12:23pm September 11, 2014

How ordinary people talk about oppression.

If you want the poem version of this, try Inside the Pauses of Ordinary Conversations. This is the long, detailed version, for people who want more details than poetry can provide. There’s a tl;dr at the end.

Note: This is all from my experience. I shouldn’t have to say that, but I feel like I should note that in bold letters because this is how things are in my neighborhood, in my world, in my conversations, in the conversations I overhear, in the conversations I participate in.

EDITED TO ADD: IMPORTANT: IF YOU’RE SOMEONE WHO CAN’T DO SOMETHING A CERTAIN WAY, OR HAS TO DO THINGS A CERTAIN WAY, BECAUSE OF A DISABILITY, I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU. I am talking about, largely, people who haven’t listened because they didn’t know there was anything to listen to, not people who can’t listen because they can’t do nonverbal cues, for instance. And I’m talking about people who use jargon as part of a system of looking down on people who don’t, not people who use jargon because that’s the way their vocabulary works. And so on and so forth. So if you see something in this that you can’t ever do because you’re disabled, you’re not who I’m aiming it at.

When ordinary oppressed people, talking to each other in the offline world, discuss oppression, it’s different. It’s not what you see most often online. There’s not a lot of obvious analysis. There’s not a lot of academic language. We talk about right and wrong in a very blunt straightforward manner, and a lot of things are left unsaid, but deeply felt.

The things left unsaid but deeply felt confuse people whose main introduction to discussions of oppression are through books, or online blogs, or classrooms. There’s this sense that in order for something to be made real, it has to be openly stated, out loud, in obvious language.

And that’s just not how it works. I wrote my poem because that’s not how it works, and I wanted to show how it works. And how it works is a lot more like poetry or storytelling than it is like academic analysis.

We talk about real, concrete things that have happened to us. But we don’t just rush through the story, as if we have the whole thing typed out in our minds ahead of time. There are a lot of pauses, and the pauses are as significant as the words, if not more so.

The pauses are where all of our voices get to be heard. The pauses are where we react to each other. The reactions can be verbal or nonverbal, but they’re often completely nonverbal. A sharp intake of breath. A hand on the person’s arm. Eyes widening, head pulled back. Narrow eyes, drumming fingers. A hand thumping the table. Hand pressed to chest in disbelief. Slow shaking of the head in disgust. Nodding. Twenty million tonal variations on “uh-huh” and “nuh-uh” and “huh?” and and other grunt-words. Lots of different hand gestures.

And these aren’t isolated gestures and sounds. When taken together, they look like a well-choreographed dance. Each person is reacting both to the storyteller and to each other. All at once.

And these reactions are ways of showing that we understand. That we understand why what happened was wrong. That we understand who was in the wrong. That we know what we would want to do to the person in the wrong, if only our conscience or society would let us.

Sometimes there are actual verbal discussions about taking action. They’re not always serious. Sometimes they’re a way of blowing off steam, of saying, “Yes, if we had all the time and money in the world, if we thought it would succeed, then we could do this.” Recently there was talk of a petition in our building, but nobody was serious about it. We just wanted to feel like we would do something if we had the chance, that we weren’t completely powerless. We knew no petition would ever surface, for a million good and bad reasons alike.

But sometimes the action does turn into real action, too. It’s just that when you’re poor, elderly, and disabled, you have to pick your battles because you just don’t have the spoons to fight every single one. So sometimes, talking about fighting back reminds you that you could fight back, maybe, and sometimes that has to be enough.

There’s a lot said through nonverbal means, and that can be hard for anyone who has trouble reading nonverbal cues. There is far more said through tone and body language than is ever said through the words alone. If I gave you a transcript of some of the conversations we have around here, you might not even recognize they were about oppression, unless you heard the music in their voices and saw the dance within their movements.

I’m a weird autistic person because I do better hearing the music and seeing the dance than I do hearing the words. So often, I’ll pick up on all this nuance, things I can’t even translate into words because it’s so subtle and detailed, and I won’t hear the words at all. Autistic people tend to swing one way or the other — hearing words but not tone, or tone but not words, or switching between the two. My baselines tone without words, but I can switch to words without tone if I have to, sometimes anyway. I just wanted to explain that because most people assume that all autistic people are pure words-but-not-tone people. Even Temple Grandin has said that she can do one or the other, just not both.

I may see the dance, but I can’t both see it and participate in it at the same time. I can either participate in it but be blind to a lot of the dance happening around me (and do the nonverbal equivalent of stepping on people’s feet a lot), or I can be acutely aware but unable to participate beyond the most rudimentary ways.

But this dance is so important to how ordinary people discuss our oppression. Because we discuss our oppression as stories. We don’t discuss it in abstract terms, we discuss it in terms of “This is what happened to me today,” “This s what happened to my cousin last month,” and these stories get woven into a tapestry that we remember about each other, a tapestry of discrimination and oppression and how it affects us on every level.

The emotional responses people give at first are meant to say “I understand that this was oppression and I understand how awful it is that this happened to you.” There’s a lot more nuance to it than that, though. There always is, with body language and tone of voice. You can take a single syllable sound, like “uh”, and turn it into a hundred different emotional reactions by adding tone of voice and body language. And in these conversations that’s exactly what people are doing.

But they’re not just doing it to the storyteller, they’re doing it to each other. They’re bouncing their reactions off each other and seeing how the others are reacting, adjusting the tone and pitch of their reactions accordingly if necessary. This all happens very quickly.

That part, where everyone is reacting in the pauses, reacting to the story, reacting to each other. That’s one of the most misunderstood parts. That’s where the analysis would be if people were coming at it from an academic angle instead of an emotional one. But since it’s an emotional one, what you get is a lot of sincere emotional responses, with so much layer and depth to them, that it would be very hard to communicate all of the information in words. It’s a very dense, multilayered mode of communication. And I always feel amazed when I get to witness it.

Stories also get traded. A man tells a story about himself. After all the right pauses and responses in all the right places, a woman talks about something that happened to her cousin the other day. Pauses happen, responses happen, stories happen. People build up a sense of their own oppression without a piece of jargon or a buzzword in sight. This is ongoing, throughout our lifetimes. In many cases, we start learning very young.

I go to the emergency room and have a bad experience. On my way out, the cabbie driving me home tells me he used to be a janitor there. He tells me how on many shifts there was a culture where doctors and nurses looked down on everyone else, from patient to janitors. He had to quit.

Another day at the ER, another bad experience. This new cabbie tells me about when he had his heart attack. He had no insurance. They stabilized him but refused to help him get set up with preventative care. He asked, “What happens if I have another heart attack?” The doctors said, “It won’t matter to you, will it? You’ll be dead.” The cabbie is still, to my knowledge, uninsured, and has been given no preventative care and no means of preventing another heart attack.

These are the stories that ordinary people spontaneously tell each other. They are real. They are straightforward. They have pauses in all the right places. They tend to have a stark sense of right and wrong. There’s no buzzwords, I’ve never, ever heard an ordinary person on the street tell me a story of oppression and then complain, “Whenever I talk about my life, someone accuses me of using SJ jargon!”

Because that’s not how we talk about our lives or our oppression. We talk about good and bad, right and wrong, sometimes even downright evil, but not heteronormativity. And if you tried to insert words like heteronormativity into the discussion, you’d get responses like confusion, mistrust, laughter, and disgust in about equal measure depending on who you were talking to. Words like heteronormativity are most often, in ordinary-people circles, ways other people have of saying “We’re better than you and smarter than you and we know it.” Even if that’s not your intent, you’re going to get read that way, a lot.

In developmental disability circles, things are a lot the same as they are among any other group of ordinary people. One thing that strikes me about the DD community in general is how ordinary most DD people within those communities are. And by ordinary I don’t mean something bad. I mean that we’re a group of people who’ve had everything, even our right to call ourselves human, stripped away from us, and we still manage to cling to the most important parts of being ordinary human beings: Compassion, love, and community. This isn’t because we’re too stupid to know better. It’s because we’ve worked hard, really hard, to maintain our humanity in the face of some of the worst dehumanization out there. And maintaining your humanity, maintaining your ordinariness, those things go hand in hand most of the time. We need to be profoundly ordinary in a way most people don’t need it. And we cling to it like a life raft in a sea of chaos. And there is profound beauty, profound dignity, to be found in those who have had everything taken away from us and still managed to be ordinary. Ordinary should never be a dirty word, or a substitute for normal, because it is neither of those things.

When ordinary DD people talk to each other, sometimes it’s the same as when ordinary non-DD people talk to each other. But sometimes it’s different. Sometimes we pause for longer, not for responses, but because we can’t find the words we’re looking for. We’re even less likely to use jargon than the average person, unless we’re deliberately trying to show off that we’re not as ignorant as people think we are.

But what’s really different for us is what happens in the pauses. I guess it might not be noticeable to everyone, but I notice it a lot. When we react, we react a little more strongly than usual, like the tone and expression is slightly exaggerated. Because a lot of us had to learn these expressions consciously. And while there’s still that dance between all of our different reactions, it can be a little bit off-beat, with the reactions slightly less coordinated than they otherwise would be.

But the basics are still the same: Ordinary people talk about oppression in stories. We don’t necessarily analyze it out loud, that all happens in between the lines, during the song and dance of responses during the pauses in the story. And I’ve said before we talk in poetry. What I mean is the pauses. We pause at the end of a line, and that’s where everyone responds. And the responses take the place of all the analysis that people online are always doing. The mostly nonverbal responses say, “I know what this means to you,” and “I understand,” and they build a sense of community between the people having the conversation.

And as I keep saying, community is the important thing in all of this. Community means practical compassion and practical love. It means being there for each other, even in cases where we don’t even like each other. And that’s the edge we have, the communities of ordinary people who meet and tell each other stories and react to these stories. Our ways of interacting are just fundamentally different than what you usually find online in “communities” built entirely around oppression and analyzing oppression. Because those of us offline aren’t usually meeting to analyze oppression, we’re meeting to connect with each other as human beings. Which does involve talking about what happens to us, but it involves a lot more than that, too.

So when I wrote that poem… I was trying to show in a very visceral way, what happens when groups of ordinary people offline happen to start telling each other stories about oppression. The way the communication is so dense that volumes can be conveyed in a glance or a word. The way we tell stories. And I think, especially, the way we deal with right and wrong.

Because for us, it’s very stark, “That was wrong. That shouldn’t have happened to you.” That’s all. And it might be conveyed with a glance, or rolled eye, or a grunt. Our communication in these situations is very economical, yet layered with meaning. And the dances between people in the pauses remain the place where the most communication takes place.

Yes, this can be very hard for people who don’t come by this kind of communication naturally. Some autistic people have a really hard time even noticing that this communication exists. And there are people whose class background or culture makes it harder for them to recognize or participate in this kind of communication. Especially people who have been brought up to talk everything out, to turn everything into words, to analyze it, to make sure that everything is explicit.

Because for most people, our discussions of oppression are implicit. They’re all about what happens in the silences. And the silences are filled to the brim with meanings and messages to each other. We aren’t stupid. We aren’t ignorant. We aren’t unaware of what’s happening to us. We just talk about it differently. What we have is a major cultural divide.

So if you’re not used to this kind of communication — next time you are in the offline world, and you’re part of a group of people telling stories about their lives… listen, really listen. Don’t say anything, don’t respond to anything. Just pay attention to everything and everyone around you. Pay attention to people’s movements, to the sounds they make, to the way each person’s movements and sounds relate to every other person’s. Pay attention to the rhythm of the conversation. Pay attention to the way people talk about right and wrong, good and bad.

Pay attention. That’s the main thing. Pay attention, have some humility, learn that ordinary people are not stupid or ignorant about our own oppression just because most of us don’t analyze it the same way you do.

TL;DR: When ordinary people, in the offline world, discuss our oppression, we do it differently than on tumblr. Mostly, we tell stories about our lives. We trade stories about what has happened in our day. During those stories, we pause. During those pauses, we have an entire song and dance of nonverbal responses that convey everyone’s position on the matter without anyone saying a word. These are the conversations I have when I socialize with people in my building (which is for poor elderly and disabled people), or other clients from the local developmental disability agency (which is for people with intellectual disabilities or autism). It’s all about the stories, the music, the dance in the silences. We understand oppression as deeply as anyone who’s analyzing it on tumblr. We just don’t talk about it the same way. We aren’t stupid, we aren’t ignorant, and we aren’t missing out on your wisdom.