That is the main thing, after all. Eighty percent of Americans live in urban areas. Waves of immigration continually rework the demographics of four-fifths of the country. People are getting used to difference. It isn't so scary any more.
There remain many areas of resistance to full rights, access, and representation: one of the more heartening things about being in grad school is exposure to how integrated that awareness is becoming in psychological practice. Race is big, and ethnicity. Permanent injury, trauma, and various disabilities have vast social and psychological implications. So as it is heartening to see
attitudes soften towards sexuality that doesn't fit in a neat little box, it is also interesting to read new perspectives on how we are creeping toward a more open, accepting, helping society.
But there are dangers. To wit:
...with the Human Genome Project finding in 2000 that all humans are more than 99 per cent alike, many thought genomics would put the final nail in the race coffin.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. Shortly after the HGP's finding, several research projects began focusing on mapping this less than 1 per cent of human genetic variation onto social categories of race.
This small variation reflects millions of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), some of which may loosely correlate with geography. Yet the resilience of linking such differences and disparities to biological mechanisms is striking, since most analysis of the data cautions otherwise.
Some uses of new technologies also reflect this renewed effort. Though they explicitly reject the scientific racism of the past, race is given genetic significance in an effort to resolve health disparities, provide a richer sense of ancestry, and aid law enforcement.
If technology is for the moment knocking down old notions about the immutability (or even relevance) of race, it also holds the potential for reinforcing those same notions is the information is misused. True enough.On the language side, here is an interesting discussion of the language of disability, from the blog Feministe:
Before we go any further, you guys are going to need a quick tutorial on models of disability.
There are a number of models, but the two primary models are the medical model and the social model. These are the two most often discussed because of the particular ways they conflict with one another.
The medical model centers around the individual. The medical model defines disability in opposition to the normal body/brain, as deviating from that model of normalcy, and any problems that arise in your life are seen as arising from your deviation. Thus, these problems are to be solved by addressing that deviation — by bringing your body/brain closer to the normal model.
The social model centers around the structure of society. The social model does not seek to define disability: instead, it proposes that the problem is that society is built such that many people are prohibited from full participation in society because of their differences. Under the social model, the problem is not the difference, the problem is that society does not accommodate that difference. “The problem is not the person” is a common refrain from champions of the social model.
In short, you might say: The cause of exclusion is not the disability. The cause of exclusion is how the rest of society treats disability. Therefore, what needs to be addressed to eliminate this exclusion is not the individual person’s condition. What needs to be addressed is how society is set up in such a way that this person faces trouble when attempting to exercise hir right to participation equal to that of a non-disabled person. What do you change? Not the person. Society.
Enjoy. See you tomorrow.
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