Transcript

I do not know what I do not know: A case for intersectionality | Lyndsey Johnson | TEDxLSSU

so here's the deal freshman year of high school I had a plan I wanted to get great grades graduate early and go to my dream school since elementary school Harbor become an anthropologist and I was on track I was doing well academically I had a bunch of extracurricular projects in the works and I think barsa tea and swimming that's me actually but that summer instead of getting my driver's license testing out of algebra to going to swim camp at Michigan State and getting my lifeguard certificate I slept you see the powers that be decided that instead of all that I should get mono and not in the fun way that you can catch mono if you catch my drift despite my best efforts I didn't recover my symptoms started growing beyond the standard symptoms of mono I had fevers headaches dizziness brain fog a racing heart nausea and extreme fatigue one of the fun things I did get to do that summer was visit Georgia and one day when I was on a day trip to Senoia I had made it halfway down the Main Street before collapsing my immune system was so compromised that I'd gotten pneumonia in the south during summer has anyone here ever heard of Senoia like raise of hands now yeah okay it's where they filmed the walking dead so I was in the perfect place for a walk-on role as a zombie and I had the dead part down just not the walking by November I'd stopped being able to go to school on in fact on Black Friday in an attempt to get me out of the house my mom and I went to Joanne's where I could get from the car to the front to the front door into a wheelchair by the time that I got to the back of the store I was so nauseous that I had to go home again it was the most fun I'd had all month and I have brain fog still okay so ever since using a wheelchair okay wait no no my brain often fails me in the following months I continued getting worse and despite a ton of tests like EKGs halter monitors a tilt table test and a ton of blood tests we couldn't figure out what was going on by the time that I got to the Mayo Clinic in January I was so ill that I couldn't get out of a wheelchair for more than a minute even then with my heart racing and trying not to faint after four days there I was diagnosed I had postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome or pots not the fun way that you can get pot pots is a form of dissident Omiya it basically means that when I stand my nervous system doesn't pump my blood up to my head and heart correctly and so that's what causes all of my symptoms with a beta blocker my heart can calm down but my autonomic nervous system still doesn't work properly currently I'm in junior in high school and I'm still working with my doctors to improve to improve my symptoms because the additional treatments for pots just make me worse 25% of pots patients are disabled to the point of not being able to attend work or school and scientists have compared the quality of life of someone with pots to someone with congestive heart failure or someone on dialysis for kidney failure before I got sick I thought of disability as something that I could easily see I had no idea that someone could be so ill that they became disabled or that there were invisible disabilities like pots if I'm not using a chair and I'm wearing enough makeup I look fine right right right okay but I can't want standing or walking long enough so I after five minutes I look like a ghost and I'll need somewhere to collapse the easiest way to explain my energy levels is with the spoon theory it was created in 2003 by Christine misery and Ino and is now used by a lot of chronically ill people we call ourselves spoon ease it quits spoons two units of energy for example it takes me about two spoons to get out of to get out of bed take a shower and get dressed in the morning and it takes about three to go to my 50-minute class here at LSU and those are all the spoons that I have in a day I never know if I'll have that many if I use more than my five spoons of the day I'll have less tomorrow so doing this going over my spoon limit ever since I started using wheelchairs I've been thinking about one extremely overused trope the only examples of wheelchair users standing up that I've seen in media are used for an AHA they've been thinking it moment the one I remembered the most was in an episode of Cory in the house where Stanley pretends and sprained his ankle to get extra sympathy and take attention away from Cory this trope keeps me on edge whenever I'm out in a wheelchair one time last year I was hanging out with some friends and we borrowed a wheelchair in a store to save energy as we looked into the shops what if I was kept pushing me in really fast spurts even though I protested but actually I was having the most fun that I've had in months and I finally decided to stop protesting and the wheels caught on the sidewalk and I fell face forward I really didn't have a plan I just got back up and back in the chair but I did torment him a ton later and my other friend said that she could see people in the parking lot staring at us giving us the eyes of you are disrespecting real disabled people and playing with a wheelchair if the only examples that we see of peek of people in wheelchairs standing up are when they're faking an injury all together for advantages how can we be expected to know that there are you wheelchair users that can stand I've read countless stories of people with invisible disabilities using mobility aids and getting harassed for it there have been people with notes left on their windshields their mirrors broken and their cars keyed we as humans have this natural tendency to make assumptions even if we don't know what we're making assumptions about those people were trying to make sure that no one took advantage of disabled parking but they were actually hurting real disabled people in the process so through my experience I've learned that there's no wrong way to be disabled you can stand beneath a wheelchair you can look happy despite being an extreme pain my illness completely changed my life I learned that changing one detail can change the entire experience as I was going through all this I was meeting more disabled people and learning more about other marginalized groups a term that I learned about was intersectionality intersectionality is defined as the interconnected nature of social categorization such as but not limited to race class and gender as they apply to a given individual or group regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage the term was coined in 1989 by kimberlé crenshaw when she heard about a case involving a woman named Emma Grafton Reid who was denied a job at General Motors I believed it was because she was a black woman because the company had only ever hired women that were white and black people that were men but the court would only let her have the case if she was suing for either racial or gender discrimination she was at the intersecting disadvantage of being black and a woman but the court couldn't see that intersection an easily visualized example of intersectionality is the wage gap it's often mentioned to talk about gender inequality but the wage gap is even larger for men and women of color for example a Latina woman holds both the identity of a woman and a Latin ex person and is paid less because she holds both of those identities historically people felt that they had to choose between black civil rights or women's rights for example white women's rights activists such as susan b anthony decided to fight for only white women's rights to vote concluding that women of color could just get their rights later or simply not caring whether they got them at all there's an example of this struggle between choosing between civil rights or women's rights in the docu-series good girls revolt where the actress that portrays civil rights attorney and now congresswoman representing the District of Columbia Illinois owner Holmes Norton says this these women have something very important with us in common with us they're second-class citizens and you and I know exactly how that feels don't we kept from your full potential paid less than you're worth talk down to told to shut up stay in your place these women live in a box just like you so don't be fooled because their box looks a little more comfortable than yours it's still a box and the only way that any of us are going to break out of this box is if we stand together because when the second-class citizens of the world stand with each other not against each other that's how you change the world so when you have these women that's how you for yourself it's not as simple as man or woman black or white rich or poor gay or straight or abled or disabled experiences can overlap and not everyone falls on one side or another for example this quote really sums that up pretty well there's no such thing a single issue struggles because we do not live single issues issue lives rights for oppressed groups are not mutually exclusive evidence shows that adding one detail changes the whole experience so we can't be like that Court was they understood the parts but not the whole human experience is not that simple we can't just pick either/or when I got sick we had to figure out a way to handle my education while trying to figure that out it was implied to me that I really stick the only thing that had changed the only intersection that was added was becoming chronically ill I still have my goals I just have to reach them a different way just because of this advant disadvantage I was at this disadvantage of being ill I was expected to lower my goals and I don't have only one thing to say to that and it's a line from a song by my favorite rapper Desa I've got a lot of imperfections but I don't count my ambition in them the worst thing that ever happened to me was also the biggest learning experience of my life but it doesn't take a life-changing experience to learn I don't know what it's like to be a black woman a trans Asian person a gay Latin next person a blind person or an immigrant I do not know what I do not know what I kind of do is listen to and learn their experiences learn their stories and amplify their voices accepting your privileges shouldn't be a daunting or guilt-ridden thing if we acknowledge the privileges we have that's how we can start to tackle the issues it's kind of like saying accepting you have a problem is the first step to recovery after that we have to be open to learn humanity will benefit when more people listen to each other from Disney's Pocahontas if you walk the footsteps of a stranger you'll learn things you never knew you never knew thank you [Applause]