Is Good Spelling Classist? « Clarissa's Blog
1. I was extremely brow-beaten by my parents, where part of the justification of this attack on my psyche was the assertion, “You can’t even speak properly!”. My parents are extreme right-wingers, who identified speaking the Queen’s English with being civilized. In effect, what they were saying to me was, “We don’t think you are civilized or acceptable according to right-wing ideas.” Instead, they codified their feelings in terms of my alleged inability to speak.
I didn’t understand the meaning of their accusation at the time, but on reflection it seemed probable to me that colonial subjects who were non-English speakers were attacked in precisely this way as a means to deny them political power via liberation from British, colonial rule.
It was also apparent that my parents wanted to deny me my own power to make decisions for myself, despite the fact that I had already claimed that right, but had been set back by workplace bullying. My health had suffered a devastating beating.
One of the stranger psychological effects I have experienced as a result of dealing with my parents and other right-wingers online is the sense that although I’ve spoken I haven’t really said anything. They would pick apart your grammar or your tone in order to assert that you had said nothing at all.
At times, this attitude to me made me feel I was going mad, until I finally figured out that all of this had nothing to do with my capacity to communicate, but was rather a political strategy, designed to make you feel you were going mad.
2. I was not young when they did this to me. I was in my my late twenties and had returned to my parents’ house to recover from an extreme collapse of my digestive system. That had been as a result of workplace bullying. I already had a bachelor’s degree in Arts.
I was cottoning on to the need to fight as if my life depended on it. I was tired of being pushed around. I had so much in my character structure that was adapted to an entirely different set of cultural expectations.
And, yes, it did feel deadly even then. It felt like my parents wanted to erase me and start again. Or, they were giving me a choice: “Either we erase you, or you erase us.”
This is why a lot of my blog writing focuses on the issue of Superego, and why I have a rather nuanced perspective on the topic.
3. That is why, by the end of writing my thesis, whereby I took sides against my original Rhodesian identity, I felt like I was going mad. It was very weird — a kind of “limit experience”, where I felt really proud of myself for saying what had to be said, against a lot of opposition that was still resonating in my head.
My memoir was a similar project — a strike for freedom against the odds because of what was fighting inside me.
1. I was extremely brow-beaten by my parents, where part of the justification of this attack on my psyche was the assertion, “You can’t even speak properly!”. My parents are extreme right-wingers, who identified speaking the Queen’s English with being civilized. In effect, what they were saying to me was, “We don’t think you are civilized or acceptable according to right-wing ideas.” Instead, they codified their feelings in terms of my alleged inability to speak.
I didn’t understand the meaning of their accusation at the time, but on reflection it seemed probable to me that colonial subjects who were non-English speakers were attacked in precisely this way as a means to deny them political power via liberation from British, colonial rule.
It was also apparent that my parents wanted to deny me my own power to make decisions for myself, despite the fact that I had already claimed that right, but had been set back by workplace bullying. My health had suffered a devastating beating.
One of the stranger psychological effects I have experienced as a result of dealing with my parents and other right-wingers online is the sense that although I’ve spoken I haven’t really said anything. They would pick apart your grammar or your tone in order to assert that you had said nothing at all.
At times, this attitude to me made me feel I was going mad, until I finally figured out that all of this had nothing to do with my capacity to communicate, but was rather a political strategy, designed to make you feel you were going mad.
2. I was not young when they did this to me. I was in my my late twenties and had returned to my parents’ house to recover from an extreme collapse of my digestive system. That had been as a result of workplace bullying. I already had a bachelor’s degree in Arts.
I was cottoning on to the need to fight as if my life depended on it. I was tired of being pushed around. I had so much in my character structure that was adapted to an entirely different set of cultural expectations.
And, yes, it did feel deadly even then. It felt like my parents wanted to erase me and start again. Or, they were giving me a choice: “Either we erase you, or you erase us.”
This is why a lot of my blog writing focuses on the issue of Superego, and why I have a rather nuanced perspective on the topic.
3. That is why, by the end of writing my thesis, whereby I took sides against my original Rhodesian identity, I felt like I was going mad. It was very weird — a kind of “limit experience”, where I felt really proud of myself for saying what had to be said, against a lot of opposition that was still resonating in my head.
My memoir was a similar project — a strike for freedom against the odds because of what was fighting inside me.
1 comment:
What I noticed from my parents' way of using the accusation for political leverage is that it worked on the same basis as gender bigotry does. If you want to attack someone on that basis, you keep asserting untrue things about them until they start to produce those responses you have already attributed to them, as symptoms. For example, you will keep accusing someone of being too sensitive, or too [whatever], until they start to feel like they are going mad, and produce the qualities of sensitivity you had originally accused them of having.
Similarly, my parents' accusation that I still was "unable to even speak properly" caused me to hesitate and stumble over my words.
So it is that oppression typically creates a relationship where cause and effect are reversed, so that to observers they seem to flow in the wrong direction.
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