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"Carnagey, Bill" wrote in part: > I should point out that some eight years ago I met an individual at work who > had paraplegia. He and I-as well as our spouses-have been very best friends > to this day. I can honestly and sincerely say that I never think of my > friend as a paraplegic nor even as an individual who uses a wheelchair. I > am sensitive and aware of accommodations that he may need at times. But, he > is just a good buddy of mine and he regards me as the same. We became > friends before I knew I was also a PWD. Bill, I hate to break this to you but your statement sounds exactly like most whites who refuse to admit they aren't color blind. If you truly didn't think of your friend as paraplegic/in a wheelchair, it never would have occurred to you to bring this up and you wouldn't consider it significant that he has a job where you do if you didn't feel that this was an unusual, unheard of, shouldn't/couldn't/wouldn't/can't be thing. It's the, "I'm not prejudice. I just happen to have a (fill in the minority category) friend" defense. And I'm always intrigued when it is used -- especially when there appears to be no obvious reason for summoning it. There are many problems with "disability awareness" days and simulations -- and, if memory serves, we've discussed most of them before on this list. However, the main points have usually been ignored -- by both pro and con camps. The first is, as you pointed out, anyone who truly has no need or desire to accept difference will not be effected or affected -- the Kevorkians, Marge Schotts, and Harry Haiseldens of the world are not going to change their worldview over a day/week/month in a simulation. And, to be realistic, they aren't the biggest problem facing any minority group either. They just happen to be convenient scapegoats because they are the extreme. The majority of the problems stem from people who think that they understand what it's like to be different/unacceptable/stigmatized yet do not look at their own behavior, thought processes, actions and, in some cases, denials and how these perpetuate the status quo, perpetuate prejudice. It is, for example, how Erving Goffman's book Stigma discusses prejudice while never acknowledging the language used within the text, to discuss the ills of a prejudiced society, affirms these prejudices -- the supposed inherent superiority of that one unblushing white, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied male. The majority of the problems stem from people who, as well intentioned as they may be, like to pretend that they are both "color" blind and "know" another group's lived experience. Like John Howard Griffin's experiment, as Gayle Wald points out, it is "the troubling assumptions contained in Griffin's defense of his experiment and its methodology; his implicit perception that as a white male intellectual he is entitled to the cultural knowledge of others; his assumption that he can willfully transcend the conditions of his own social formation; his conviction that passing affords the only means of authenticating racial oppression; and his belief that he can better convey the meaning of this oppression to other whites than can African Americans," that makes these types of experiments problematic, at best, and catastrophic at their worst. -- Carolyn check out, "Passing, Invisibility and Other Psychotic Stuff" at http://www.tell-us-your-story.com/_disc68r/00000003.htm Add your story at http://www.tell-us-your-story.com Finding What We Have In Common One Story At A Time* %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%