[IBARW] Anti-color-blindness 101

[rushthatspeaks]

It's the second annual International Blog Against Racism Week, and link roundups can be found at ibarw. My entry from last year is here. You can find interesting and thought-provoking entries this year from, among many others, oyceter (whose brainchild this is: thank you again, Oyce), kate_nepveu, nojojojo, coffeeandink... and that's things I thought of without looking at the link roundup.

So. This year I've seen a lot of discussion about the concept of 'colorblindness'. One of the things that many people say, sometimes more and sometimes less politely, when the concept of white privilege and of being privileged because of one's race is mentioned, is summarizable as "but going on about how various people are privileged is nonsensical, because emphasizing the ways that people are treated differently detracts from the long-term goal of having everybody be treated the same-- we should all be color-blind, and not see race or ethnicity at all in any way when we're interacting with people and making decisions, that's the goal here, right?"

Well, firstly, if that were the goal, I don't think that discussion of how the concept of colorblindness is failing to work on a day-to-day basis, and how people are treated differently every day because of their skin tones, nationalities, and perceived ethnic groupings would undermine that.

But, and this is the real point of this entry: no, that's not the goal. There are two goals shoved together conceptually in that idea, and they are completely different goals which do not work together.

Let me break it down: the goals I stated in the phrase in quotes above were

1) everybody should be treated the same way, regardless of ethnicity, race, national background, etc.

2) we should not pay any attention to race or ethnicity at all in case doing so skews our judgement, in order to accomplish goal #1.

1) is, in fact, the goal, the point, the entire rationale of anti-racism work and in fact of all anti-discrimination work: treating all human beings equally, because all human beings are equal by virtue of being human.

The problem with 2) can best be summarized by a sentence from Madeleine L'Engle, a sentence that forms the entire point of A Wrinkle In Time: "Like and equal are not the same thing at all."

All human beings are equal. All human beings are different. The problem with 'colorblindness' as a conceptual practice is that when one attempts to practice it, one winds up treating everybody the way that one treats persons who have exactly the same background and react exactly the same ways that one does oneself. And, if one is white middle/upper-class American, this means that one tends to default to white middle/upper-class American, a default that is made even easier by the fact that popular culture considers it 'normal'.

And this 'normal' is not color-blind. It is in fact highly discriminatory. Let us take, for example, dialect. I can't speak it or write it, but I know black English when I hear it. It is a dialect; it has its own vocabulary and it has its own grammar. It can be spoken well or badly. It can be spoken respectfully or insultingly.

And the most grammatical, rhetorically precise, respectful, lyrical, downright gorgeous black English ever written is not going to fly on a job application for a Fortune 500 company, because the white upper/middle-class norm is coded to see this dialect as grammatically incorrect, lower-class, and inappropriate for a job application-- and possibly inappropriate for writing at all.

If you are operating by trying to be color-blind-- let's say the job application form you use to hire does not specify the race of the applicant-- you will still assume that the applicant who is writing in black English is less literate and less educated than the one who is not. You will assume this person cannot write an English sentence, unless you are yourself familiar with the dialect, or unless you are consciously trying not to make this sort of assumption, which can be difficult to do when there are so many people out there who actually can't write an English sentence.

You are just as likely to hire a black person as to hire a white person using this race-not-given form, provided that the black person is writing in the dialect you perceive to be correct and professional.

Now, I grew up speaking the dialect that is considered to be correct and business-professional. I had no trouble learning it; I just had to be told what levels of formality to use at what times. It's my native tongue, and it's easy for me. To a person who is a native speaker of black English-- or of Southern English-- or of the Ozark dialect (just ask ozarque-- the dialect I grew up speaking may literally be a second language, and is almost certainly a learned behavior, with a level of conscious performativity to it.

The way that 'colorblindness' works in the job market at the moment tells these people: you can be treated just like everyone else, as long as you discard your native dialect.

I've never had to do that personally, but I would think it would be difficult and painful-- and at certain income brackets and in certain environments, how is a person supposed to learn the 'more acceptable' dialect in the first place, even if they want to? For that matter, why is the dialect that is more acceptable more acceptable? Because it's white upper-class academic, that's why.

There are lots and lots of examples like this, everywhere. Every day.

And this is why 'colorblindness' doesn't work. If I am aware that the people I am interacting with speak a different dialect of English than I do, and I accept that that dialect is an interesting, useful, and innately valid form of English, which is equal in every way to mine, and I learn something about how that dialect works, I will be able to tell when people who speak to me in that dialect are literate, intelligent, and rhetorically fluent, and then I can make my hiring decisions based on that. This is what diversity training is supposed to do: teach a person what the likely cultural differences they may run into are so that they do not default to a non-inclusive idea of normal.

The assumption behind 'colorblindness' seems to be that if we notice a difference at all, we will judge against a person based on that difference.

It doesn't have to be that way. Equal does not have to be the same as alike.

It is hard work to fully acknowledge that practices that are completely different and sometimes utterly contradictory to what one's own culture teaches are absolutely equally as valid. We are taught that they are not all the time, and there's also a large set of scenarios which are extremely morally ambiguous and difficult to deal with (female genital mutilation: native cultural practice? Yes. Hideous, discriminatory, and something that ought to stop ASAP? Hell yes. Change that has to come from within the culture that practices it? Oh yeah; if I go and tell people to stop it, they will quite rightly ask me who the hell I think I am-- but, as an equal, I can try as hard as I like to convince people that it is a bad idea).

But that is the goal, right there: to treat everyone equally because of who they are, and not in spite of it, or without acknowledging it. To find any dialect of English as valid as any other, and to judge merit by how well a person uses it, and to apply this principle in all of the thousand other places it needs to be applied. To accept, and not to overlook.

To respect.

That is what needs to be fought for.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

And this 'normal' is not color-blind. It is in fact highly discriminatory. Let us take, for example, dialect. I can't speak it or write it, but I know black English when I hear it. It is a dialect; it has its own vocabulary and it has its own grammar.

True, but the black people who use it most tend to be the poorest in every sense, exactly the way there's a redneck way of speaking, too. Success in any field requires considerable contact with already-established people there, and the more you hang out with them, the more you talk like them. Do people judge you by the way you talk and dress yourself? Of course, and they always will. The vast majority of the time, it's accurate. When applicants show up speaking in Ebonics about price-to-earnings-growth ratios, no doubt that will change.

I don't think a person gets to set their own characteristics as the baseline of virtue, or reasonableness, and demand that the world change for them.

[cija.livejournal.com]

I don't think a person gets to set their own characteristics as the baseline of virtue, or reasonableness, and demand that the world change for them.

But they do, and you yourself pointed out how it works. You just said:

Success in any field requires considerable contact with already-established people there, and the more you hang out with them, the more you talk like them. Do people judge you by the way you talk and dress yourself? Of course, and they always will.

That is to say, you just acknowledged and underlined the point you then denied. If you are a member of the upper classes, particularly if you are a boss or a hiring manager, you absolutely do get to "set your own characteristics as the baseline of" etc. And you absolutely do get to demand, successfully, that the world change for you: hence the existence of people who have to consciously learn the mainstream upper-class white dialect in order to succeed, and do so. They are part of the world; they changed in response to these people's demands. Because 'already-established' people do get to do what you say a person can't.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

The key distinction there is that those people are paying you, and if you're getting into management, they're probably not paying you peanuts. If an Asian-American CEO wanted me to learn Mandarin in order to rise in his company, I'd have a clear choice. If an African-American does what he has to to "make it" and starts his own company, he can require his employees to speak "black American." If white supremicists got up in arms about that, I think most right-wingers would unite with the left against them, because it's widely held that turnabout is fair play.

Already-established people always have more control. That's part of the control that parents exercise over their children, for example. Then when the kids get the means to be independent, that control ends. It's just a matter of paying your dues and getting to call the tune.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

True, but the black people who use it most tend to be the poorest in every sense, exactly the way there's a redneck way of speaking, too.

How would that make the language any less valid as a form of expression?

Success in any field requires considerable contact with already-established people there, and the more you hang out with them, the more you talk like them.

Which is how the already-established elite in a field can (quite possibly unconsciously) control what language is considered acceptable in the workplace, and make sure it is within their comfort zones. You have to talk like them, think like them, in order to be taken at all seriously-- and when you are not like them in a way that cannot be camouflaged, that means you don't get taken seriously at all without a hell of a lot of backbreaking work that has nothing to do with your actual abilities in the field. This is true of all workplaces to some extent, but it was a great deal easier for me to learn five words of pidgin Spanish and some dirty jokes when I was working fast-food than it would be for me to learn an entirely new dialect and way of speaking in order to have people listen to me at all. There is a difference between the inside jokes and insider's vocab that appear in an industry or workplace, and the non-toleration of persons who do not adhere to a given set of linguistic/appearance/cultural parameters, especially since said non-toleration is not for any quantifiable reason.

Do people judge you by the way you talk and dress yourself? Of course, and they always will. The vast majority of the time, it's accurate.

What I'm saying here is that the standards by which 'normal' American culture judges people are innately biased and need to be revamped. If all clothing from the Indian subcontinent looks strange to me, how am I going to know who is a really good dresser when I'm talking with people in salwar kameez? Hopefully I won't just default to 'the one who looks most Western', but that's certainly what I've been taught to do.

When applicants show up speaking in Ebonics about price-to-earnings-growth ratios, no doubt that will change.

One reason that people do not show up speaking in black English about price-to-earning ratios is that they know perfectly well that it isn't going to get them anywhere, and that doing so will not get them hired. And because the dialect is spoken by a minority, it is difficult to change the hiring practices: people who are willing to speak the perceived-professional dialect are totally findable. At the moment, I think that most higher-level business-types would be surprised, confused, and upset by a person who spoke to them about price-to-earning ratios in black English, because that just isn't what you do.

And that's what needs to be changed, because black English is not innately less capable of talking about price-to-earning ratios; it's just that everyone treats it that way.

I don't think a person gets to set their own characteristics as the baseline of virtue, or reasonableness, and demand that the world change for them.

But this is what the people in power do all the time. I should not get to say that people who want to come and work for me have to learn a second dialect. The current standard of business English is the current standard because a lot of mostly white mostly upper-class mostly men set it as the standard of virtue and reasonableness. Why do they get to do that?

I think the world is totally capable of accomodating a more flexible paradigm, in which more than one form of speech is acceptable in formal business. I also think that in order to do that, the current privileged speech needs to be understood as, in point of fact, privileged.

[navrins]

You said some interesting things in this post, which I'm going to have to think about. I have some gut responses to it, but I want to give what you said a little more time to settle and see if I still think my gut responses are right.

But I do want to respond specifically to this particular point:

And that's what needs to be changed, because black English is not innately less capable of talking about price-to-earning ratios; it's just that everyone treats it that way.

Black English is not innately less capable of talking about price-to-earning ratios, I'm willing to stipulate. But it is less capable of communicating with American businesspeople about price-to-earning ratios than standard American English. So is Cockney English or some of the more extreme forms of Irish or Scottish English. Likewise French, or Mandarin, or Japanese.

A person capable of speaking fluent black English would no doubt make a better financial consultant to an investor whose primary dialect was black English (and I think it's very important to distinguish "person capable of speaking fluent black English" from "person whose primary dialect is black English" from "black person"). But to get along well with the majority of American businesspeople, he's going to have to learn to speak the English that is common in that community - just as a native speaker of any other language and most other dialects would have to do. I think that's perfectly normal and natural.

I should not get to say that people who want to come and work for me have to learn a second dialect.

I don't agree. I think you should get to say exactly that. I think that, depending on what the business you run is, you should say exactly that. If you seek to hire an employee who will have to interact with a public most of whom speaks a particular language and dialect, you would be a fool to hire someone who cannot communicate effectively with people speaking that language and dialect. If you seek to hire an employee who will have to interact with you a lot, you would be foolish to hire someone you had difficulty communicating with (although you may be willing to put in more work than your customers are).

The current standard of business English is the current standard because a lot of mostly white mostly upper-class mostly men set it as the standard of virtue and reasonableness. Why do they get to do that?

Because a community sets its own standards for appropriate behavior in that community. Every community does.

If, when I first met you, I had been wearing a power suit, had close-cropped hair, a clean shave, smelled like after-shave lotion, and talked about baseball and beer, do you really think that you and your household would have welcomed me? I doubt it. And if I walked into a bank's back office dressed like I am and talking about the things I do, I would not expect to be welcomed there. Every community has its own standards of behavior, and it welcomes and thinks well of those who meet its standards and shuns and thinks poorly of those who don't.

[cija.livejournal.com]

So is Cockney English or some of the more extreme forms of Irish or Scottish English. Likewise French, or Mandarin, or Japanese.

I think there is really problematic transition in this sentence. The less-mainstream dialects of American English are not equivalent to actual foreign languages. Speakers of "black English" don't generally have any difficulty understanding speakers of "white English,"[1] and it isn't much more difficult to go the other way, either (even though it's always easier to pick up a dominant dialect, just because you're surrounded by it) -- in my experience, white people who claim not to be able to understand black slang/accents/dialect are usually amping up their deliberate, intentional incomprehension for racist-comic effect (as in the "Do you speak jive?" bit in Airplane.

Neither is it fair to compare an "extreme" form of Irish or Scottish English to the not-particularly-extreme form of black dialect/accent that (I think) rushthatspeaks is referring to. I think you might profitably compare an speaker of "black English" to a regular old English or Irish person, though. An English person especially can get away with considerable dumbness or rudeness in the US just because we so strongly associate intelligence and politeness with that set of speech markers that we frequently pay more attention to how they sound than what they're saying. Only for them, white American cultural biases work in their favor rather than against them. So because of that, this:

But to get along well with the majority of American businesspeople, he's going to have to learn to speak the English that is common in that community - just as a native speaker of any other language and most other dialects would have to do. I think that's perfectly normal and natural.

--is not strictly true. Because speakers of black English aren't just speaking in a different and unfamiliar way; they're speaking in a way that is specifically familiar to white businessmen -- but familiar as an object of scorn, discomfort, and low comedy. Black English is not a neutral foreign dialect to many, if not most, white Americans.

[1] Scare quotes included because I am not very comfortable with this terminology.

[navrins]

Yes, I mostly agree with what you say here.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Businesspeople have a different set of emotional reactions to money talk, it seems to me. I think it's a strong signal of "one of us" to them. So if someone at a business meeting started talking in black English about the prospects for the coming fiscal year, yeah, there might be a few adverse reactions, but mostly I think they'd take him or her seriously.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I think that if I am running a business, I should get to say that the people who work for me should speak a language I speak, or a language that someone working along with me speaks. I don't think I should get to tell them *how* they should speak that language, as long as there is mutual comprehensibility. cija is correct that I am talking about the mutually comprehensible dialects of English rather than the ones that require subtitling for one another at the cinema.

... to get along with the majority of American businesspeople, he is going to have to learn to speak the English that is common in that community...

And this is one reason that Americans have gained something of an international reputation for throwing their weight around: insisting that people come to us and use our standards, instead of going to them and using theirs, at all times. Yes, I feel that people who want to talk to me should be making an effort to make themselves comprehensible to me. But I should be making an effort to make myself comprehensible to them, too. The effort needs to run both ways.

With the situation I am discussing involving dialect, *all* of the effort is placed on the shoulders of the group who are viewed as not matching the norm, whose language is viewed as inferior. One community is setting the standards for *everybody that community deals with*, and the set of people that that community deals with quite frequently includes the general public.

In my ideal world, I would be able to speak to someone using my native dialect of English, and they would be able to reply using their native dialect of English, and neither of us would innately judge the other as more or less educated/literate/worthwhile from the choice of dialect alone.

Re: our household welcoming you if your appearance/demeanor had been different: we would at least have been polite, as we are with relatives and other people we are trying to communicate with without much common vocabulary. As regards your second example, there is a difference between the private and the public sphere; if you went into a bank's back office dressed as you are and speaking as you do, and had business there, it would be discriminatory of them not to be polite and welcoming. They deal with the public, which involves understanding that they do not legislate the public. If our household had been in some way nasty to you (God forbid) because of your appearance etc., it would be an interpersonal nastiness. If a bank is nasty to you, it is a public matter which may seek public redress-- I mean, one can seek public redress even if people are nasty enough to one in private, via charges of libel or assault.

Therefore, I think that it is reasonable to question who gets to set the standards for the public spheres of society, and what those standards are, and to try to cause those standards to meet somewhere in the middle between the standards that are set up by the thousands and thousands of private communities. Which means compromise on all sides, and not automatically defining a given set of standards as inferior, as said standards are defined now.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Job advertisements regularly require that the person be bilingual. This is part of the boss's dilemma; if they set the requirements too narrowly, the job may well go unfilled and their work go undone.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i agree with you completely here.

and i'm still going to make sure my kid(s) speak upper class academic english. (my current plan is to adopt, probably transracially.) as a survival skill. i hope they pick up other dialects as well, but i want them to be able to speak like the rich people speak, so as to maximize their chances of becoming rich people themselves.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

My kids are probably going to wind up having upper class academic English as a default, because it's my default, and my wife's.

But I'm going to try to give them exposure to as many other dialects as possible, and emphasize the importance of learning at least one foreign language.

And I feel sad about the necessity, but I agree that business/academic/white speech is still at this point in time a survival skill that I want them to learn how to use. It's just-- I want them to know it doesn't have to be the only language, and it's not better.

Also, oh God the post I could write on having to learn how to speak a language that men will even vaguely listen to... I didn't bring it up in the main post because I don't want to derail the discussion away from racism (and I hope this comment won't do that either), but women certainly have a very similar dialect-related conundrum when trying to break into upper-level business/academia/public discourse.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

But I'm going to try to give them exposure to as many other dialects as possible, and emphasize the importance of learning at least one foreign language.

See, that's a different matter. Our kids go to a bilingual day care, at which they alternate Spanish-speaking days with English-speaking days. We're happy with that. We're happy to live in a major city where there's diversity. If our sons turned out to want to marry a Jamaican black woman and a Hispanic man, that's fine. But we see an appreciation of diversity as completely different from culture as a fit subject for public policy.

[nightengalesknd.livejournal.com]

I so completely agree with all of this.

[gallian.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, and I also agree with handworn.

I mean, I was warned when I went to work at my current/old agency that many of the people I worked with would be of lower educational level than I am. When I look at resumes, I do look at command of the written English...

Because many of our prospective employees are not native English speakers, and if their receptive English is not decent, that can be a safety hazzard, as we have unfortunately seen.

You could argue it's race/culture. I would argue it's safety.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

As I said above to navrins, there's a difference between saying that someone needs to speak a language that I understand, and saying how they ought to speak it. I absolutely agree that in your profession having someone not understand what is being said to them can be a major safety hazard. I don't think that the only way of checking whether they understand is by seeing how well they do at standard American business/academic dialect.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i mainly agree with your point, but i find your example of dialect wanting.

suppose we have an undisputably white person who, do to certain facts of her background, speaks vernacular urban black English as her native language. she will, faced with a sincerely color-blind interview process, also be totally screwed when applying for many jobs. the problem with this part of the system isn't that it is or isn't color-blind, but that it engages in phenomenally arbitrary linguistic discrimination. since racial and ethnic boundaries prettymuch never line up neatly with linguistic or cultural boundaries, applying different linguistic and cultural standards to people based on their race or ethnicity will leave a lot of people screwed for no good reason. the total damage will, if we pick our stereotypes carefully, be less than if we picked one set of linguistic and cultural norms to judge everybody by, but the basic unfairness is the same. you have a hell of a case for increased linguistic and cultural tolerance in our society, but, although color-blindness is problematic for other reasons, it seems to me that no amount of color sensitivity is really going to solve this particular problem.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I didn't say we should apply different linguistic and cultural standards to people based on their race or ethnicity. I said we should try to treat linguistic and cultural practices as equal to one another. That way, no matter who is speaking the English to me that I associate with urban blacks, I will still know that it is just as valid as my own dialect.

[q10.livejournal.com]

I didn't say we should apply different linguistic and cultural standards to people based on their race or ethnicity. I said we should try to treat linguistic and cultural practices as equal to one another.

indeed, but once everybody in the conversation has accepted that, we find we aren't any closer to determining whether applying that policy in a color-blind way is a good idea. so the point about linguistic and cultural tolerance is well-taken, but as an argument against color blindness i'm still not sure how it helps. (i want to stress again that i think there are plenty of other arguments against naive color blindness - this isn't in any way intended as the start of a dispute about any substantial claim.)

or, more simply, the policy of respecting everybody's dialect and culture, and not holding people to different dialect and culture standards depending on ethnicity is still, if we say no more about it, apparently a color-blind policy.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

During that old "ebonics" kerfuffle -- when I was in college? anyway, a good long while ago now -- I had it ranted at me more than once that Black English isn't grammatical; therefore it isn't a language. Several people I corrected were truly shocked to find out that a dialect IS grammatical. Every dialect is grammatical. British English isn't ungrammatical just because its allowable comma splices drive American readers bananas; it's just a slightly different grammar.

I don't know how that mistake develops -- do people really think that dialect is haphazard, confused, riddled with errors? I like to believe that people don't really think that, that they just haven't thought the matter through. They hear different and they think wrong and they never do a rethink unless forced to.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I like to believe that too, but I also got that sort of rant. It's also amazing how long it can take to communicate the concept of dialectical difference to some kinds of grammatical stickler-- I have actually had college professors tell me that there is One Correct English Language Found In The O.E.D., and if it isn't in there, it is Wrong. Asking these people whether they use British spelling is soothing to the temper, but doesn't actually help anything.

[q10.livejournal.com]

what people here is somebody speaking what's recognizably a variety of their own language, but in a way that violates the rules they're accustomed to.

another case in which people here this in the speech of non-native speakers who are, in a real sense getting it wrong in the sense that they haven't internalized all the rules of the grammar that they're trying to learn. in general, when one is speaking a language of which one is not a native speaker, one accepts error diagnoses offered by native speakers (if they're polite and offered at socially appropriate times and all that).

that is, there is a common case of failure of others to conform to one's internalized grammar (and phonology) that is the result of what could be called genuine (if blameless) error. it results from not having successfully learned all the rules. in this case it is an oversimplified but not wholly absurd approximation of the truth to say that the people who sound wrong are just missing part of the grammar and fudging it. if you're working on the (really incredibly wrong, but in ways that aren't obvious to most people) assumption that first language learning and second language learning are reasonably similar processes, then when you hear somebody else speaking a variety of your first language as their own first language, but in a way that sounds funny to you, you're going to assume that they're in the same boat - that they didn't learn all the rules and are fudging it. you will, of course, be colossally wrong, for reasons that are easy to explain by sitting somebody down for about half an hour and talking them through some examples and analogies. most people, however, have never had the benefit of this half hour conversation, so they fall into this trap.

i'm not in a position to say this with certainty, but it strikes me as likely that certain black dialects have the bad luck to differ from standard American in ways that are also characteristic of non-native speech. (substitution of more cross-linguistically common phonemes for some of the rarer standard English phonemes and failure to use standard inflected forms of the verb ‘be’ come to mind.)

at least, this is my best guess about how people are implicitly reasoning about this. and if i'm at all right it really must be implicit, because when you lay it out explicitly like this it immediately looks very silly.

[ifnotnow.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU!

more, maybe, when life calms down a bit

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this post, it really got me thinking.

I am reminded of the subplots of an episode from the first season of Dark Angel (or maybe I'm combining two episodes in my head), in which [very minor non-arc character and plot spoilers] Original Cindy gets a job as an insurance telemarketer, commission only, and at first attempts to follow the white english script. Which she is able to do, because she is very intelligent and knows the dialect well even if she doesn't usually speak it, but it feels fake to her and comes across as flat and doesn't work. When she finally gives up and starts speaking sincerely and passionately in her native dialect of black english is when she starts getting through to the customer, and starts having an actual conversation instead of just trying to be allowed to recite the script before she gets cut off.

Meanwhile, Herbal, a black character who usually speaks with a much heavier Carribean dialect comes to work at the courier service speaking very precise upper class english for the day, boggling all his friends -- he announces he is trying to change how he communicates to impress his girlfriend about his intelligence, but he also eloquently describes the necessity of speaking in the dialect of those with power if one wants to be successful.

Of course by the end of the episode(s) both of them decide that it's just not worth it to not "be true to themselves," echoing the conclusion Max comes to in the main plot.

Written out like that it looks like a heavy-handed message, but still I didn't really think about it enough when I saw the show, not the way you've thought it through for this post -- although obviously some of it stuck with me for me to remember it now.

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

kudos on the L'Engle quote. My personal favorite on the topic is Tom Robbins' "Equality is not regarding different things similarly; equality is regarding different things differently".