@funruly posted this excerpt in the “Obama was ‘raised white’, says Ben Carson” thread:
I was thinking about it earlier when I saw the post about how awful normal people are. No comment on that article at all, really, but in my head, I connected the idea of “normal people” with people who assume their “code” is not a code, it’s the uncoded way of communicating. Women know how to speak to women, but they also know how to speak to men. Black people know how to speak to black people but they also know how to speak to white people. Everyone has to learn how to speak to their own cultural subgroups as well as to the dominant groups (and those that don’t have their prospects severely limited).
What’s been happening with the privilege paradigm is white/male/cis/able people have been encouraged to recognize that their code isn’t the “correct” way, it’s just another way. Instead of always expecting women to understand men, maybe men could try to understand women too.
Francophones (who could be a metaphor for women or a minority group or who could literally be Francophones, since language minority groups have a similar experience in some ways) living in my area have to know English, Anglophones don’t have to learn French. It’s as if some English people are being asked to learn a little French and yelling back, “Why don’t you just learn English?!?” because they haven’t noticed that the Francophones have been speaking English to them the entire time.
