ASL at the Grammys, casual exclusion, and a call for color lovers (SBLTN Lab Notes 030)
ASL interpreters for Grammy interviews, disability language for common phrases, and color tools for creatives
IN THE MARGINS
Loyalty vs Community
In the weird mix between sales language and community building, I’ve been seeing the term "loyal community". I think that’s so weird. I don't want people loyal to me. Be loyal to your values, not a product or service that I offer. If your values no longer align with what I talk about, I want people to leave. That self-selection or self-curating is like when people unsubscribe to a newsletter - a good type of cleansing. And is community about loyalty? Or is it about mutual support? Maybe I have a problem with blind loyalty, and not loyalty itself... 🤔 /rambling
ACCESSIBILITY
ASL at the Grammys
If you’re Stateside and watched the Grammys recently (a music industry award show), you may have noticed there were American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters for some of the pre-show interviews. As I thought “YAY FOR ACCESSIBILITY”, I began to dig a little deeper into who was providing the interpreters: the Grammys or the individual artists.
Surprisingly, it was the former! The show provided interpreters and it was up to the artist if they wanted to use them or not. I’d like to see in the future interpreters for every interview and better camera work that doesn’t crop out the interpreters or hosts that don’t block them with their mic. For now, cheers to a bit of progress!
DIVERSITY & INCLUSION
The way we talk about disability matters.
Phrases like “the blind leading the blind,” “crippling poverty,” or “falling on deaf ears” reinforce damaging associations between disability and undesirable states of being. I’m definitely guilty of using these kinds of phrases casually. It wasn’t until a colleague pointed out to me that tossing around “crazy” as a way to describe someone’s behavior was actually offensive to them. They had struggled with mental health in the past, including being institutionalized and dealing with the stigma attached with being in a ‘nut house’ and called ‘crazy’. Until that moment, I honestly had thought nothing of it and at the time my kneejerk internal response was “Yeah, well, that’s not how I meant it and you know me better than that so stop being sensitive.”
I try to keep up with The Hastings Center, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that produces publications on ethical issues in health, science, and technology that inform policy, practice, and public understanding of bioethics. It was their public event series, “The Art of Flourishing: Conversations on Disability,” that kicked off my thoughts on disability language and how the use of metaphors characterizing disability actually relate to real-world biases and inequities.
❓ QUESTION: Are there any phrases you use casually that may need some rethinking? What are some alternatives you can try instead?
ART & DESIGN
Calling all color lovers!
For Global North peeps, the arrival of Spring season means refreshes and renewal. With brands reinvigorating their visual identities and designers spicing up their portfolios, adding a dash of color has been on my mind lately. Here are some fun color tools for my fellow creatives!
Hue Mint is a color palette generator that uses machine learning to create unique color schemes for your brand, website, or graphics like illustrations and gradients. (I spent waaaay too long on this website haha)
MyMind’s color generator offers simple 2-3 color palettes for starting inspo.
Have you ever considered combining ‘snail-paced soft pink’ with ‘unsealed mahogany’ and ‘lousy watermelon’ as a color scheme for your next project? Well, what might sound a bit weird at first is the concept behind colors.lol - a color inspiration site with “overly descriptive color palettes”, as its creator Adam Fuhrer describes it. Created as a fun way to discover interesting color combinations, the palettes are hand-selected from the Twitter bot @colorschemez. The feed randomly generates color combinations and matches each color with an adjective from a list of over 20,000 words. Hiding behind the unusual names are of course real hex color values that you can use right away — #FDB0C0, #4A0100, and #FD4659 in the case of ‘snail-paced soft pink’ and its fellas, for example. A fun take on color.
Signing off from the Starship SBLTN,
Laneen (Pronouns: she/they)
🎧 Listening: 4 hours of Dark Folk - Viking - Native American Music by Munknörr
👀 Watching: Disrupting Ableism with Artful Activism
🖊️ Word of the Day: Linguistics - The scientific study of human language. It entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure.