No lie, I do appreciate how Tan and Karamo speak out on this to the others, and the others LET THEM, and give them the floor when they’re talking about how being brown/black and being gay intersect. Similarly to the way they give Jonathan the floor when he’s talking about the difference in presentation being being, for example, someone like Antoni and Bobby who straight people generally don’t find threatening, and being someone like Jonathan who, in his own words, never had a CHOICE about being in the closet because “Sky is blue, water is wet, Jonathan is flamingly homosexual”. There are different experiences here, but Queer Eye actually gives them air time to talk about intersections of prejudice??? and that’s… so weirdly cool????
In the year 1905 my paternal great-grandmother, a Jewess from Austria-Hungary, left her homeland–although perhaps “fled” would be a better word–with nothing but a suitcase, the clothes on her back, and the potential promise of finding work with a distant cousin who had been living in the slums of Victorian Glasgow in Scotland since the 1890s.
During that time she married my great-grandfather, an Irish Catholic immigrant who lived in the notorious “Rat Pits”–so called because the Irish (and therefore inherently Catholic) residents “bred like rats”–and worked as a boat smuggler (meaning he smuggled people and other commodities into Scotland from Ireland on a boat, he was not in fact a smuggler of boats), a shoe maker, a wood carver and general jack of all trades master of none, with a stereotypical love of drink and a violent temper to go with it. But he provided for her and didn’t force her into sex work like so many girls her age were, so she forgave a great many things that would no longer be forgiven and had lots of children, many of whom died.
Dad tells me he remembers her “singing” their names and lighting candles at specific times, but only when his grandfather was “out” (smuggling, or visiting another woman, he never elaborated on this) because she sang her prayers in Yiddish and they’d spent many years trying to hide her Jewishness.
Being a Catholic in the turbulent streets of Glasgow where Protestant faith is still practiced militantly in some areas, was troublesome, but it was infinitely less trouble than being Jewish during the years that would lead up to two world wars. So she hid behind his Catholicism and his large family, and watched as the world turned against her and her people once more. And despite her pale skin and bright eyes and her passing status as an equal among the Irish matriarchs of the slums, they still woke to blood smeared over their front door more than once, or were spat on in the streets. She told my father, jokingly, it was her nose, though to look at photos you’d never notice she was different from anyone else. That was the joke.
After her husband died she became unapologetic about her Jewishness. She spoke Yiddish at home and made sure my father, who had been living with her from the age of seven, knew some words too. He was fourteen years old when he heard her “sing” his mother’s name and
watched her tear the clothes she was wearing, having now outlived all of
her children. She outlived many of her grandchildren too. And when no one was left to make the meal of condolence, my mother–a gentile girl from the neighboring street–found out, she tried her best to make one.
Dad tells me it was largely inedible, not least of all because it wasn’t kosher, but for his Maw (Scots slang for mother) it was one of her first memories of someone not of the faith acknowledging her Jewishness with kindness. She was sixty years old and had been living in Glasgow for forty five years.
And she spent the majority of that time forced to move from slum to slum by her faith, until eventually in post World War Two Glasgow, the local authorities either had to dig mass graves or deal with the conditions of the poor and chose to be merciful and built better housing instead. She was eventually moved to a housing estate where she could look out and see a garden rather than squalor and degradation and no one charged her extra rent because everyone knows people like her have secret stashes of money and will pay anything not have their windows broken or pigs blood slashed over the door. The history books never tell you that sort of thing. They only tell you about the selective moments in history when tyrants had the audacity to threaten other tyrants, and only then does mass discrimination, abject poverty and genocide through the former become an unpalatable evil that needs to be stopped.
Nothing much has changed.
She lived long enough to hear about Holocaust deniers and my father tells me, spat
their names with all the vitriol of an ancient curse held dormant in the fires of the earth. And when she was buried, the man who cut her tombstone informed my father it probably wasn’t a good idea to put a Star of David on the stone, because those were the stones that were the most often attacked, the graves desecrated and the grass salted so nothing would grow.
And this is no ancient history. This was in the UK, in 1979. This was less than forty years ago. And still whenever my father visits he will find some form of vandalism enacted on her tombstone. It’s her name you see, even in death it doesn’t sound right.
Margarethe Ingrid Fehrenbach Patton. Or “Maggie Patton” as she was known for most of her life, never hearing her own name save for the few times she went back to the degradation of the Gorbals, usually when someone had died and there were traditions to be kept. And forty years on some dull and depraved bastard still feels the need to paint a swastika on her grave in neon paint or tip it over and smash the urn of flowers, because not even death is free of persecution.
And this is not just my family history, it is many family histories told over and over again, and I get to recount it from the safety of 2015, with my gentile name and baptized gentile faith.
So yes, it matters that we are seeing a new wave of antisemitism, online and in the physical world. It matters that there are blogs being set up for the purpose of sending images of dead bodies and gore to Jewish people and their friends. It matters that those people are losing friends because it’s the only way to not also be harassed and retain their own freedom of communication the way theylike it. It matters that people feel the need to ask what is wrong with Nazism in the same way one might ask what is wrong with a little rain. It matters that Jewish characters in popular media are stripped of their ethnicity and faith and made not only into Neo-Nazi sympathizers, but volunteers to a Neo-Nazi regime (if you can’t work out why this is horrifying, here). It matters that a family in Houston Texas found the mezuzah of their door violated with the symbol of a Nazi swastika. It matters so much because this is not the past, nor is it some distant land you can pretend you can neither see nor hear. We live in the age of constant communication, we are no longer blind, except to things we do not wish to see.
We cannot pretend that horrific acts of violence are not enacted against others on a daily basis, because if we do so then we are enabling these acts. You cannot stand silent against hatred, otherwise you enable things like this:
It’s happening in the way in which people insist on calling the black people being murdered by police “thugs” while white protesters are cited the rules of Baseball (three strikes and you’re benched with a fine or jail time, not murdered), it’s happening every time someone says “well maybe they shouldn’t name their children ghetto names" as a means to dehumanize another human being, it’s happening whenever someone cites free speech in the protection of hate crimes. It happens every time you think “well it’s not happening to me so it can’t be that bad” and close your eyes and make the horror of it all into a mere inconvenience interrupting your enjoyable browsing time between mainlining netflix and cat gifs.
It’s happening. And we don’t have the excuse of ignorance to hide behind, it’s there.
And I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can block and report all the live long day, but it doesn’t solve the issue of tumblr and other social media platforms being like “just ignore it, dont feed the trolls”, like sticking a band aid over a gaping sore in need of urgent surgery in the hope that it will somehow go away. You might think someone receiving gory images and threats is not the same as an act of physical violence, but it is undoubtedly violence. It’s people painting pigs blood over my Great Grandmas door and telling her she doesn’t belong in the country that she thought was safe and being told snidely to be thankful it wasn’t worse.
To you it might be petty and mildly distressing, but to another person it’s salted earth and the promise that not even death is safe.
And you are either complicit in this, or you are against it.
Decide.
I’d say sorry for reblogging this again, but I just had to read Nazi apologism with my own two eyeballs in the year 2017 and I’m this close to hauling off with an axe.
I reiterate my previous statement from two years ago: you are either against these atrocities, or you are complicit in them. Decide.
[edited to fix the use of language in original post, if you reblogged this earlier, please delete and reblog without the unintentional use of a slur word used to describe sex workers.]
I think a lot of the autistic and autism communities have this idea that… there’s a type of person called aspie. And those people aren’t ~real autistics~, they just are really good at academic geekery and bad at knowing that people are real.
But there’s this notion that *that* kind of autistic person isn’t really disabled, especially if they can pass.
And there’s a real cognitive subtype that actually *is* associated with receptive language problems, being good at academics and other abstracty things, and being able to pass if you push yourself in certain ways. But those people are disabled too.
And I think – those of us who have been pushed to see ourselves as that subtype when we’re not, when we’d never in a million years be capable of that, often end up being somewhat repulsed by people who *do* have that particular cognitive configuration.
And it’s not ok. Because the ableism we face isn’t their fault, and they’re no more free of it than we are. And we need to not be part of the problem.
The aspie hate things people say are not accurate descriptions of *anyone’s* cognitive type.
This is true and valid and I agree we need to stop eating our own.
Though I want to say something about the aspie subtype. As someone who benefited from that label (and no long IDs as an aspie), I’ve always felt that non-autistics and neurotypicals tend to value one subtype over the other. They usually are the once that sort of enforce this schism. Aspies are portrayed as goofy, cute, white boys who just want to fit in. People see they stereotype of them being good with math and computers as marketable. They seek out IT type aspies. Whilst everyone else gets passed over. The problem is many of them that are articulate, passing and have enough social reading, they end up buying this well constructed lie that they are far more valuable than non-speaking, chronically ill or non passing autists. So they end up throwing us under the bus.
This is not a new phenomena. Nevertheless it’s still fugging awful. My problem is not aspies but the NTs and the allistics that enforce and build this massive schism up. They want us in-fight, they want the aspies to talk over us over issues, they want the resentment. This hierarchy is artificial and awful and we need to destroy it.
So yes, they are disabled, but they also benefit a great many privileges too they need to realize themselves that we’re all drowning.
I have no problem personally with the term ‘Aspie’ or people who identify as such, but I stopped using it to identify myself because I realised that it came with baggage. Functioning label baggage. ‘Asperger’, for people who even know the term, tends to be equated with ‘high achiever’. It tends to imply that the person will go far if they find the right career, will succeed in academia if they find the right specialty. It implies a level of competence that I consistently failed to be able to live up to.
Now, my diagnosis was for Asperger Syndrome plus a handful of other things, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any diagnostician would diagnose me differently. I am highly verbal, highly literate, and as a child I learnt to pass to a degree and I live with that privilege/curse every day. But I failed out of my last year of high school and four further education attempts because the social stresses and expectations pushed my anxiety through the roof and into burnout so severe I was housebound. I had a handful of minimum wage jobs, one I know I was fired from because of my (then un-dxed) autism, and two that I probably stopped getting shifts from because of my short-term memory issues and my failure to grasp things at times that seemed easy or common sense to those around me.
‘Aspie’, with its connotations of competence behind a quirky, eccentric shell, made those around me – family, social workers, employment case managers – think that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. And that was crushing.
I realised when I started reading about other autistic people, that I always seemed to find more in common with ‘autistic’ rather than ‘Aspie’ autobiographers. Even if our actual life experiences were very different, ‘autistic’ authors seemed to write more about problems I faced, and seemed to more often have a world view closer to my own.
‘Aspie’ began to seem very limited, while ‘autistic’ encompassed the whole of my identity and disability. It had the flexibility I needed to cover my experience.
Add to that, I have a running tally for how many people I once loved and respected who have made the ‘arse burgers’ joke to my face when I disclosed. The first time was a very old and dear friend at my birthday dinner, a handful of months after my diagnosis. At the time, only a few people close to me knew. Every time someone makes that joke it catches me unguarded, and every time it hurts. I will never understand why people think that making that joke when someone is in such an incredibly vulnerable place is acceptable. Every time, it’s as if they think they’re the first person to think of it, and that they’re hilarious. At least the word ‘autistic’ gives me one less vulnerable place than if I use the word ‘Asperger’.
knitting in the dark 