Tonight I sat down and watched Pedro, the TV movie which aired on MTV detailing aspects of the life of Pedro Zamora, who was on the 3rd season of the Real World, and the first openly gay man to be on a television show while living with AIDS.
I have no desire to write about the quality or context of the film, it was what it was, but what I do want to write about is something I have thought for several years. We say words have power, words can make or break things in this world, can unite people or tear them apart. Words keep us moving and we cannot deny the power in them.
So while surfing the net I briefly glimpsed something on an entertainment website that said "Important Roles These milestones in gay roles on TV marked the path to tolerance."
For as long as I can remember those statements always would stir uneasiness within me. So many people working for tolerance and I hated that word, to me the word in relation to the rights of others always left me with a sour taste in my mouth, it left and air of negativity that I could not "tolerate". To me tolerance was something I did in spite of a desire not to...I tolerate this war, I do not like it and I do not accept it. I tolerate the aspects of religion that I disagree with, I may not like them and I may not accept them but I deal with them. All of these things I can deal with but I do not ACCEPT. Acceptance being the operative word.
All this time what frustrated me about the Tolerance movement was that I felt it should be an Acceptance movement. I felt that we shouldn't just be working to tolerate others and having that be the ultimate goal. I don't want someone to feel like they have to deal with me because of my differences, I don't want to interact with someone who would feel the need to deal with me as a black person even though they do not like my blackness, who deal with me as a woman but do not like my womanhood. We have been working for years to secure human rights, civil rights, women's right, gay rights, political, religious...I could go on. And after all this time that hadn't yet transcended to Acceptance, we were settling on the limited definition of tolerance in the face of a far reaching acceptance.
So in preparing to write this I wanted to do a little copy and paste of the definition of tolerance. I specifically remember watching an episode of Oprah a few years back where the guests discussed tolerance and I looked it up online and hated the definition. So tonight frustrated yet again I went back to the website to do my copy and paste and upon reading the definition was a bit shocked. Where I was going to go into my frustration with our use of a limited term and the power of the words we used I could say I was pleasantly surprised. Although the terminology had not evolved from Tolerance to Acceptance the definition itself has changed. Instead of finding a definition of tolerance which implied dealing with something you don't like what I found was :
–noun
1.
a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.
2.
a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one's own.
3.
interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.
Words like fairness, freedom, concern, liberal had all become a part of this word that from my perspective had such a limited scope. So I feel as if I were right and wrong at the same time. Right in that words are so extremely powerful, they can change our attitudes and opinions. But wrong in that we haven't progressed to a more full understanding of differences amongst us because it seems that although words can change our attitudes and opinions, our attitudes and opinions can also change words.
**FirEFLy**
I have no desire to write about the quality or context of the film, it was what it was, but what I do want to write about is something I have thought for several years. We say words have power, words can make or break things in this world, can unite people or tear them apart. Words keep us moving and we cannot deny the power in them.
So while surfing the net I briefly glimpsed something on an entertainment website that said "Important Roles These milestones in gay roles on TV marked the path to tolerance."
For as long as I can remember those statements always would stir uneasiness within me. So many people working for tolerance and I hated that word, to me the word in relation to the rights of others always left me with a sour taste in my mouth, it left and air of negativity that I could not "tolerate". To me tolerance was something I did in spite of a desire not to...I tolerate this war, I do not like it and I do not accept it. I tolerate the aspects of religion that I disagree with, I may not like them and I may not accept them but I deal with them. All of these things I can deal with but I do not ACCEPT. Acceptance being the operative word.
All this time what frustrated me about the Tolerance movement was that I felt it should be an Acceptance movement. I felt that we shouldn't just be working to tolerate others and having that be the ultimate goal. I don't want someone to feel like they have to deal with me because of my differences, I don't want to interact with someone who would feel the need to deal with me as a black person even though they do not like my blackness, who deal with me as a woman but do not like my womanhood. We have been working for years to secure human rights, civil rights, women's right, gay rights, political, religious...I could go on. And after all this time that hadn't yet transcended to Acceptance, we were settling on the limited definition of tolerance in the face of a far reaching acceptance.
So in preparing to write this I wanted to do a little copy and paste of the definition of tolerance. I specifically remember watching an episode of Oprah a few years back where the guests discussed tolerance and I looked it up online and hated the definition. So tonight frustrated yet again I went back to the website to do my copy and paste and upon reading the definition was a bit shocked. Where I was going to go into my frustration with our use of a limited term and the power of the words we used I could say I was pleasantly surprised. Although the terminology had not evolved from Tolerance to Acceptance the definition itself has changed. Instead of finding a definition of tolerance which implied dealing with something you don't like what I found was :
–noun
1.
a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.
2.
a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one's own.
3.
interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.
Words like fairness, freedom, concern, liberal had all become a part of this word that from my perspective had such a limited scope. So I feel as if I were right and wrong at the same time. Right in that words are so extremely powerful, they can change our attitudes and opinions. But wrong in that we haven't progressed to a more full understanding of differences amongst us because it seems that although words can change our attitudes and opinions, our attitudes and opinions can also change words.
**FirEFLy**
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