Synthesis Sunday: Privilege, Subsuming the Needs of Others, and Never Getting a Turn...

NOTE: This post is very opinionated and full of my current challenges, frustrations, and sparks of understanding. If I offend you in any way, please do not hesitate to send an anonymous comment to this blog. I do not automatically publish comments because most of the comments that I get are spam. If you want to engage me in more of a conversation about any and all of these topics, please do. While I have strong and possibly strange opinions, I am able to change those opinions when I can see the logic behind them, but I will never change if I cannot see that logic.

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK...

My brain is currently spinning around and around through all sorts of topics and situations. If you have ever been on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland, you may know what I am feeling as I go twisting and turning through all sorts of thoughts, situations, and emotions. I am thinking deeply about situations that do not directly affect me but that I have opinions about as well as all sorts of other stuff going on. I started this post yesterday, but abandoned it because it just wasn't flowing smoothly from my churning brain into words on a page.

One of the things that I am hung up on, for some strange reason, is the insistence that our society has right now on pronouns. I am person who genuinely does not care which pronouns you use when you are talking about me to other people. I strive to speak to you when you are present rather than speaking about you to other people when you are present. I do not have any need to know personal details about you in order to relate to your presentations, and I will never stand up in front of a group of people or even just one person to describe myself through gender or sexual preference statements. I do not feel that you get to have access to that information about me just because you feel that I need to have access to that information about you. I really don't care what your gender identification or sexual preference is - I really don't, and I am completely uncomfortable when I am asked to disclose this information with people who do not need it in order to relate to me. I do not understand how our relationship will be different as presenter and audience member if I tell you things about my personal life, especially if those facts do not have any relevance to what I am speaking about.

Okay, now having shared my opinion about this, let me tell you something important to know. If your pronouns are important to you, then keep sharing them. I will respect your wishes to be referred to as you request. You are just as entitled to your opinion as I am to my own, and I will fight to the bitter end to defend this right.

My major difficulty with this topic (and the others that I will bring up here) is that it seems like the preferences of some is being forced upon all without consideration of everyone's needs. I can tell you that the day I have to list my preferred pronouns for an AMTA thing is the day that my membership will end.

This leads me into the perception of privilege.

I am, at first glance, perceived as a very privileged person based on my skin color, my hair color, my personal presence. If you are the type of person who decides how you will interact with people based on what you can see, then I would be judged as someone who is extremely privileged. If you are the type of person who holds off on your judgment about how someone will treat you until you know something about that person, then you may find that I am not as privileged as I appear.

The culture of privilege is something that I find rather hypocritical. On the day after 9/11, I was sitting in a Curriculum course led by one of our cohort who was from Saudi Arabia and who followed cultural and religious norms with dress and interactions with others. It was his evening to share his topic, and he changed it to reflect some of the events happening in the country. The entire evening was full of me being told how I responded to him - none of his assumptions about how I respond to his presence were accurate. I spent the entire lecture thinking that he was stereotyping me in the exact same way he was accusing me of stereotyping him. There was no acknowledgement that what he was saying was true on both sides, and I often feel that discussions about privilege follow this same pattern.

Now, I know that there are generational hurts, I know that there are specific responses that people have experienced, I know that this is not something that is limited to the music therapy world, and I know that this is an ongoing problem for human beings. I can tell you, that even as a person who might be perceived as "privileged," I have experienced all of these things as well. My experience is MY experience, but that doesn't mean that it is any less important than the experiences of other people. I think the danger in this type of discussion is starting to think that my experiences are more important than the experiences of others AND that my experiences and issues deserve more attention than those of any others.

I am thinking that most of my issues with things that are happening in our professional association right now stem from the last sentence in the previous paragraph. At what point does the wish of someone else subsume my needs? Is it my job, as a member of AMTA, to ignore the needs that I have as a music therapist because someone out in the country thinks that I "SHOULD" do things the way that they prefer??

My ongoing mantra seems to be, "Why can't we all just get along?" 

Helpful? Possibly not, but I am getting closer to identifying my own thoughts and ideas about various issues and topics happening in the world of music therapy right now. I refuse to be bullied into a form dictated by someone else that negates things that I feel are important to me. Feel free to do your own thing - but allow me to do mine, especially if it doesn't hurt you personally. I will support what you want or need, but I expect that same consideration from you. It is not my job to reflect everything you tell me to say and do. My ideas and experiences have shaped me into the person and music therapist that I am, and I will not devalue who I am to make you happy. So, don't insist...