I used to think that exposure=knowledge, but that isn’t the case. I go to a historically black college and thought I would understand African-American culture better by watching and listening to the people there.

I’ve never been familiar with this subject; I have my own unfortunate white bias and it’s hard for me to understand any NT community. As I interact with African-American students, there are many subcultures, personal variations and historical contexts I learn of that make it increasingly difficult to generalize about them.

I can tell you that being a home support worker has completely destroyed my self esteem. People I go help often seem to take pleasure in reminding me that I am at the bottom rung of the health care ladder. The number of times I have been told “they don’t train any of you to do anything”…no, we are told that legally we are only allowed to do certain tasks. The number of times people I care for have run down other HSWs as “idiots”, “stupid”, “lazy”, or that “that worker that can’t speak english”.

I am an easy going person who works hard and tries to get along with people but I still have had many tiems when people I care for have called me told me to “fuck off”, threatened to punch my “fucking face in”, thrown things at me, swung their fists at me.

My family and freinds meanwhile think I’m a complete doormat to be doing a job like this. Many freinds have tried it and only lasted a couple of months or less. Hey, who likes getting threatend, screamed at, sworn at, bossed around and humiliated, clean peoples shit and piss.

Yeah Ballastexistenz you are a just a human being like everyone else…congratulations, you can count yourself amongst the rest of the assholes.

At the end of the meeting I mentioned how pleased I was that in a previous phone conversation the principal had mentioned that she strongly supported the idea of inclusion where possible, saying that it benefited both the child and other children, who would learn acceptance of differences and diversity. The autism program head then added that she also thought it benefited both the child and other children. She went on to state something to the effect that it enabled the other children to see how fortunate they were and how others ‘had it worse’ then they did. To be honest, I was too stunned by the statement to know how to react.

I still can’t quite believe that she said that.

Fortunately, I think the principal’s idea of the benefits of inclusion is not based on the autism program head’s philosophy – although I do note that she was silent too. I can only hope her silence is either for the same reason as mine or that she did not want to reprimand her colleague in front of me. Regardless, I’m now looking for a Plan B. If my daughter does end up at this school, I think I will be spending quite a bit of time there.

In other words, there’s a big component of wanting to believe tht they’re the brave advocates “defending” Those People by educating everyone about the “truth” of their horrible lives, even if they don’t even work with Them personally. Of course, they expect to always be seen as wonderfully caring and open-minded people for it.

I still think there’s room for optimism [what Ettina said]. Actually, I think we need to work on the assumption that there is, and work hard at looking for where it might be found.

Also: I wanted to add an amendment to my post, changing “upsetting” to “upsetting or life-threatening.”

I’m thinking of (this is second-hand, my ex participated in this and told me about it afterwards) a series of anti-racism workshops held in a hospital. Everyone was required to participate and staff considered this an appropriate forum to vent frustration and prejudice. One complaint was, “This isn’t prejudice, they really *do* smell bad! [of curry, whatever]. The animator’s response was to point out that many Haitians think that white people smell of vomit. The observation wasn’t contradicted, simply put in a larger context. It shut people up.

Or a complaint by a European acquaintance of mine who was very unhappy about the social strain created by a particular immigrant group. He would go on and on about all the problems they created, and complain “I don’t like complaining like this, I don’t want to be a racist.” So I asked, How do these people understand and present the difficulties you’re talking about? And the answer was, “I don’t know, because they don’t have access to the media.” And that answer was enough to stop the venting, because there was now a larger context and a new way of asking questions about the situation. Which was really what he was looking for.

I am not denying the horrible attitudes, just saying that yes, there is space for optimism anyway, even with the horrible attitudes.

For the second-degree stories though, I’m afraid it might be much rougher going. Someone who is that invested in someone else’s stories sounds like they’re invested in an us/them alignment. They would probably have to have more first-hand experience having their own relationship with disabled people – as n. was suggesting – to be able to see things differently. Though as tqm^Amorpha says, the fact that they are invested in their second-hand viewpoint could make this very difficult.

You also get this second-degree phenomenon with students. They learn about situations and about one way to frame them, and are all happy with their newly acquired knowledge and ability to parse. Then they take this oversimplified perspective and apply it indiscriminately with little or no first-hand experience. This, happily, you can expect to pass with time, experience and maturity. But it can be upsetting until it does. And really upsetting if it doesn’t.

I think there is a commonplace myth that exposure equals understanding; if you are around a certain group of people for prolonged periods, you get to know and understand them as well as anyone.

In which case, you’d think that plantation owners would regularly give up, set their slaves free and negotiate fair pay and employment conditions…

In fact, all positions of power have the potential to corrupt – not because people are mean or exploitative. A nurse who is afraid to look a quad in the eye will remain afraid to do so until somehow the dynamic changes from patient-nurse to peer – not peer as in fellow quadraglegic, but fellow human being.

I hope that makes sense, very dopey today.