4:25am June 4, 2014

People need to be able to identify with each other, and work with each other.

This doesn’t mean you ignore the important differences between people and their experiences. But lately I’m seeing people so afraid to identify with each other’s experiences that they think they might be appropriating if they find anything in common with each other at all. And that clearly shows the pendulum has swung so far in one direction that it could stand to swing back towards the middle.

It’s okay for two people with very different experiences to find commonalities in those experiences. If those experiences involve oppression, identifying commonalities can be vital to learning how to fight that oppression. Finding commonalities also helps people connect with each other and form bonds on a personal level.

When I wrote In My Language – a video focused on clearly disability-related experiences – I was utterly thrilled to come across a group of Chicana activists discussing the video in terms of their experiences growing up in English-speaking schools, speaking only Spanish. I was thrilled because they were applying it far beyond where most people would apply it. If this had happened on tumblr today, someone would have ended up accusing them of appropriating disabled people’s unique experiences of oppression. (Even though this is not what appropriation means. I feel like the idea of appropriation has been appropriated.) But at any rate, there’s an extreme wariness of finding those common experiences.

But finding those common experiences help people make human connections. It helps people understand each other. Not as identical experiences, mind you – but as people with something in common. People can begin to form bonds with each other over things like that. And then when one person needs help, another person is more likely to go and help them, because they’ve created that connection.

I feel like I’m saying things that should be obvious. But it seems like a lot of people have become so afraid of having their experiences poured into a blender and turned unrecognizable, that they won’t allow people different from them to identify with their experiences at all, without a fight. This prevents connections between people, which prevents alliances, which prevents people acting together on similar issues, which prevents us having the numbers we need to get anything done.

Trust me, I do know what it’s like to have someone grossly misidentify their experience of oppression with my own. But people have become so afraid of that happening, that people are now afraid to identify at all, even when it’s appropriate. I think it would be far more useful to help people realize when it is and isn’t appropriate to identify, than to have everyone scared like this. Hell, I’d put up with a little over-identification just to see people connecting with each other across the lines of different oppressions again. Because having us all packed tightly into communities of people who (supposedly) understand each other completely, with little to no cross-over with other groups… that’s not going to help anyone in the end, even if it’s good to have communities we can come back to that are more like us.

I want to go back to when I could publish In My Language, and see people discussing everything from aphasia wards to racism in the school system, and have people coming together over all of that. There was something magical about that, something beautiful. I didn’t know how beautiful and magical it was until it started going away, until people started fearing to identify with experiences that were, or seemed to be, too different from their own.

I would love to see people connecting over experiences again. "Wow, that feels so similar to what I went through, except this part was different…“ "I can’t fully relate to that, but this one little bit is familiar…” “That sounds exactly like my experience, so exactly it’s scary, except people do that to me over race instead of disability.” "I don’t really understand that experience, maybe just a little, could you tell me more?“ Without fear of getting flamed or ostracized if they get it wrong.

(What set this off? We were talking about child-rearing practices, and someone was afraid they might be appropriating autistic people’s experiences if they compared it to growing up with Crohn’s disease. Not that I needed that example when I see it at least five times a day, that’s just the latest. Real appropriation is terrible, but this isn’t even close to appropriation, and people are being made to fear that identifying with each other is appropriation.)