11:47am June 29, 2014

The tl;dr version of my post about cognitive disability and academic communication styles in social justice circles.

I’m usually very bad at summarizing my longer posts. In fact, it’s usually impossible. This upsets me a lot because it means that a lot of my posts are unreadable to a lot of people. Sometimes, though, I’m able to summarize things. I’ve been able to do it here.

If you want to read the whole, original post, click here: Cognitively disabled people DO get to complain about jargon, academia, etc. in our movements. Seriously, we do.

But here’s the basic gist of what I’m saying:

Academic language and academic communication styles have become an enormous part of social justice movements both online and in universities.
This language and communication style is impossible for a lot of people to understand. Most ordinary people can’t understand it. Many oppressed people have particular trouble understanding it. Many cognitively disabled people will never understand it.
I am not telling anyone to give up academic language or communication styles. Some people can’t (including because of disabilities), some people won’t. I’m just trying to say that there’s something wrong when an entire movement is based on these communication styles, to the point you have to be able to understand it and use it in order to participate fully.
On tumblr, people who bring this up often get told it doesn’t exist, and that what we call ‘academic’ is just ‘people talking about their lives’. This is partly because academia has so thoroughly shaped how oppressed people in certain social movements talk about their lives, that people really do think this is how you talk about your life if you’re oppressed, period.
I posted a long list of words that create little explosions in my head every time I read them, that are used in social justice circles constantly. My intent is not to tell people not to use those words. It’s to prove that yes, there is jargon, I am not imagining this or making things up.
I am, myself, oppressed in many different ways. Fighting oppression is a survival issue for me. I’m also cognitively disabled in ways that make these academia-influenced social circles very, very difficult for me to communicate within or understand. I’m not writing this just to bother people (I’m no more anti-SJ than I’m SJ), I’m writing this because for my own survival I need social movements to be accessible to people like me.
Ordinary people, all over the world, fight oppression in amazing ways. Without ever coming up with new jargon, without forming academic departments at universities, without engaging in sophisticated academic argumentation styles, without becoming inaccessible to ordinary people.
People need to stop denying that this stuff is academic in nature. Right now it seems like people will admit it’s academic if it gives them more credibility (“it’s not just tumblr, this is how Real Sociologists talk!”), but if anyone says it makes things inaccessible, suddenly they say “There’s nothing academic going on here, nothing at all.” This makes it impossible to address the problem.
People can still do their academic stuff it they want to or need to. I’m not stopping anyone. I just really, really don’t think this stuff should be at the core of any movement that seeks to end oppression. Because that just makes things impossible for a lot of people, including the people who most need these movements.
My dream is exactly that: Ordinary people, including cognitively disabled people, fighting oppression. Talking about our oppression without needing fancy words. Fighting oppression without needing academic argumentation tactics. Doing all these things, without needing this academic stuff. I know it’s already happening offline, everywhere around the world, in fact. But I’d like to see it happen on places like tumblr, too.
It’s possible to be intellectual without being academic. I do it all the time.
Not all cognitively disabled people have the same problems with the same stuff. Some cognitively disabled people even need to communicate in an academic style. But there’s a huge number of cognitively disabled people who can’t participate in these discussions because both the language and the entire structure and mentality of the discussion is too academic in a way that we can’t penetrate no matter how hard we try. Some of us stick around and tough it out and try to change things, but more walk away on sight. And lots of ordinary oppressed people have the same reaction.

And even though that was kind of long, that was much shorter than the original post. If you want more detail, see the original post, it’s lots more detailed and may clarify some things that I leave out here.