Personally I am so used to people making assumptions about who I am that I take great delight in directly challenging their preconceptions. I have done this in regard to my mental health status (how can you have a family, an education, a job, be a counsellor etc and have chronic mental health issues?), my education (how can you be so well educated when you are a single mother, have mental health issues, live in a remote rural area?), my financial status (how can you own a house, hold down job, afford this and that when you are *insert whatever characterisation of the many that fit me*?), my health status (how can you have normal BP, normal this and normal that when you are morbidly obese?) etc.

I detest generalisations and assumptionsm, they really do no one any service at all.

Monica: I really don’t know, I’m just starting to challenge these ideas in myself! I’d love to hear suggestions. Anyone?

Naamah: I think I understand. My disability status is a political identity, a term of alliance and strength and marking out my social place. But to dominant society it’s a mark of weakness, of being less than, when it’s acknowledged at all. And regarding the variability of shared identities, my brother and I, for instance, have very different experiences of racialisation and racism. What great thoughts!

I hope the following makes sense. I’m trying to word this so that it won’t be misunderstood.

I am an incredibly curious person, I pay close attention to people for clues about their life and what they are like so that I can know them better and so that I can make my interactions with them more pleasant by being aware of potentially problematic areas. Also, just because I’m curious and find people fascinating.

One thing that being an incredibly curious person has taught me is how very little the identities that are most often used to sort us actually have the meaning assigned to them by the dominant culture.

I can’t say that these identities don’t “matter,” they DO matter. Mine matter to me so much! They do describe and define me in certain ways, and are important parts of me. But the words I use to describe myself and what a lot of folks mean by it when they put me in that box by using those same words are often two different things entirely.

Also, my identities can mean different things to me personally than to someone else with the same identities. It’s intensely variable.

One of the things I’ve learned to be curious about is what words people use to define themselves, and what those words mean to them.

Thanks for the discussion on why “colorblindness” does more harm than good. That reminded me of another post I ran across recently at Body Impolitic, Colorblindness, Race, and Children: The Elephant in the Living Room. This kind of privileged attitude has also made me come close to smacking my (ethnic Swedish) husband on more than one occasion. (Smacking people is not OK, but I was still sorely tempted out of frustration.) Just because you think race should no longer be an issue, and everybody should just get along, doesn’t mean it will magically happen.

And at the same time as I’m being misread, I have guilt, because sometimes I cultivate a white, abled image for safety or comfort.

I know that one. It’s very uncomfortable indeed.

What a wonderful post, Chally! I’m invisibly disabled (generalized anxiety disorder, comorbid depression) and it’s getting bad enough that I feel like I’m close to no longer being able to pass. There was an unpleasant incident earlier in the week when I felt like I may end up being pressured to out myself and the thought was really uncomfortable–the situation was that I had to work late on a project one night and would not be able to make it to the class the project was for in the morning, because sleep deprivation aggravates my mental health issues and at this point it would be tantamount to poking an already-angry bear.

It has been my experience as a college student that people tend to assume “Because I can survive on [x] hours of sleep a night, you should be able to survive on [x +/- 2] hours of sleep a night,” and just have no concept of how damaging that kind of assumption can be.

And my stuff has been so close to the surface lately that whenever someone says something like, “so-and-so is crazy,” or “I have so much work to do, I kind of want to shoot myself,” I really have to remind myself not to flinch. I’ve had to ask my best friend twice in the past month specifically not to use language like that; the first time, she said she didn’t really think of me as “crazy,” and I gently explained to her that I am. The second time, earlier tonight, she accepted it and we moved on.

So the question for me is–what can I do in my daily life to un-invisibilize these identities, above and beyond being cognizant of my own perceptions and language use? Is there some kind of active teaspooning (in the parlance of Shakesville) that I can do? I’ve begun challenging my own judgments and assumptions, to a degree, and sharing these thoughts with my loved ones, but is there more?

I hear you on identifying people by race. I try very hard not to. I’d prefer to describe someone by their clothing or by a distinguishing feature like length or style of hear than by their race.

I agree about the whole idea of colorblindness. It’s a way to say ‘but that doesn’t matter, because we’re all the default color now’ when the default color has always been white in the US and UK. I can’t speak for other places. I am white, but have no desire to erase anyone else’s culture and heritage.

I can’t pass as being healthy anymore (well, except when people assume I’m training my service dog not working with him). But I do routinely pass as straight, and I leave it that way because…well, because correcting the assumption tends to lead to conversations I don’t want to have, usually men asking me about having threesomes. I’m heteroflexible/bi, and if I don’t have a reason to change the straight assumption (like a girl I’m over the moon about), I don’t.

~Kali
http://www.brilliantmindbrokenbody.wordpress.com

Let’s talk about the post now.