Strike.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

I loved the illusion, the conviction, the desire – whatever you want to call it – that the words were agents rather than extensions of reality. That they made my life happen, rather than just recorded it happening.

Fiction is also a kind of inoculation, a vaccine, preserving us from such plagues as reality can breed. But, like all true vaccines, it will work only if it contains a measure of the plague itself, a tincture of the thing it confronts.

What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.

Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.” Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the first epithets that many European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term “nigger” – it made them feel instantly American. But this is tricky magic. Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man’s value system, but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.

The problem with metaphors like “I was blind and now I see” is they overwhelmingly position the disability as the negative. When you’re “blind to the consequences”, when your voice “falls on deaf ears”, when you need to “stand up for yourself”, those are all negative situations that should be rectified. In contrast, having your “eyes opened”, being “all ears” and “standing your ground” are situations that are generally applauded. Sadly, I never hear anybody being told to “sit their ground”. Disability is synonymous with lack of insight, inability to communicate and not having the power or the intelligence to have agency over your own life. Sound familiar? Those are all stereotypes that are associated with all kinds of disability.

[L]iberalism also tends toward an abstract, idealist way of approaching social issues that leaves untouched substantive inequalities, unfreedoms, and restrictions on self-determination that derive from pervasive, embedded, and normalized social practices. Recognizing the existence of such inequities, liberalism trusts that firm and consistent commitment to abstract principles is the best the polity can do to challenge them. Liberalism tends to mistake state power as the only form of power worthy of public concern and thus tends to approach social questions as always questions about what the law should or should not do. As an antidote to state power, liberalism places its greatest hope in the power of the individual rational mind to decide among competing views about the good life and choose for itself the best path. This is appropriate at certain levels of social interaction. However, since the disciplinary social forces and barriers that entangle and block those paths work in part through shaping consciousness, desire, and thereby agency, liberalism’s valorization of idealist principles and individual autonomy not only leaves untouched but often exacerbates social inequalities.