Uh, as another developmentally disabled person, I’m gonna just say that asking people to write shorter sentences does not make those sentences inherently more accessible to people
and that not everyone is capable of writing in ways that you personally (or people with your specific ways of reading & ways of how ADHD, brainfog, dyslexia etc) find the most accessible to you.
Or even if they are capable, they have their own reasons for not writing in very short sentences, separated by small line breaks.
I can’t write that way naturally myself–I had to modify this response after I wrote it.
and I find it much more difficult to understand than gothhabiba’s writing, which to me is much better at getting across her complex & nuanced ideas and statements.
Like I get the frustration of wanting/trying to read things that are impossible for you to understand without you having to modify them yourself
but sometimes that’s just what you have to do.
Unfortunately, not everyone’s writing & reading needs are compatible.
And there absolutely is a very real & racist pattern where white people specifically demand that bloggers like gothhabiba and other poc writing about racism constantly modify their writing in specific and often conflicting ways
which she & other poc among others has talked about and are talking about above.
Like the fact is that racism is a thing that white people claim consistently that they can’t understand, need broken down more and more, need always the most dumbed-down explanations/analyses of.
Regardless of whether or not they have disabilities
Or whether or not other disabled people (with the same disabilities often, and really really often poc themselves) find the writings accessible.
Like gothhabiba has talked about this a LOT before but white people’s demands to break down all analyses of racism to small clipped soundbites is racist
And a denial of the complex nature of racism & its manifestations. It is just another way for white people to demand that poc do labor, unappreciated, unpaid, and often difficult and nebulous for them.
I empathize with your frustration and annoyance. I also really hate the more general atmosphere of many spaces, on tumblr and off, that encourage people to write in ways deeply inaccessible to me.
I really do. I’m disabled. There is a lot I can’t understand either. I have reblogged & written critiques of these social norms before.
(And I hold the very firm opinion that nobody needs specific academic or otherwise complex language–or really language at all–to understand and have good politics. Like an approach to life that’s about compassion and nuance, understanding reality, and helping to fix social ills.)
Some people’s writings are just fucking incomprehensible to me. They’re inaccessible in ways that I find incredibly difficult to articulate.
But this is a blogger who writes for free, on her own time, in her own style, in accordance with her own desires & choices.
Coming at her in a really demanding way is not actually acceptable or value-neutral
and neither is assuming that all dd/adhd/brainfog/dyslexic people are like you and need the same things as you.
Multiple people in this conversation, including gothhabiba herself, have disabilities.
And your assumption that the people disagreeing with you & reacting to you (who are unless I’m mistaken all poc, including me) are not disabled is inherently ableist and racist.
And it’s part of a wider pattern of a specific racist manifestation of ableism.
It’s a way that white people get to yet again position themselves as the smug authority on a topic and poc as the unenlightened pedants who could not possibly already know these things.
It is a way to not meet poc as equals.
You are not going to be met with sweet compliance by approaching this subject & these people with passive-aggressiveness and by demanding things that not everyone can do. That’s just how it is.