes the disability framing that’s already there and turns it around to point the other way. That seems to me like a very different thing than adding a disability framing where there wasn’t one at all. Which isn’t to say that adding a disability framing is automatically ableist, just that if you are adding it, you have to make sure it’s clear that you’re not just using it as a way of saying ‘this is bad’ - which the OP didn’t really do. (Versus in the neurotypical syndrome case, where the writer was very clearly acknowledging that that framing usually means ‘this is bad’, and pointing out that that framing can just as easily apply to exactly the opposite of what it usually refers to - it wasn’t so much about NTs as about deconstructing the framing itself.)

You’re right. Bad example that popped into my mind of the style of snark. My brain is not working so well tonight, and probably not at the time of the reblog.

Unfortunately good description of a certain pattern in the OP, but maybe also an unfortunate way of presenting it. I really didn’t mean to bother anyone who doesn’t think that pattern is an awesome way of life.