athousanderrors

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andreashettle:

aiyumedayori:

Hey children, Did You Know?
Representation isn’t exclusively important for the people being represented!!!
White kids need to watch POC being heroes too!!! It shows them that people can save the day regardless of their race!!!
Boys need to watch girls being strong and powerful!!!! It shows them that people deserve respect regardless of their gender!!!
Slim kids need to see confident and adored fat characters!!!! It shows them that everyone can be loved and love themselves regardless of their body types!!!!
Cishet kids need to watch queer kids falling in love (or just not falling in love!!!) and having happy endings!!! It shows that everyone is valid and everyone deserves to be happy regardless of sexuality or identity!!!!
Representation isn’t just for minorities, it’s important so that kids can learn that yes, they can be whoever they want to be and they deserve good things, but so do people who aren’t like them!!!!

And non-disabled kids need to watch disabled characters who … 

Have their own story arc, 

Have their own will and agency and goals and motivations that aren’t just to support the emotional growth and maturation or story arcs of the non-disabled

Get to have happy endings WITHOUT BEING CURED OF THEIR DISABILITY

Have complex and nuanced personalities without stereotyping

If they are villains, then their villainy has nothing whatsoever to do with their disability, and there are ALSO “good guys” in the same story who are disabled people

Because non-disabled people need to learn to respect us disabled people as having the same range of talents, interests, etc. as they do. And that we deserve to exist and to be included in the mainstream of society–which means everyone has a shared responsibility for continuously creating an accessible environment.  And employers need to learn that they need to ASK us how we intend to carry out the essential tasks of the job instead of just assuming that we can’t do them.  

Non-disabled people need to learn that most disabled people can work–and do! If just given the opportunity to show what we can do! And for disabled people who cannot work at all, they have value too and deserve to be respected and included in society because, no, they’re not just “slackers” and no, it’s actually very rare for anyone to be “gaming the system” – if they have welfare then it’s because they have passed very rigorous screening to prove that they really do need the benefits! 

Non-disabled people need to learn that videos should always be captioned for people who are deaf or hard of hearing or have auditory processing disorder. Images should always come with image descriptions for people who are blind, have low vision, or vision processing disorder.  Important information should be available in easy-to-understand language for people with intellectual disabilities. Public buildings should always be fully wheelchair accessible and have braille and so forth.

Religious diversity matters too–non-Muslim people and non-Jewish people need to see that the overwhelming majority of Muslim people and Jewish people are just regular folks like them, and some of them do amazing things, and some of them are leading regular boring lives just like the lives of many non-Muslim and non-Jewish people. Religious people need to see that atheist people have a sense of morals and values just like they do, it’s just that we don’t consult a particular religious body of literature in knowing right from wrong. 

Class diversity matters too. People who are rich or middle class need to realize that most people living in poverty ALREADY HAVE JOBS, and that the average poor person often works harder than the average middle class/rich person. They aren’t poor due to laziness, they’re poor because they may only have the skills for (or only have access to) low paying jobs that don’t pay enough to keep them out of poverty. Or for people who are on social security or other benefits, many benefits and regulations about who can receive them keep people in perpetual poverty with very little, almost no, opportunity to escape–even if they are desperately trying. Regulations meant to get people off welfare often do so simply by cutting them off and leaving them in worse poverty–and NOT by actually improving their access to opportunities for income or other ways to escape poverty without benefits. 
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aegipanomnicorn:

finnglas:

Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.

We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.

The bigger part is schema.

Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.

One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.

If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”

The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”

BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.

Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.

Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.

Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. 

And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.

And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.

But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.

So you see this.

And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)

Do you see what I’m saying?

I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.

And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.

But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.

So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.

It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.

So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.

(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)

I love a good lecture.