Open letter to Trever Noah about the word "spaz."

Dear Trevor Noah,

I’m sure I’m probably not alone in telling you that your show is a balm for me, a respite from a despairing world and a healing draught of laughter in the face of things that hurt too much.

I’ve got two kids who I adopted from traumatizing orphanages in the Czech Republic. They were kids the authorities told me “no one would adopt” because they are from a despised, non-white ethnic group—the Roma.

We spent the first ten years of their lives living there in the Czech Republic. 2008, the year before my daughter was born, was the first year when Romani children were allowed to go to standard Czech schools. By the time she went to first grade, I didn’t need a lawyer or a police escort to get her into school, but it was nip and tuck there for a while.

My son’s preschool attempted to expel him when he developed a minor allergic skin rash, because he was non-white and their assumption was that he was diseased and contagious. They would have succeeded too, if his pediatrician hadn’t been progressive and feisty. That was in 2015.

I tell you this, because you need to know that I’ve seen a few things. I’m a white American, but I’m not exactly your typical white American. I’ve had “the talk” with my kids, ages eleven and thirteen, about police and brown people. I learned how to do it by reading Black authors, listening to you and talking to my Nigerian friend in Prague, who was distressed when I said we were moving back to the US to escape the rampant racism and the beatings my son was enduring at school.

“You’re going THERE to escape racism?”

I grew up in the US—in a particularly backward and monotone part of it, in fact. I have few illusions about things here. I told her that she was absolutely right. That we probably wouldn’t be going, if my children were Black. But they aren’t Black. They’re Romani, and the realities on the ground are such, that it’s safer here for them than there. She agreed that that was the best a parent could do.

Image of a dark-haired man drawing a picture of a female figurine with his toes.

Before I had kids, I lived and travelled in more than 35 countries, including several months in Zimbabwe near your homeland. I spent ten years working as a journalist, primarily exposing the quiet but lethal racism against Roma in Central and Eastern Europe. That’s my history, which I think may give you some perspective on what I need to say to you.

I am also pretty anti-celebrity. I’ve never really cared about a celebrity who was alive before, since the last one I liked at all was Bob Marley and I was five when he died. I know famous people have the same feelings and foibles the rest of us do. And so, it isn’t so much that you fell as a giant for me when you dismissed the concerns of people with disabilities. It is that I felt like I was betrayed by a friend.

That’s silly, I know. You don’t know me, but I don’t watch any TV, except for you. I listen to audio books or listen to international news. I watch Netflix on a tablet occasionally. But TV? Nope, except you when I exercise every morning, there’s nothing on there I care to see. And as I said, your ability to laugh in the face of the worst depredations of our world is really and truly medicine.

And I know that it is always only a matter of time before anyone, even the best friend, has a different opinion. That’s not the point. I have disagreed with you several times. No sweat. I don’t even entirely remember what the fine points were. This is different, because it strikes at the core of who you are. It is something that betrays all the work of bridging divides and empowering the disempowered and fostering empathy that you’ve done.

Yup, it’s about Lizzo. Now, I don’t know LIzzo very well. My daughter listens to her. I think I recall her listening to a song with the word “spaz” in it at one point. I noticed and mentioned it to her, explained that it’s a derogatory word that we don’t use in our house, because it is used as an insult against people with disabilities. We had the whole discussion about how it means something quite different in this music. I didn’t know for sure but guessed, even at that point, that its meaning might be significantly different in African American culture than it is for most of the country.

I wasn’t that mad. I didn’t forbid my daughter to listen to that music. It’s far from the only “bad word” I don’t want my kids repeating at school that they encounter in popular music. And no, just talking to my daughter about it, didn’t fix it. My daughter is developmentally disabled, essentially due to the horrific conditions Romani children endure in the Czech Republic. She has talents but she was injured by that system and part of that injury is neurological damage that interferes with her ability to understand abstract concepts, remember conversations or connect cause and effect.

So, I talk about these things with her, but she may well repeat the word “spaz” anyway. She’ll certainly hear it used as an insult against disabled children at school, maybe even against herself, though she works very hard to blend in and pass for average.

And that’s the thing, Trevor. I’m not mad at Lizzo. What she did was something that happens. Yes, I understand the argument that she was a bit dismissive about apologizing and changing the song with “spaz” in the lyrics, but as you said, she changed it. That is such a big step in the right direction, it’s worth recognizing.

People with disabilities have largely been left out of the “woke” wave to shield under-privileged groups from microaggressions. So many people would have completely ignored criticism over “spaz” or any other word insulting people with disabilities. You sound like you would have. Lizzo didn’t ignore us, and I’m not too picky beyond that.

If I was someone close enough to her to have a conversation, I might have said, “Please, stop on that a moment. Take a moment to empathize. It isn’t just about avoiding being publicly criticized. It really does hurt people, just like some words would hurt you.” But that’’s it. The basic thing was, she did what was needed. She apologized and changed the song.

Here are two other bits about my background, Trevor. I am a linguist by education, so when I say I’m looking at this not just from experience but also from a language development standpoint, there’s that. I am also blind—that is legally blind. I see about 5 percent of what you do. It’s not noting but it’s pretty minimal. I’ve been that way since I was born. Yup, I’m the same person who worked as an international journalist and hung out in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe as a lone white girl. I was also blind while I did that.

Here are some facts, you need to know about the word “spaz.”

1. I was called “spaz” as an insult every day for over a decade as a child, in the United States. It isn’t only a derogatory term in the UK and Australia, as you insisted repeatedly on television. It was and still is used as a vulgar insult in this country. You claimed it isn’t and was never used that way in the US. That was factually wrong and I hope you’ll retract it publicly.

2. I have noticed the linguistic migration of the word “spaz'“ over the past couple of decades. As I’m sure you’ve read, it started as “spastic,” relating to a type of muscle convulsion or cramp suffered by people with some disabilities, but it has been used to insult all people with disabilities, including blind people.

3. When Donald Trump made that motion with his arm at the reporter who was disabled, that was the motion that usually accompanies the word “spaz.” That gesture also refers to a “spastic” muscle contraction. People with spastic disabilities sometimes move their arms that way involuntarily. Donald Trump is obviously in the United States—not the UK or Australia. And that was not very long ago. Donald, as you’ve pointed out, doesn’t have a great memory and wouldn’t have remembered if this word was only used as an insult decades earlier or in another country. The fact that he used it is pretty good proof that it is a conventional American insult.

4. About fifteen years ago, I first heard people start to refer to “spaz” as just meaning “crazy” and overly emotional. It had migrated from just disabilities, to mental illness, and like the word “crazy” to behavior that is considered a bit too much. It then migrated further in some communities to mean something less negative as acceptance of “wild” behavior became more widespread.

5. But it is still used as an insult, NOT just in other countries. Here and now. And despite having a migrated and coopted meaning, I am sure you are aware that many other insulting epithets have undergone similar linguistic migration and we don’t excuse them. It is hard to imagine that with your American staff you weren't;t told the truth. There’s a word for knowingly obfuscating the truth and insisting that our lived experience is not real—gaslighting.

6. As an example, please try asking Siri (or Google) the definition of the word “Jip.” I believe you’re well-educated enough to know the connotations of that word and would never use it. But Siri says the origins of that word are “unknown.” While even Siri—and certainly a dictionary—would have told Lizzo the connotations of “spaz” had she checked, an uneducated person could not be blamed too much for using the word “Jip,” since looking it up isn’t very helpful. Yet that word is abhorrent and rightly shunned in woke circles. It is a racial epithet aimed directly at my children. But it’s used here in rural Oregon. I used it as a kid, until I learned better. Gip = Gyp = Gypsy = stereotypes about Roma being thieves. Words migrate linguistically, but that does not mean we give them a pass when they are still currently used as insults and derogatory epithets.

Here are some things, I am betting are true about you, Trevor:

1. I cannot imagine that under any other circumstances, you would deem it acceptable to use a word that is still used as an insult against a vulnerable group, if that group was a race, ethnic group, culture or LGBT+ group.

2. I feel very sure you have been told by people with disabilities whether in online comments or hopefully in person, that “spaz” is still used as an insult, including in the US. I wonder if you were told that before you went on the air dismissing us as people with valid concerns or only after.

3. I feel pretty confident that I’ve heard you say that it should be up to the given vulnerable group to say when a derogatory term used against them is “fair game” again. But you aren’t giving people with disabilities that agency.

4. You decided to state on your show and at great length with repetition, that Lizzo never did anything wrong. You criticized and condemned those members of the disability community who asked for an apology and a change to Lizzo’s song. That using the word “spaz” was legitimate in her circumstances because you believe “spaz” is only derogatory in the UK and Australia.

5. You have a diverse crew. I guarantee some of your staff know very well that that your statement is blatantly untrue. Either they told you that and you ignored them, or they are so afraid of crossing you, that you have got much worse problems than marginalizing people with disabilities.

Trevor, here’s the thing. Lizzo goofed. But it was understandable. We don’t check every word we use for its connotations in the next neighborhood over. It’s possible that in her subculture, “spaz” really hasn’t been used as an insult in her generation. She was told, and she fixed it.

Some people apparently weren’t happy with her quick and unreflective turnaround, feeling that she was only doing it to avoid criticism. That’s what I saw you get upset about. I’ve noticed that you often seem to feel protective toward the African American community. Nobody’s perfect and every time the Black community in the US makes a mistake, they get just as little leeway as a Black teenage male committing the usual sins that white teenagers regularly get away with. I get it.

But you went a step further and a step too far. You insisted at length that the facts are not the facts. You gaslighted us, telling us that what we know is reality isn’t reality. And you did it because the group you were dismissing is the one group you have never included in your work of bridging divides. I wonder if it is only that you have little experience with people with disabilities.

I have always loved your work because of all the good things in it. I have vaguely noticed that you never include anything about people with disabilities, but I didn’t realize, until now that this is a real blind spot for you. (No, that’s not a problematic term for me. It isn’t used as an derogatory term against blind people.)

Frankly, it isn’t just you. The woke movement is often dismissive of one particular group they should naturally be allied with, and that is people with disabilities. Sometimes we’re included as an afterthought but often we’re left out entirely, as we’ve been left out of your work in bridging divides and making healing out of humor.

Maybe for you that’s partly because people shy away from making fun of anything to do with disabilities. I guarantee I could introduce you to some people who can get you rolling on the ground laughing about disability issues. We are sometimes a bit too much, but I’m sure some of our self-styled “gimp humor” could be made accessible to the rest of the world.

Trevor, you said people often get mad at a celebrity who does something that hurts them and that’s it. They’re done. That’s cancel culture. That’s not my way. I mean, maybe if I heard someone I respected and admired had bragged about grabbing women by the pussy. I guess, I’d probably actually boycott them immediately. But this isn’t like that.

I notoriously can’t hold a grudge. But I haven’t been able to watch your show for the past month. I thought I’d just get over it, but it hurts. When I see you going on without any concern for the hurt this caused and when I saw that it is virtually impossible to send you a letter you will actually get, I can’t listen to your voice without hearing that jeering, derogatory insult against me and my kids.

But I don’t want to give up on you. You’re one of the best we have and I think you can see past this prejudice and accept people with disabilities as part of the communities. you fight for. I’m hoping that enough people will tell you that your dismissal and gaslighting of us hurt and that you’ll listen. Because while I know you’re human, so you can have prejudices and blind spots like the rest of us, I think you—like me—have seen a lot in your life. And that kind of experience gives us the ability to stretch and grow past those prejudices.

So, I still hope that some day I’ll see you retract the untruths about the word “spaz” and affirm that people with disabilities are valid, that insults against us are not okay, that musicians can and should be aware of that in their language, and that Lizzo did the right thing after being justifiably criticized.

But because I do believe in your talent for healing divides, I also hope against hope that you’ll be one of the first to break through the lockout of people with disabilities from the woke movement. I think you’ve got it in you, and when you can laugh at the social systems that cause the vast majority of difficulty that people with disabilities face (the actual physical or neurological problems are minor by comparison), you’ll discover a whole new area of healing humor.

Your voice is strong right now, very strong across this country and especially in progressive communities. I believe that if you are introspective and real and honest enough to look back at that thing with LIzzo and admit you were wrong and that your words hurt people, it would matter a great deal. It could be the moment that turns the tide and makes the woke movement fully inclusive.

Hope and peril at the dawn of a new epoch

Oh, the voice of Yolanda Adams singing Hallelujah!

My throat swelled and tears brimmed in the corners of my eyes. Yes, my lady, it has been a long, long night and that first pale light has come at last!

I had an extra reason to be choked up. The day of the inauguration was also the day my son started his new school. It’s still online, but it is functional. There are explanations. active teaching, smiles, help for those who struggle and clear goals—none of which were prevalent at his previous school. There is also a reasoned amount of work that he can finish without exhaustion, despair and tears.

Image via Pixabay

In mid-December our local schools opened for ten days and the bullying problem that had been growing in June roared back with a vengeance. I don’t know if it was just that the bullies were suffering from pent-up energy due to successive lockdowns or if it was because all the sports and after school clubs are still closed, but it was worse than ever before.

There were daily attacks. One day, a boy tricked my son into letting him “see” his phone and then he whacked it repeatedly against a tree, smashing it beyond all hope of repair. Four older boys lifted my son off the ground and slammed him down on his back, leaving bruises. Others threw rocks at him as he escaped on his bike. That was just one day.

He’s the only person of color in his school and he’s a softy—a kid who wouldn’t tell me about any of this because he hates confrontation more than anything.

But I found out from friends, and it turned out that a teacher had seen some of it, so I got my son’s permission to try to find out which teacher it was. The principal refused to let me seek out the teacher though, saying, “This was ten meters off school property. It is none of our concern.”

So yeah, I was researching schools after that.

It took weeks. I can’t drive and there is no other school within transportation range. There’s no specific bussing for schools here. And the US online public schools require physical presence in the right time zones. I searched and I searched and I searched.

For weeks on end, I ran across block after block, even with online schools. I’d think I had found a solution only to find out that it required documents I don’t have or cost more than my family’s entire monthly income. We had to have an actual online accredited school because getting approval for homeschooling in the Czech Republic is a bureaucratic nightmare of at least twelve months before you can start—and that’s IF you get approved.

Finally, I found a theoretical possibility and then I had to see if it would actually pass muster with Czech educational and social service authorities. A few days of nail biting, and it is looking good, so I yanked my son out of the endless drone of mandatory make-work without waiting for the end of the semester (or even the end of the day), and started the new program immediately.

He was watching his final required session from the old school while I worked out in front of the news. That’s when I heard Adams and I felt my spirit lift. Oh my, but there are moments that speak to the soul of a nation!

Then, I got my son set up on his first math class in the new school. The lesson was on place value, something he has always struggled with—despite knowing how to do most arithmetic. “Ah well, might as well start off with a bang,” I thought, and I hopped in the shower.

As I stepped out of the shower a few minutes later, I heard a sound even sweeter than Adam’s voice. (OK, possibly a mother might be biased.) My son yelled, “Oh, cool!”

Photo by Arie Farnam

In math class!

Over a place value lesson!

He wanted to show me, still dripping in a towel. “Mama, they explain it so much better!” In the evening, he did extra math problems “for fun,” because he was so elated to have finally conquered something that had plagued him for years.

That was his first class free from four years of tyranny.

Yup, dawn is breaking.

OK, even if you loved Yolanda Adams, you might find me a bit overly optimistic here. Surely, no one can stay excited about fourth grade math for long and the feeling of fresh air in politics isn’t likely to last much longer. Joe Biden isn’t exactly a progressive dreamboat and my son’s school science curriculum on climate and weather doesn’t even mention climate change. Their “social-emotional” course is so fake (not to mention weirdly cult-like) that we had to opt out.

And beyond that, the reasons so many Americans supported an egotistical, racist maniac remain and his supporters are still out there festering—and in some cases plotting violence and hate crimes. The bullies who found school such a convenient place to take out their frustrations on my son are still out in the parks and playgrounds, and they are particularly bored during Covid restrictions.

All is not perfect.

But gods, there is nothing like a few years of things being really bad to make one appreciate the imperfect and the halfway decent.

A few days later…

A lot of people in America are mulling the opportunities—and the perils—we now face. It isn’t that we’ve come down from the glorious hope of dawn after a long night. We’ve been thinking and talking about these things all along, but now is the time we need to really take a hard look.

My focus is on progressives and more broadly people who support the Democrats, because that’s who is in my circles, who I relate to, and the ball is now in our court.

So, here are the opportunities I see before us:

• Democrats in the federal government can now make policy. President Biden has begun it already. His initial moves about climate mitigation, immigration and Covid relief may have been partly a ploy to win the hearts of progressives, since he already got their fear-based ballots. But they were also much needed and they set a good tone.

• Those of us who value fairer voting systems, science-based public policy and education, fact-based discourse, compassion and empathy in society, broad inclusion, protection of the vulnerable, economic justice, equitable treatment for all, and the centering of marginalized voices have a chance to be heard in the current political and media climate. For at least some weeks and maybe even a couple of years, we have an opportunity to decide what concise and clear message we want large portions of the country to hear, because the media is primed for it and there is a theoretical way for political leaders to hear it.

• There are some who once supported Trump, who are disillusioned and are open to having civil conversation and possibly even changing their minds about a few things. OK, I make no claim to knowing how many of these there are, but I’ve seen some of them personally and seen evidence of more. Yes, some will hunker down and dig in, nursing hate and resentment. Some will just tune out and zone out. But some are open now. And IF they meet progressives who are kind, compassionate, open-minded, utterly factual, balanced and clear—some will change.

• As vaccines proliferate and the economy rebuilds, we have the opportunity of rebuilding in our lives and communities. And with that will come opportunities for healing. I think there will be a lot of scars from the traumas of the past several years, but healing is still healing, even when it leaves scars.

But as crucial to our consideration—if not more so—are the perils we are walking right straight into:

• We are pretty well aware that there is a danger that Biden and other mainline Democrats could squander the opportunities of this moment and either make deals where they give away the farm for a pittance or they could simply drift to the right over the next few months. This is something most progressives are pretty aware of and it appears from Biden’s early actions that he is aware we’re aware. It simply bears mention that vigilance will be necessary.

• Similarly, many of us are aware that Trump supporters, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and climate deniers are still out there. While some of them are disheartened and likely to zone out on beer, football and consumerism, many are stewing in their resentment and hate. If we don’t deal with the reasons why people turn to hate and conspiracy theories, as well as the reasons why people become so extreme that they are willing to participate in or tacitly support violence, this is going to come back to bite us—and very likely sooner rather than later. Some of the next few issues may exacerbate this one if those go unchecked.

• Much less discussed are the reactions to the coup attempt that could come back to haunt us even without the help of Trump supporters. The social media crackdown on Trump, his supporters and Covid-deniers in general is on a slippery slope.. I know. I get it. The rhetoric WAS harmful and it was also a serious source of stress in our lives. And as far as direct harm goes, social media companies are justified in banning repeat offenders. But banning a whole topic of discussion or some statements about scientific topics should be taken very seriously. Just because we are sure we understand what scientists are saying about Covid right at the moment doesn’t mean science doesn’t develop. Both in social media and in our off-line circles, we risk much by closing our minds to new information, contrary perspectives and questioning of authority.

• The ACLU has blown the whistle on policy discussions about how to further crack down on the right to protest and lift surveillance and privacy protections in order to combat right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism from white supremacists. And with good reason. I am NOT supporting neo-Nazis in any way and neither is the ACLU. But the fact is that the US government has all the policy and legal tools it needed to stop the attack on the Capitol. It just chose not to use them because the attackers were white and conservative. Any new policies in this area won’t just impact those groups. They will be general policies against public protest and against people outside the mainstream organizing. The next administration may well take those policies and use them against us. This goes back to the Geneva Convention. Whatever you do, remember that it can and will be done to you.

• Similarly, the so-called “liberal media” isn’t all that liberal on a lot of issues, but there have been a couple moments, especially around Covid, where journalists have been stepping out of objectivity and openly (as well is covertly) pushing a particular agenda. It’s all in the name of “supporting science,” but there was at least one time this past year when science didn’t support that agenda and the more progressive-friendly media actually did what Trump and his supporters accused them of doing. They bulldozed right through, using the words of scientists out of context and linking “children and super-spreaders” together again and again, despite the fact that even the most alarming studies of the pandemic show that children have a 0.5 spread ratio. By contrast, the flu has 1.2 and Covid among adults has more than 2.5. That 0.5 spread ratio is actually very low. When scientists said children CAN spread Covid, they meant just that. It is possible, though not likely. They did not mean that schools are super spreader hotbeds which should be closed while the real hotbeds, like meat packing plants, remain open. Keeping schools closed (and countless low-income parents out of work as a result) hurt the real small-people economy far more than closing certain types of workplaces, shuttering shopping beyond food and medicine and turning vegetarian for a while would have. But mostly schools have been the first to go and the last to reopen, due in no small part to the “children and super-spreaders” media ploy. Women, who bore the brunt of the home-teaching policy, were 40 percent more likely to have to give up their jobs due to Covid than men, and equity experts say women’s economic equality has been set back by decades. If this was truly the best way to fight Covid, the sacrifice may have been better accepted, but it wasn’t. In situations like this, we are at peril of using “supporting science” as a slogan without remembering that to support science means adopting a total openness to change your mind based on the evidence at hand, even if it means changing tack a few months into a crisis once the numbers are in.

• When any group is on a roll, there is a danger of confirmation bias. We have been clamoring for a return to facts for years now, and rightly so. But now that we have the ability to spread messages and make waves, we must be extra vigilant about our own truthfulness. Some of those who spread that factually flimsy “children and super-spreaders” slogan, admitted privately that it was “an exaggeration” but justified it by saying that too many people were bucking desperately needed public-health measures—like masks and social distancing—and anything that helped scare people into compliance was justified. But here’s the rub. Eventually, a lot of people will see through an exaggeration. And many will lose trust in media outlets, in all public health advice and in science-based policy in general. Public trust is severely shaken right now. In many places, even those who were initially very compliant with Covid restrictions are now flaunting them at a time when the pandemic is at its worst, not because of exhaustion but because they have come to assume restrictions are overstated and that officials who publicly tout them will privately flaunt them. It happened. The only way to win trust back in public discourse is through extreme truthfulness that is willing to admit mistakes, explain nuance and trust that MOST people will not be idiots when something like public health advice is carefully balanced. Check the facts before you repeat what you’ve heard, don’t exaggerate and admit mistakes. The next pandemic could easily be worse. The trust and voluntary compliance of vast numbers of people is the best defense.

• Finally, we face peril within the progressive movement itself from the demon of division and judgement. Our patience has been strained in so many ways and it shows. I’ve witnessed firsthand several (and heard of many more) examples of close friendships and family relationships broken up, not just because of the Trump versus Democrat divide, but also because of micro-differences among progressives. You think racial justice is more important than justice for LGBTQ+ people! Relationship cut. You think poor, white disabled people are underprivileged in any way comparable to black people! Not speaking anymore. You cite stats that school closures have exacerbated wealth and race inequality and have caused a surge in youth suicide instead of holding to the line that all costs are worth even one life saved from Covid! You’re worse than a Trumper! It sounds silly in black and white, but these are real divides, real relationships ruptured and deep rifts in a movement that has a tenuous chance to make some progress.

I am not a leader of anything. And I’m rather glad of that at the moment. This is a rugged time to be a progressive leader or even a Democratic elected official. There is a lot of pressure, some opportunities crying not to be missed and a whole lot of pitfalls. I’m just a scribe pointing them out.

Here’s a poem to close with.

Divide and conquer 

“We find our strength in open minds.
Always did. But always will?
We could stand side by side on the line,
Democrat and progressive, leftist and anarchist.
How many times did we hammer out agreements
In late night meetings with bleary eyes?
And yet when it came to the poll booth,
Our strength became our weakness.
Spoilers and small factions kept us down,
Against the rah rah juggernaut.
If the pulpit said it, they voted it. 
End of story. End of our hopes. 
Yet the few times we tried the strong arm,
It was terrible, much too bad to think on.
So, we say our strength is in open minds.
Today the tables have turned somewhat.
For once the juggernaut has been shaken.
Is there a line of insurrection some won’t cross?
Evangelicals in bed with old-style conservatives
And Nazis riding their coattails.
We might be able to use this,
Break the juggernaut, divide and conquer.
But our strength is in open minds.
If we take up their old tools of forced unity,
The half-truths and pressure tactics,
We might get victory and still lose everything
That mattered to us at the core.
If we divide from our body those who disagree,
Or cut away the wild ones and the rebels,
We will one day find that this more than anything
Was what made us who we are.
Our strength is ever in open minds.”

The spelling police and the only divide between people that actually. matters

Here’s a surreal one for the annals of social media logs. A heated discussion recently broke out in a Facebook group called Blind Penpals about typos and spelling errors in posts and the ethics of calling people out over them.

I joined this group some years ago as a way to support a social media acquaintance from Macedonia who reached out to me. She’s blind and she started this group to get more social interaction in her life. I didn’t feel the need to ask why she was isolated. Blind and visually impaired people are so often dismissed and forgotten (at best) no matter what country they live in.

The group was only a handful of people and she needed numbers to get it going. I had kids with intense needs and jobs and urban homesteading, the works. I didn’t have enough local community acceptance and still don’t, but I have never lacked for online connections and I didn’t really want a penpal. But I have enjoyed the occasional perspective from other blind and visually impaired people around the world.

Image via PIxabay

Thanks to the handful of Eastern Europeans who jumped in and spurred Facebook algorithms to put the group in search results, it now has 7,300 members. It’s an English-speaking group so most of those are people in the English-speaking, privileged West of the world. And thus the discussion about typos and spelling.

As my readers know, I’m a professional writer, but that doesn’t mean I never make spelling mistakes or typos. Part of this is just that I type fast and often have a kid or two yelling at me while I edit my posts. The other part is a consequence of being visually impaired.

First, I rarely read print. It is laborious, painful and slow for me to read even if the print is large. I have read out loud to my kids for eleven years because a parent reading, both the actual warm body and the warm, imperfect voice, have amazing scientifically demonstrated benefits for children, especially children who spent the first months of their lives in cold institutions without these things. But it’s a labor of love. It’s hard and I wouldn’t do it for anything less vital.

For everything else, I listen—to audiobooks, to podcasts, to text-to-speech articles, to audio descriptions of TV shows, even to voiceover on my phone.

As a result, I don’t see words over and over again like most people in today’s world. I don’t have the reinforcement of spelling and didn’t have it as a child. I routinely encounter words I want to include in a blog post that I am pretty sure I have never seen in print before. When I realize this consciously, I look them up.

But a lot of the time I don’t slow down enough to notice and I spell the way I spell. If the word is a homophone, the spellcheck doesn’t even catch it. And at other times my spelling guesses are so far off I can’t find the correct spelling even if I search online. If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you’ll know what I mean.

But social media is much worse than blogs. When I blog, I write in relatively quiet moments and I go through and edit at least two or three times on each post. I post only every two weeks, so I have time to do that.

But social media is an ongoing conversation. It IS my social interaction and it is that for a lot of others during the pandemic and for a lot of people with disabilities even when there isn’t a pandemic. It’s like talking to people. I do it while I’m cooking dinner, fielding kids, digging up the garden, taking a five minute break from a translating job or standing in an elevator to the doctor’s office.

I can’t see much at all on the tiny screen of a phone and I use the accessibility settings to the hilt. I dictate nearly everything into my phone and I play back what I wrote, if there’s time. There often isn’t. When you speak into a speech-recognition app, there are going to be mistakes. I’ve gotten pretty good at using the technology. I know how to enunciate to increase my chances, but errors are still going to come up.

All this applies to most of the other blind and visually impaired people in the Blind Penpals group, except many of them learned English as a second language, have less residual sight than I have, have cheaper technology or have less education. Blind people never were very good with spelling and modern speech recognition technology may have made written communication a lot faster and easier for us but it generally increased the level of errors at the same time. I wasn’t the target of the shaming this time because I was one of the better spellers in the group, but the virtual heckling of others really got under my skin.

Last year, I was harried out of the local branch of Extinction Rebellion in no small part because of my error-ridden dictated messages in the group’s coordination system. No one ever said any of my messages were actually incomprehensible, but I had several major coordinating roles and I had to do a lot of messaging back and forth with volunteers.

I want to make clear here that Extinction Rebellion is an awesome movement and most of the volunteers are the best people in the world, who made me a cake to thank me for being their coordinator and were truly appreciative and cared not one iota about typos.

But there were a few people, particularly a coordinator who came from a more privileged background than most in the group, who couldn’t stand my errors or the way my messages sounded like someone speaking, rather than the clipped abbreviations which she preferred. After months of conflict over this issue and being banned from various activities she was overseeing, I left the group entirely to preserve my health and give my family some much needed TLC.

If I’d been younger, feistier and childless I probably would have stayed and fought for inclusion and maybe saved that XR branch from the disintegration that soon followed my exit. But my kids were in crisis, my health was suffering and the attacks were giving me PTSD flashbacks from much worse social ostracism in my childhood. I chose to heal and live to fight another day. But I did take a lot of lessons with me from that experience.

One of them was that even in the best circles, there are people who snap or peck at other people for reasons that A. don’t really matter and B. are beyond the personal control of the person being attacked. It’s the root of racism, ableism and pretty much all other evil as far as I’ve ever seen.

It isn’t the differences that hurt us. It’s the intolerance of difference.

Even in current American politics, it isn’t the fact that people disagree about the best ways to counter a pandemic. It’s the hatred of those who have different opinions that is breaking families, friendships and efforts to protect the vulnerable.

Willful endangerment by hugging people in large gatherings and refusing to wear a mask in crowded places isn’t about an opinion. It’s about denigrating and antagonizing those who have different circumstances and greater concern. On the other side of the political divide, shunning and shaming anyone who asks questions or mentions new information is another manifestation of the “us versus them” paradigm..

I don’t always enter the fray on social media. After I was hounded out of the local Extinction Rebellion group, I took a nine-month break from social media and had a lot fewer arguments in general. But I also became a lot more isolated. So, I’m back now and I pick my battles, but I do choose to occasionally stand up to those pouring shame on someone while they’re down.

The recent spat over typos and spelling errors on Blind Penpals was one such instance. There were several male members with English-sounding names who repeatedly posted about the high level of English grammar and spelling in mistakes in the group. They were from what I could access on their profiles all coming from fairly privileged situations. I don’t know whether they were actually blind and visually impaired as well, but they were westerners, native English speakers, and mostly men. Their style of posting showed that they had a lot of time to devote to social media and they didn’t have a lot of survival-level pressures in their lives.

I posted a brief reply on the first post informing the person offended by the errors that many in the group are non-native English speakers, and because it is a group of blind people, many also use imperfect voice recognition technology. I fully expected that to be the end of the discussion. Instead several others piled on and there were more posts harassing and shaming members whose posts were not perfect.

What I came to in the end of that discussion is worth repeating:

“The issue is not that person A has an opinion and person B has an opinion and they are different. The issue is that person A has an opinion denigrating person B and feels empowered to share it widely and publicly and person B wants to be left alone and not harassed. It is time the world woke up to this thing.

I don’t care if your opinion is different from mine as long as your opinion has no bearing on anyone but yourself. If you are troubled by someone’s imperfect typing or dictating, someone’s skin color, someone’s accent, someone’s religion, someone’s sexual orientation, someone’s gender identity or lack there of, someone’s disability or body shape, go cry into a pillow.

Expressing a negative opinion about other people is pretty much the root of all the evil in the world. There are acts of nature that hurt us, but they aren’t evil. Even Covid is just a life form, living and procreating. Evil comes in when a thinking entity denigrates another, not in defense, but just because the other makes them feel uncomfortable or requires them to exercise patience, tolerance or self-discipline.

The old saying is true after all. There are only two kinds of people in the world. There is one important divide and that is between people who attack others simply for being different, uncomfortable or inconvenient or allow others to do so without challenge and people who defend against such attacks and insist on inclusion. It’s the only divide that actually matters.”

I know typos actually do sometimes cause confusion or real problems. I also know some people really want to learn to use language better. I have spent the past fifteen years teaching writing craft and English as a second language. I spend all day essentially criticizing other people’s grammar or writing and helping them make it better.

But they asked me to do it and I never shame them. I have students who make the same mistake literally hundreds of times. But they are all doing the best they can. Bad grammar or bad spelling is never simply a matter of laziness. It is often a matter of being too stressed, rushing to much, difficulty focusing and all kinds of other things.

The problems that matter are the problems caused denigrating a person or a group of people. In this world, just about everything boils down to that.

The catch is that we aren't all permanently on one side or the other of that divide. I am dismayed when people I respect fall into the trap of shaming others or judging others without having all the information. It is crucial to keep this divide in mind. It doesn’t mean never criticizing. But it does mean paying attention to whether or not the person criticized had a real choice in their situation. And it means regularly checking your own confirmation bias.

Do people who are bullied really turn into bullies?

There is a vicious, traumatizing and stigmatizing rumor going around about my son and kids like him on social media and even in the mainstream media.

I have run across the remarks and assumptions at least ten times in just the past two days, and I wasn’t looking for them or even aware that such a stereotype existed until very recently. This vicious, hateful and potentially deadly myth has it that people who were bullied as kids become bullies, anti-social adults and/or violent criminals.

A few real-life examples do exist and psychologists call them “bully-victims,” but they are far less common than the popular stereotype assumes.

Creative Commons image by Carolyn Langton

I have recently rejoined the world of social media after a nine-month hiatus prompted partly by a serious incident of online bullying (yes, it happens with adults too) and partly by the exhaustion of homeschooling kids with special needs during successive Covid lockdowns.

And this is what I found on my return. This vicious rumor against people like my son and like me, a stereotype painting people who were bullied as potentially violent and liable to lack empathy. It’s a myth often spread even by those who previously claimed to be allies.

Maybe the myth started with an incident or incidents of violence in which the gun lobby decided to make excuses about how the shooter was once called “wimpy face” as a child and thus the quick and easy availability of semi-automatic weapons had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it was just a way of blowing off steam about empathy-impaired people during the U.S. election. Either way, it is now a pervasive stereotype.

The comments are things like an acquaintance on Facebook posting under a story about a violent police officer, “No excuse for it! He was probably bullied as a kid and this is how he takes it out on others.” Someone else referring to white supremacists as “a$$holes who were bullied in high school." And a passing reference on the television news about the need for bullying intervention to prevent “victims” from becoming mass shooters.

The overall assumption is that a direct link exists between being a target of bullying and future perpetration of violence or cruelty. And that assumption is everywhere these days to the extent that admitting you were bullied as a kid is now more likely to result in distrustful glances than support and empathy.

My first reaction was hurt and irritation, when I heard about this myth. I was a target of bullying and social ostracism as a kid because of my vision impairment, my strange-looking eyes, my secondhand clothes and my family’s alternative spirituality and lifestyle. I had a lot of strikes against me. My son just has being a member of a locally high-profile racial minority, the only non-passing representative of such in his school. But that is plenty to get a kid knocked down and chanted at by groups of bullies.

I have overcome a lot of my past, but it is still hard to see my son going through it for something equally beyond his control. And now he’s saddled with yet one more stigma. Not only is he “a young brown male” and an ESL learner, he is now categorized as a potential perpetrator of violence and cruelty in the popular imagination because of something that was done TO him.

He’s ten and he’s at the tender and naturally open age where he reminds me to include our two cats when I tell someone how many “people” are in our family. Empathy isn’t something he’s lacking.

So, the comments hurt. But then my rational brain kicks in. OK, but maybe there is some significant statistical correlation between being a target and becoming a perpetrator. I sure have had enough rage at times to be able to relate. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who spread this stereotype. So, I go look up the stats.

The National Bullying Prevention Center has a page on bullying statistics. While the site says as many as one in every five kids is “bullied” at some point, there are a lot of things that they call bullying. Name calling and exclusion are considered bullying along side physical attacks. Those who experience pervasive and repeated bullying are a bit more rare, but still more common than most people like to think. Kids with disabilities and those who are identifiable as belonging to a minority race or religion at a given school experience much higher rates of bullying.

There is also a section on the effects of bullying. Unsurprisingly, kids who are bullied end up with increased risk of “depression, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and dropping out of school.” Kids who are both bullied and bully others are mentioned but only to note that they have increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems. So do kids who blame themselves for being bullied.

Another researcher, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on “the bullying cycle,” claims that less than 10 percent of bullies can actually be considered bully-victims. Although she contributes to the stereotype somewhat by completely ignoring other bullying targets in her “cycle” theory, Vaillancourt, offers no guess, educated or otherwise, about what percent of targets actually turn into “bully-victims.”

The statistics don’t mention anything about being bullied making one more likely to bully others or more likely to become violent or anti-social in adulthood. In fact, despite a lengthy search, I could not find any study that hinted at this. Given the pervasive stereotype, the lack of any hard evidence makes me think the opposite is more likely true.

I do know from my own experience that being bullied has made me less likely to be a nice, quiet bystander who enables bullies. Hell hath no fury like getting a little light-hearted bullying in and then being hit crossways by a hurricane that was once an ostracized child.

But turn me to bully those even more vulnerable than myself? Not likely.

There was only one moment in my life where perhaps I stood on that precipice. I was huddled in an out of the way corner on a stairway during lunch in seventh grade when someone landed on top of me. I was bruised and my precious colored pencils were broken. I leapt up and grabbed the body of the intruder and started wailing away at his back with my fists. It turned out to be another bullied kid who had been thrown bodily down the stairway onto me.

I wish I could say that the two of us became friends and held out against the bullies together. I did let go of him and stop pounding on him when I heard the bullies laughing and I got a bit of a look at him. But he ran away and never went inside my short visual range again. It’s a story too often played out. Those who suffer from oppression and bullying are driven against one another to ensure that they remain powerless against their assailants.

But even in those worst years of terror and rage, I was never tempted to actually pick on someone else. There is an ingredient missing that I would have needed to make that even slightly appealing. One would have to feel that bringing someone else down or pushing them even further down would somehow raise you up. I know the theory, but none of the emotion behind it resonates. I never felt even a little tempted.

My son was in a tussle in preschool in which a friend grabbed a toy from him and he pushed the other boy. The boy lost his balance and fell over a bench and onto a pile of legos, which scraped his back. Because my son was the only child of color in the preschool and a member of a very controversial group in our area, some of the teachers and parents immediately labeled my son as a dangerous. There was even a petition to have him expelled, which failed without our intervention because there were also honest teachers who reported that my son was no more disruptive or violent than any of the other boys.

Since then, he has been the target of bullying by older boys in school, but otherwise he hasn’t been involved with fighting at school. I believe that after his experiences, he wouldn’t participate in bullying or harassing another kid.

I can’t be so sure that he would have the confidence to stand up to bullies on his own behalf or on behalf of another. Unlike me, my son has the temperament to be a follower or a bystander, but he also is the kind of kid to quickly empathize with another human or creature.

He is now in the period of childhood in which superheroes play a large role. He loves to fantasize about being a hero and stopping the bad guys. In our discussions and in our choices of bedtime reading, the topic is often real historical heroes who fought to protect the vulnerable.

I am not worried that my son may become a bully because he has been bullied. I do worry that he may follow others into unhealthy habits, including exclusion of others, because of his temperament and eager desire to make peace and be part of the group. But this is something that has been part of his nature since long before racist adults went after him in preschool.

Whether it is my tendency toward quick anger or his bent to go along with the crowd, neither of these are a result of. our experiences as targets of bullying, but rather natural characteristics which come from temperament. In the end, it is empathy that prevents people from becoming a bully and lack of empathy that may cause someone to become a bully.

There are actually life experiences which can impair a person’s empathy. Extreme rejection of a child by family, complete isolation from human contact and being raised in an institutional environment have all been linked to dysfunctions of empathy.

Even though I know some experiences can lead to disruption of empathy, I would not willingly participate in labeling those who have suffered such terrible abuse. Where there is real concern the focus must be on healing. The one thing science knows about redressing an actual dysfunction in empathy is that the only treatment is lots more empathy.

But there isn’t even a real concern when it comes to a link between targets of bullying and the perpetration of violence and bullying. There is no such link. Perpetuating such a stereotype is nothing more than piling on with the bullies to rain more blows down on vulnerable kids and the survivors they become.

Please stop it. Don’t make statements based on such an assumption. Don’t joke about it. Don’t speculate based on this stereotype. It does real harm.

AOC and a voice for those who were dismissed

It’s been more than fifteen years and one minute is still as clear as if it happened a moment ago.

I was attending a public comment session at a European Parliament regarding the war in Iraq, civilian casualties and the US misinformation about weapons of mass destruction. One of my closest friends at the time was an Iraqi refugee and his brother had recently been killed by American troops who mistook him for someone they were looking for. Shoot first and ask questions later… and all that.

High-ranking US military and civilian officials had come to answer questions from the European public and this was supposed to be a rare opportunity for open discussion of the issues with those who actually had the power. I managed to get a seat in the question gallery due to connections within the high-powered charity community. My US passport and press credentials didn’t hurt either.

The session lasted two hours and there was very little critical discussion allowed. Everyone had been pretty thoroughly vetted and most of the questions from the “public” were sycophantic opportunities for officials to regurgitate the Republican party line in Europe. Finally, toward the end of the session, I got one of the coveted comment spaces, and goddess, was I ever ready.

I had a stack of documented cases of avoidable civilian casualties three inches thick in my hands with my friend’s brother on top.

Public domain image

I am not good at public speaking or even speaking in general. My forte is much more the written word. I tend to choke and forget my vocabulary and stumble around without a clear goal even just trying to hold my own in a political discussion among friends. So, I had prepared for this.

I took deep breaths as I was called to stand and then I put it out there. My statement had to be phrased as a question, and it was, but it contained enough data to make clear that platitudes weren’t going to work here. The mediators were so shocked that I actually got to the end of the two sentence question before the shouting started and I was drowned out.

I had done it. The words were on the record and on national TV and I hadn’t choked. My heart was pounding. It was a tiny thing, but at least I had forced the people in power to confront the lie that this was a relatively clean war, where only the guilty suffered and the oppressed people of Iraq were supposed to be grateful for occupation and viciously negligent violence.

The officials had to spend the next ten minutes uncomfortably wriggling out of the issues I had raised. But of course, it was buried in the end. That was just all the power I had at the time.

And that isn’t actually the memory I mentioned in the first line. What stands out most clearly to me isn’t the fact that I managed to put the truth out on national TV and in front of US officials. I was standing out in the entrance hall of the Parliament after the event and I was cornered by a member of Parliament from the far left who had been trying to milk the anti-war movement for media attention without actually helping.

Several members of Parliament from the pro-US, right-wing party walked down the steps from the main hall and passed us. One of them turned around, pushed his face close to mine and sneered in a loud voice that cut through the space, “Disgusting bitch! It speaks our language!”

His cronies chuckled and they left. I stood frozen and speechless.

I had spoken in English during the public session because the guests were US officials and English was allowed. But I had been speaking Czech to the leftist MP. That was what the right-winger had meant. He was surprised that I was bilingual. But he had put it in extremely insulting grammar, calling me “it” and clearly putting me in the place of a sub-human.

His companions had laughed and the leftist MP who had pretended to be sympathetic stepped away. Far from standing up for me, he disappeared.

I was a blind woman who had the international microphone for a fleeting moment and I had been slammed back into my place with public humiliation.

No, I wasn’t surrounded by people mocking me or supporting me. I was suddenly simply dismissed. Everyone’s back seemed to be turned to me in the entrance hall. The journalists who had previously been interested in my documentation were no longer interested. I had been demoted from upstart to irrelevant and then brushed away.

That is the part that makes the memory stick so painfully—the dehumanization followed by very effective dismissal.

When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was demeaned with sexist language on the steps of the US Capitol building last month by Congressman Ted Yoha it was the same kind of moment. It was a man in power slapping down an upstart woman, calling her a “F—ing bitch” and “disgusting.” It was eerily reminiscent of my experience all those years ago.

At first AOC didn’t respond publicly. She probably didn’t want to stoop to his level. And that is understandable. I didn’t respond either. In the moment, I choked as usual, and later when I could have thought through a response, I no longer had a microphone or any platform to speak of.

But I very much appreciate Ocasio-Cortez’s words from the House floor several days later. She laid the issue out in no uncertain terms. Having experienced much the same thing in public and a lot of less-public abuse over forty-four years of being a disabled woman, I know exactly what she meant when she said, “It’s cultural.”

It wasn’t just about me being a woman or disabled, of course. I was a political opponent of that rude MP. But he did not and would not—particularly in the somewhat more staid European context—treat a man like that.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “Men harass women daily and feel they can go unpunished,” I know exactly what she means.

I have often wished I had the platform, the mficrophone and the power to talk back and to verbally tear up sexist, ablest and racist bullies in public. But the truth is I don’t have the seat-of-the-pants eloquence either, not in spoken words at least. Ocasio-Cortez has that and she now has the microphone and the platform too. She uses it well and I’m one more woman cheering her on.

Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez continues to be a voice for those of us who have been dismissed and trampled too many times. And she is one of those who reminds me there is still much worth fighting for.

There was a girl who didn't fall down

There was a scrawny girl with legs and arms too long for the rest of her. And those were crooked, the bones curved wrongly. Her face was almost all toothy grin and huge thick glasses.

When I catch a glimpse of her in an old picture my mind reels. That was me. I know it was but I can hardly relate anymore.

I was beyond gawky and awkward at thirteen. I had terrible posture from being nearly blind and constantly leaning forward to see things. I looked disabled and I was almost entirely socially isolated. Self-esteem wasn’t even a concept. I was in survival mode. Nothing beyond that mattered much.

Creative Commons image by Sheila Kaye Matthews

But then there was that one day when a summer camp counselor from the Blind School took me and a few other kids out to the Columbia River where the state Special Olympics water-skiing team was training. They figured, since they had the equipment out there, they would give us the chance to just try it out.

I can still remember how they made us stand on the grass and hold our hands out in front of us with a stick. We bent our knees while one of the adults gently tugged at the stick in our hands, trying utterly futilely to give blind children an inkling of what it would feel like to water ski.

We could hear the noise the boats made and distant shouting. A few of us could see the very beginning, when a skier sitting in the water rose up and seemed to stand on the surface for a second before disappearing beyond our extremely limited visual range. Our concept of water skiing was very shaky.

“The water will push at your feet.” The instructor put his hand on my feet and then on my knees. “You have to bend your knees and lean back against it.” He put a hand at the small of my back and coaxed me to lean back. All I knew was that if I leaned back that far, I’d fall over.

“You will fall down the first time and probably lots of times,” they told us. “It’s not about staying up. It’s about getting up and trying again.”

Adults who teach blind children love cliches.

I thought about all that water. I could sort-of snow ski, so I knew how skis worked. In theory, I guessed that the skis could push against the water if I was pulled forward by the boat, and somehow I’d ski up out of the water and stand on the surface. And then I’d lean back, like they said. It just wasn’t conceivable.

“Don’t worry,” the gentle lady from the Blind School consoled me, patting my shoulder as we walked toward the river, “If it is too hard or anything, you just let go. You’ll fall right into the water like jumping off the diving board. No big deal.”

I realized when she touched me that I was shivering all over. My whole body was buzzing with a fine unconscious vibration, like the hood of a souped-up car..

I waited behind several other kids. Each one in turn stood in the water near the shore while the instructors put on their water skis and then handed them the stick at the end of the tow line. One instructor near the shore would count down and the boat’s engine would rev and then the tow line leaped forward.

Half of the time, the blind kids just let go of the stick and never even fell down. The other half of the time, the tow rope pulled them a few feet forward and they splashed head-first into the river. I tried to make out the scene but all I could get was a general impression as the instructors pleaded with the three kids in front of me not to let go of the stick the instant it jerked forward. Two of them let go anyway and the third splashed into the river.

Finally, it was my turn. The water was cold and my shivering got so bad that I thought I couldn’t possibly hang on. The instructor put my skis on and held my knocking knees for a second. I comforted myself that even if I couldn’t keep a hold of the stick, at least the first pull would show me what it felt like. They said we could try again, if we wanted.

I leaned back as far as I could and felt the skis. I gripped the stick with all my strength. I was determined that at least I would be one of those to fall in the water, not just lose the stick.

“One. Two. Three.” The boat engine revved.

The stick jerked hard and I almost lost it. My body lurched forward and I was sure I’d be in the water face first, but then the skis moved. I crouched low, the way I did on snow skis on a steep slope and I felt the slope rise under the skis.

The rope pulled hard at my hands. My knees knocked and I almost went down as the skis broke the surface of the water and the line jerked even harder. I heard a faint yell go up from the people on the shore behind me.

And then a miracle happened. The water buzzed away under my skis. I slowly stood out of my painful crouch and leaned back into the feel of support from the tow line.

“You OK?” A hoarse yell came from the boat. The shore was long gone.

I gritted my teeth and nodded hard. I was glad for the ability I knew sighted people had to see my nod without my having to unclench my teeth to yell back. I was so cold from the wind that my knees and elbows were still shaking but I was OK.

I felt the way the water was like springy, unstable ground beneath me. I felt the secure tug of the line. The boat slowly eased on a little more speed and the water felt harder under my feet.

I experimented gently rocking from side to side. I tried to dig in one side of a ski the way you do in the snow and almost fell. I lurched forward and then to one side and the boat engine sputtered and nearly cut out when whoever was watching me saw what I had done. But I regained my balance and kept going.

That first time up actually seemed to take forever. Mostly other than the thrill, all I remember is how incredibly cold I was. Finally when I didn’t think my muscles could take another second and I was shaking so hard that it must have been visible from the boat, the motor slowed and stopped in the river. I sank into the water, which felt as warm as a bath after all that cold wind.

The boat circled around and came in close so that I could take off the skis and climb up onto the back of the boat.

I barely heard what the people on the boat said, except for one thing they kept saying, “Two miles.”

I thought it had felt long but that long? I was a rural kid and I regularly walked two miles to reach a friend’s house. That was a good distance.

They took me back to shore and I got to warm up while I waited for the other kids to try again. I was worried that they wouldn’t give me many other chances because after all, I had really had a good ski, while the other kids had just fallen in the water, but within a couple of hours, I got to try again and then again. A lot of the other kids wouldn’t do it after the first few tries.

A few did get up on the skis but clearly I was different. I had never been athletic before and the whole thing confused me. I wasn’t special. Not in anything but academics at least. I was a good student but hopeless in social or physical realms, a complete social outcast and a stereotypical nerd, other than being female and growing up rural with physical chores that made for a bit of unskilled muscle.

Once a couple of the instructors came over to me while I was getting the life jacket on again for another try. One of them seemed to be showing the other one my legs. I don’t remember the exact words but apparently they theorized that the crooked, curved bones in my legs that made me run in a grotesquely flailing and inefficient manner, might have by chance given me a water-skiing advantage.

I spent not just that day but the entire week on the water and I was allowed to water ski just about as much as I could stomach. I learned to cross wakes and ski through obstacle courses. I got to go as fast as I could handle and face fear. I couldn’t recognize anyone’s face because I couldn’t see and the noise of boats made it so I usually couldn’t hear what anyone said either. I was almost entirely cut off from the human world during that time, but I didn’t really care.

It was all physical—the water, the sunshine, the cold wind, the pull of the line, my aching muscles the slap of impact when I did fall, which I did a lot once I started crossing wakes…

It was more fun than I could ever remember having and the only bad part was contemplating the end of the week and my return home to chores, boring schoolwork and mean kids at school who ostracized me.

But then at the end of the week, several adults came to me and said I could join the Oregon state women’s team and go to the National Special Olympics water-skiing competition in Florida. There was even a picture of me in the local newspaper, goofy grin and huge glasses behind a water ski dramatically posed for the camera, but the clipping was lost somewhere in the past thirty years.

I went too. It wasn’t as much fun as that week on the Columbia. There was a lot of waiting around and when I finally got to compete, the place and the skis and everything was unfamiliar and I didn’t do very well.

But that didn’t really matter.

I told myself none of it really mattered. it was “only” the Special Olympics after all. I didn’t even tell my friends at home much beyond that I got to go water-skiing. No one made a big deal about it. I got third place in some category or other but I didn’t feel like I’d won.

That wasn’t the point. The point was that engagement with the physical, that sense of being one with my body, of being physically strong and worthy.

Today when I hear about the Special Olympics facing funding threats or I hear people use the Special Olympics as a slur or a joke, I can’t help but think on that. I did other Special Olympics things as a kid. I ran track and field in the local competitions. I didn’t really like it and I didn’t win with my flailing legs, but it was good exercise. I did know how to push myself. That was good too.

But I know those two weeks of water-skiing—one on the Columbia and one in Florida—changed my entire self-concept as a teenager. I went from just surviving and fighting everyone and everything because I was rejected and wrong and hurt to nursing a ferocious desire to “show them all.”

I’m not saying the second impulse was even healthy. I was driven for the next twelve years to succeed academically and professionally. I competed for and got a scholarship to study abroad when I was sixteen. I competed for and got scholarships to go to a prestigious private college. I competed for and got a coveted place as an international stringer for a national newspaper and became a journalist in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. I traveled through more than 30 countries.

Did it start with that miraculous moment when I didn’t fall down, despite all the predictions? Time-wise, yes. It coincided with the sea change.

Psychologically it is hard to say. But I’ll stand by the Special Olympics. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure it goes on, because I think it did play a role and does play a role with a lot of kids who are beaten down and at the bottom of despair. It’s one way to rise out of that.

Note to younger self

If you could send a message back in time, what would you tell yourself as a child being bullied?

I was recently asked this question as an intellectual exercise, but I had to wonder at the deeper reasons for the question. Is there something we can learn from adult memories of bullying or retrospective advice that might provide some practical help for those in similar circumstances today.?

My experience is only mine. It is particular and specific, possibly too specific to be applicable to others. But I do know this. There are things I did not hear from adults or peers that would have helped and some things I heard a whisper of but not enough. I know there are ideas that would have helped because I eventually found these ideas myself and they helped a great deal.

But I had to invent this wheel and the chariot that rode on it. No one gave ,me the pieces. It is possible, of course, that someone tried and I didn’t listen. Or that I wouldn’t have understood these things as a child, even if someone had told me. But I don’t think so. I think these words would have helped.

So for what its worth and in case someone out there must give advice to a child facing pervasive bullying or social ostracism, here is what would have helped me: .

Yeah, the kid in red and black with unmatched socks looking hopefully toward all the kids in pastel colors, that’s me in first grade.

1. It is not you. It is them.

2. It is not you. It is them.

3. It is not you. It is them.

4. Even if there is something you could do to make them bully and ostracize you less, it would only be less. You didn’t do something to “bring it on yourself.” Adults who say that want to believe it because they don’t want to believe kids will really do this to a disabled child for no good reason. It makes them really uncomfortable about the state of the world and the nature of humanity. And they don’t want to take responsibility for making ethics education a major priority. It is not your fault. You don’t have to figure out how to be more perfect. They are the problem.

5. “Social skills” are good. You should pay attention to well-meaning adults who try to tell you how to respond in ways that will help you. BUT those adults do not know what it is like. The social skills are a band aid to an epidemic. They are not worthless but your social skills are pretty average. You can figure out how to be a little more perfect, and maybe that will help. It will definitely help you win in job interviews someday. But it is still not your fault. It is them.

6. You are being bullied and ostracized because your eyes look different, because you are physically different and because of your family background. None of those things are actually bad about you. You are not the problem. The problem is in the minds of other people, in how they were brought up to be judgmental and bigoted and in the kind of society we have. It is not you. It’s them.

7. All the constant hype about how the most important thing in life and happiness is your friends, their number and their fun-ness, is wrong. People are only saying this to help kids who don’t get good grades feel that they aren’t a failure. There are plenty of ways to be happy without a bunch of friends. Find fun by yourself and with one or two friends. Being alone is not shameful or a failure. It can be lots of fun.

8. You are inherently an introvert. Even if you didn’t have a disability and you looked just like everyone else and you came from a typical family, you wouldn’t be the life of the party or the center of a crowd of friends. Some people get their energy from being with people. Some people get their energy from being alone. You will have fun with people but you need to be alone a lot. Being alone is not shameful or sign of a failure. Being alone will help you to be energized and to have fun with your friends when you do go hang out with them. Look at the things you actually like to do. Most of your hobbies, the things your really love, are hard to do in a big group and work better alone or with one or two friends.

9. Decide to be happy, even if no one will accept you. You will one day do this and you will be much happier. No one told me this, so it took me a long time to get. Maybe you could do it earlier and be happy sooner. Build yourself a happy life. Discover the joys of creating, art, writing and nature. Find work you love, no matter how little it pays. Focus on your passions and those good people who will stand by you, even if they aren’t perfect or if they live far away. You don’t need the rest of them to be happy.

10. Bullies shame themselves. Bullies destroy their self-respect. Self-respect is crucial to happiness. Your self-respect gets battered and bruised by being bullied but at least you still have yours. Theirs is gone forever, at least any honest self-respect. They can only ever lie to themselves about being a good person. I never did stoop to their level. but there were times I wanted to.

11. Don’t worry. Those adults who tell you that you have to fight back to stop bullying, even though you’re blind or one against ten and it is clearly a stupid idea—those people are just wrong and they think bullying is something completely different from what it really is. You really are worthy. Their sickness is their own problem.

12. You will be told to be quiet a lot. The people you trust most, your family and close friends will tell you to be quiet because it is hard for them to hear what is happening to you. When people exclude you, they will tell you to be quiet. They will tell you they are excluding you BECAUSE you are not quiet enough. They want your silence. A lot of people who have a disability or other difference have been silent. It does not help. Silence can help you to survive for a moment or two. Don’t be ashamed of the times you were silent to survive but know that it is not what you have a right to. You have a right to speak the truth. You have a right to be heard.

13. Those who love you need to listen, but it is hard for them to hear when you have been hurt so much that mostly what comes out is screaming. Start with “I feel…” State the feeling first. That helps them hear. When they still don’t listen, it is not your fault. It is not your fault that you are emotional or that your words don’t come out all concise and coordinated. Keep working at expressing yourself in ways people can understand. It is helpful. But there is no perfect. Being gentler and calmer will help sometimes. Sometimes it will make them comfortable with dismissing you. Being concise will help sometimes. Sometimes it will let them make their own assumptions.

14. You are enough. It won’t go away because it is them, not you. And you can’t change them without a major change in society. But you will escape from the power of bullies someday.

As i said, this is not a universal message. Bullying comes in different forms. For some kids it is only a few times. For some the physical part is worse than the psychological part, and for others it is visa versa. This is just my message to myself. It would have helped. Now I know what I needed to hear, what could have saved me a lot of dark years, but no one knew it then.

Those who meant well, meant well. They couldn’t know but maybe someone who knows a bullied child will discover a bit of transferable truth in it. I hope so. Feel free to share.

You don't have to forgive

I’ve been staring at photos of Jemel Roberson for almost two weeks now. Every violent death of innocent people—there have been so many lately—is a tragedy. Every time the police in the US kill a black person for no conceivable reason, other than prejudice and disregard for their lives, it’s an outrage.

But there is something about Roberson that has me by the throat. It grabbed me even before I saw the pictures of him with his nine-month-old baby. It’s the context. He saved people from a mass shooting, yet another one. He did what all those who oppose sensible gun regulations keep saying some good guy with a gun must do. And then they shot him dead.

And I watch black men and women speak about it—calmly, with dignity, with tightly controlled emotions. I don’t think I could talk about it in person without getting upset. Writing has always been easier for me that way.

But of course, I’m not black. I haven’t been forcibly taught to control my emotions or hide outrage to such an extreme. I respect that dignified control. I try to emulate it without much success. Today it makes me think of an incident that happened at my house, which was a lesson on self-control, manners and forgiveness.

My daughter bursts in the front door, breathless and wide-eyed. “They called her “black face!’” she gasps.

Creatuve Commons image via pixabay

My husband just drove up with my daughter and her Nigerian friend from the city, age 8, in the car.

“Who?” I spin around. Our little town is very, very white, something my slightly brown children are all too aware of.

Still gasping out each word, my daughter points out to the road. She says both my son and a boy visiting us from across town ran up to my daughter’s friend when she got out of the car and started taunting her, calling her “black face” and a the local term for “African,” which isn’t supposed to be derogatory but lots of things depend on tone.

I run out the door and find the little girl on the front porch alone. I bring her inside and ask for her take on the story. She is mostly silent, answering with shrugs, nods and shakes of the head with her lips pressed together.

“Is it okay to call you that?” I asked.

Shrug.

“Do kids at school call you that?” I know she goes to school in a mostly white area as well.

Nod.

“Do you like it when they do?”

Shake.

The girl is only eight and we’re on the leading edge of Eastern Europe. We don’t exactly get consciousness raising here, so I can’t assume much. I explain that it isn’t okay for people to call her things she doesn’t like or to make fun of how she looks. As I explain, she slowly relaxes. This is only the second time she’s been away from home over night with white people and she barely got out of the car when this happened.

Justice will wait a moment in favor of therapy. I spend a good long time reassuring her that this is not okay and I won’t let anyone say those things in my house, no matter what. I reassure her that she is beautiful—and she is objectively stunning for an eight-year-old as it so happens. She nods but looks unconvinced.

I do get confirmation that it was my son as well as his friend calling names and I try not to show that this not only deeply embarrasses me but fills me with rage. She doesn’t need my emotions. but my kids are adopted from a racially marginalized group here in Eastern Europe and they have been called “black face” themselves, although they are many shades lighter than the Nigerian girl.

That my son would participate in this… There are no words.

I give her my own apology and send both girls upstairs to play and go out to slay demons.

When I corner the boys outside, they are initially unrepentant—silly, stumbling and giggling. This almost, but not quite, breaks my cool. I want nothing more than to rip them to shreds.

I ask for their side of the story. They attempt to say they were just playing, just kidding, but admit to using the words. The visiting boy admits fairly easily. He isn’t entirely sure these are bad words. My son knows better and it takes longer to get the truth out of him.

I need to cool off to keep from doing something illegal, so I put my son behind one door and the other boy alone on the porch for a time-out. After awhile, my son is more open to talking and he tells all.

The other little boy is frightened and crying. I know that his father just left definitively a couple of weeks ago and that his mother cleans houses. I note with quiet irony that the Nigerian girl’s mother cleans for a living too.

When children do really bad or dangerous things, things parents want to stop in their tracks, there is a conundrum. It isn’t garden-variety naughtiness and with rambunctious kids like mine, they have already seen every acceptable disciplinary strategy in more than a dozen parenting books. Giving them regular discipline (time-out, apologize, revoke video game privileges) seems woefully inadequate and I want to make this eminently memorable.

I talk to my son alone, keeping my fury in check.

“Why did you call her that?”

“It was funny.”

“Has anyone ever called you that?”

Negative head shake.

“Well, actually I happen to know that they did when you were in kindergarten. Lots. It was a big problem. That one teacher…”

Shrug.

I had to bite my tongue. Unlike the kids and some parents, the teacher had not called him “black” or “gypsy” but she had said “those people have trouble in school” and “it’s about the genes, you know.” In the spring she had insisted that he had a contagious skin disease and would be banned from kindergarten for the several weeks it would take to be completely screened by dermatologists. Fortunately, the pediatrician stood up to her. It was ant bites. But all Marik knew was that he had to go to the doctor and the teacher was upset and the doctor said it was silly. As a mother you protect six-year-olds from some of the world’s worst truths, but kids and parents had said those things to him.

“Do you like it when people call you something like that?” I pressed.

Head shake.

Sigh. “Do you think you can give her a really really good apology?”

Nod.

I am far from satisfied, but I go out to talk to the other boy. He’s wiping his tears on his sleeve. This is even harder, though less personally humiliating, since he isn’t my son.

“Have you ever seen an African person before?” We essentially don’t have any local people of African origin here, so this is more or less how I phrase it.

“No.”

Much as I thought. “Why did you call her those words and laugh at her?”

Shrug. “I don’t know.”

“Have you heard other people use those words about African people or other people with brown skin?”

“Yeah.”

“I understand that you heard older kids and grownups use those words. That still doesn’t mean they are okay. It is not okay to call people names and I will never allow those kinds of words at my house. Even outside my house, if you use them, you won’t be welcome at my house. Do you understand me?”

Slight nod.

“Do you think you can say you’re sorry in a really nice way?”

“She’s black. It’s true.”

I’m momentarily at a loss for words. He’s only seven. I didn’t expect much resistance, though I didn’t have any great hopes of making a lasting impression on him either.

I again have to leave in order to avoid coming down like a ton of bricks on someone else’s kid.

I leave the boys in separate confinement for awhile yet. Then I bring them both out to the porch. I tell them that they need to apologize extremely well or my son’s friend will have to go home immediately. I know his single mother is looking forward to a day of rest with him here, but that’s just tough. He will go home if he is recalcitrant on this one.

Before I’m finished the two have started giggling again but I reiterate the consequences and they start to get serious, when they realize I mean it. I have my phone out, ready to make the call.

They start crying and we discuss more. My son’s friend unexpectedly states that kids at school do call my son those names. My son argues that it is mostly only one kid. Obviously he wasn’t telling the full truth before. I discuss with them the ridiculous nature of calling someone with slightly tan skin “black” and point out that the Nigerian girl is also not technically black in color, but more like dark brown. I reiterate that these differences don’t matter and it it is not okay to laugh at someone’s appearance anyway.

Slowly they both appear a bit more genuinely contrite. Finally, I leave them to plan their profuse apology and go upstairs to see the girls again.

I ask the Nigerian girl if she would come down, when she isn’t busy. Overly polite child that she is, she jumps up immediately to go downstairs. I ask her if she would be willing to listen to the boys’ apology. She agrees.

We join the boys outside, and I reiterate for everyone that it isn’t okay to call people names or laugh at anyone’s appearance or background. The boys actually do a pretty good job of apologizing and I almost ask, “Do you forgive them?” But I bite my tongue again.

She’s standing there with her head high, looking down on them from the top step of the porch, while they stand on the grass in the deepening dusk. I think on the fact that white people have probably never apologized to her for racism before. It will be a rarity in her future as well, if she ever gets another such apology, and the racism isn’t going to stop.

The handling of this moment is as crucial as any other step I’ve taken in resolving this deceptively childish conflict.

“You don’t have to forgive them,” I tell her. “They can handle it themselves. But you can forgive them if it makes you feel any better.”

She takes a moment more to look down on them and then says with the most impeccable manners I could wish my kids had, “I forgive you. Thank you for your apology.”

Then she turns and goes back to playing upstairs.

I let the boys come in the house and mostly things continue well, except that I discover that it is the Nigerian girl’s birthday. They don’t do birthday parties in her family, so no one mentioned it when we invited her. I decide this is a perfect opportunity to make the rest of the day all about her.

The boys have to work off a bit of their naughtiness by cleaning the floor. I whip together the world’s fastest chocolate cake and make the boys wrap a gift. The birthday girl is wide-eyed and stunned when she comes downstairs again to our impromptu decorations and party. She says she’s seen birthday parties on TV and she does everything just like in the movies, closing her eyes and putting on a dramatic show of making a wish and blowing out the candles.

In the middle of eating the cake, the seven-year-old who had never seen a black person up close before blurts, “At least you don’t have to worry about getting chocolate on your face, since…”:

I growl his name and fix him with a death-glare across the table. He gulps and wisely shuts up.

She doesn’t appear to notice.

By the time I tuck all four kids into bed, I am aching and exhausted. I feel like I have been literally fighting a war. I don’t know if I’ve won anything this day and I am sure that tomorrow and every single day we’ll still be fighting it.

How does this relate to the case of Jemel Roberson exactly? Well, it isn’t just that case of course. But I would say to all the black people who hurt inside or out because of this lethal and crushing racism we are living with, “Thank you for your calm and your manners and your endless attempts to live in peace with us. You do not have to forgive white people, even when we apologize. We can live with not being forgiven. What we need is to learn and remember and do better in the future.”