disabledtalk:

“Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren.  Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump.  At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life.  Each yields its version of the same cliche.  A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those though taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make is to help another reach true potential.”

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it.  Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history…Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968.  To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist.  She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909…Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps.  She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realise that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause.  Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class.  Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness.  Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see.  Keller’s research was not just book learning:  ”I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums.  If I could not see it, I could smell it.”

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet.  She soon became the most notorious.  Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged….Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her developement.”

Keller recalled having met this editor:  ”At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them.  But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error.  I must have shrunk in intelligence in the years since I met him.”  She went on, “Oh ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle!  Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change.  Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others.  She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s.  She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his compaigns for the presidency.  She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics…

One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions.  Her praise of the USSR now seems naive, embarrassing, even treasonous.  But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media left it out.`

-Lies My Teacher Told Me - James W. Loewen, 2007

fromonesurvivortoanother:

zuky:

This is the story of a racist myth that began with a light-hearted letter to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968 and subsequently exploded in North American culture — in direct opposition to every shred of scientific evidence — becoming so prevalent that credulous eaters buy into it to the point of experiencing its effects on a purely psychosomatic basis. 

It’s often been called “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” and its premise is that MSG in Chinese food results in unpleasant allergic reactions. Interestingly enough, higher quantities of MSG in non-Chinese foods are not reported to have the same effects. MSG is a naturally occurring amino acid, and some of the highest levels of MSG a North American consumer is likely to ingest come in vine-ripened tomatoes, aged cheese, and dry-aged steak — yet there is no reported medical phenomenon known as “Italian Food Syndrome” or “American Steakhouse Syndrome”.

Monosodium glutamate was first isolated from the seaweed kombu, commonly used in the Japanese broth dashi, by biochemist Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University in 1908. He named its taste umami because it differed from the five conventional flavours of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and spicy. Ikeda patented his discovery and MSG became commercially available in 1909. It was found to enhance flavours with one third of the amount of sodium as traditional salt, i.e. sodium chloride. In this sense, monosodium glutamate is probably healthier than sodium chloride because it achieves flavour with reduced sodium levels.

MSG was immediately popular in Asia and became common in the North American food industry after World War II, used in baby food, canned soup, vegetable juice, frozen food, as well as seasoning mix brands such as Accent. Yet somehow in the 1960s, this popular food additive became associated with Chinese food and deemed a health hazard. Why? Because Chinese people, culture, and food have been targeted by widespread and effective racist hate campaigns in North America since the 19th century, buttressed by wild claims that the Chinese are “unclean”, carry diseases, are sexually-deviant opium addicts, inscrutable and sneaky, a Yellow Peril. 

The 1968 letter to the New England Journal of Medicine which solidified the myth of MSG was actually written by a Chinese immigrant named Robert Ho Man Kwok, who described “numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitation” after eating in American Chinese restaurants. The letter opened the floodgates to a barage of letters and related articles complaining of headaches, dizziness, paralysis of the throat, tingling in the temples, tightness of the jaw, irregular heartbeat, depression, hyperactivity, and all manner of digestive ailments. 

Given this preponderance of anecdotal evidence, numerous scientific studies have been performed since then attempting to identify this “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”. The funny thing is that no study has ever been able to do so. When people don’t know that they’re consuming MSG, they don’t suffer adverse reactions. All national and international food safety bodies have concluded that MSG is perfectly safe. People in Japan eat MSG every single day and the Japanese have the longest life expectancy in the world.

Fear of MSG is a racist remnant of the Chinese Exclusion era which exists only in North America and has been thoroughly debunked by science. Yet racist socialization is so powerful that people actually experience physical effects such as headaches, depression, and indigestion based solely on their indoctrinated fear of Chinese people and Chinese food. Think it over next time you eat parmesan cheese or a vine-ripened tomato.

guess what also gives people headaches? eating foods with high sodium content without drinking any liquids

TW: discussion of rape culture, sexism

silvysartfulness:

“If you think that the nice guy ranting only happens on the internet, you’ve never had to deal with your thoroughly drunken friend shouting about how no girls would go out with a nice guy like him, even though he’s surrounded by single women he ignores because they aren’t attractive enough for him. If you think guys getting pissy and escalating matters because you told people to stop making sex jokes is a feature of the internet, well, you’ve never asked anyone to stop making jokes that make you uncomfortable. If you think that inappropriate comments and requests for sex are an internet thing, you’ve never tried to stop a coworker or boss from hitting on you repeatedly, or a head of security, or the guy at the convenience store across the street. If you think that being shouted at and asked to show people your tits just because you present as a woman only happens in chat rooms and online games, you’ve never walked past a frat house, or, unfortunately, through the main thoroughfares of either university I’ve attended. If you think unasked for commentary on a woman’s looks only happens because girls post pictures on internet forums (which probably means they’re asking for it), you’ve never been at a bus stop, or the city square, or a mall, or… well, anywhere, really. If you think insecure men trying to drive women out of activism only happens in online male-dominated communities, you’ve never paid attention politics. Or Fox. Or CNN, sadly. If you think the reaction to rape victims is bad on twitter, try sharing that experience in person. Or try even standing up for a rape victim. Count how many minutes until someone points out “but men can be falsely accused! The woman just changed her mind! You just can’t believe those drunk *insert varying level of insulting reference to gender*!””

—

It’s Not Just the Internet. It Never Has Been.

(via loveyourrebellion)

Okay everybody ignore this just settling a bet with the roommate.

TW: discussion of sex work in fiction

fuckyeahworldbuilding:

How does your society view prostitution? Is it legal or illegal? Would outlawing it even cross people’s minds? Is it looked down on? Is it seen as just another profession?

Real life examples: I’m drawing a blank here. Does anyone have some knowledge to share?

Real life examples: temple prostitutes whose trade was part of the worship of the gods, societies where a distinction was drawn between ‘common/dirty’ street prostitutes and high class courtesans, and differing opinions on prostitutes based on class within a society (Victorian England, as mentioned in limyaael’s fantasy rant on whores).

Also might be worth thinking about how your culture’s gender issues intersect. In our world, there have always been male prostitutes, but in most cultures they’re vastly outnumbered by female ones due to patriarchy.

girljanitor:

blackraincloud:

I hate talking with teachers about Student’s behavior and how best to facilitate interaction between him and other students.

It always goes something like this:

Teacher: “Student started helping a classmate with a problem, but when the classmate still made a mistake, Student yelled at them that they were lazy and must not care!”

Me: “Ok. That happens because Student doesn’t have an intuitive knowledge that what he’s thinking and experiencing is not what someone else is thinking and experiencing. It’s extremely difficult for him to put himself in someone else’s shoes.”

Teacher: “Oh, right. See that’s the compassion thing I was talking about—”

Me: “NO. Student has compassion, we see that in his eagerness to help others.”

Teacher: “Yeah, but the empathy just isn’t—”

Me: “NO. It’s not empathy he’s lacking. He just has a shaky understanding of other people’s consciences, can’t accurately guess what others are thinking, and therefor tends to assume others know what he knows.”

Teacher: o_O

Me: “So, in the situation you’re talking about, Student noticed someone struggling and thought he would give them his knowledge so they would know what to do and not have to struggle. But once he told them what he knew, he assumed they now had the same understanding he had. So when they then make more mistakes, he assumes they’re doing it on purpose or refusing to listen to him.” So, you see he cares, he just gets frustrated and misreads others’ motivations due to his disability.”

Teacher: ….

Teacher: ……..

Teacher: “So how can you get him to care about other people?”

Me: *self-immolates*

This is a perfect illustration of why a lot of Autistic adults like myself maintain that it seems to be Allistics, not Autistics, who have difficulty “caring about other people”.

Jeebus fricken crapapple.