The Way Normal Controls You
I had been playing around with what “normal” meant in my head since middle school, when I had to make a two-minute presentation on it. After the two minutes were up, I didn’t remember anything I had said but felt good that I was done with this stressful ordeal and that I had remembered to maintain good eye contact during it. For the next nine years, I tossed it out of my brain box because the philosophical nature of it exasperated me. However, this concept resurfaced in my junior year of college.
On a bus ride to Golden Gardens Beach with a few fellow Unite UW club members, my emotions rose at what I was hearing from a club member alumna. Unite UW is a club that makes space for domestic, out-of-state, and international students to mingle and become friends, because it was observed that people generally made friends in their respective groups. Students could only be participants for a quarter. However, all alumni are invited to their annual end-of-year party.
This alumna was recounting her recent trip to Japan, complaining about her lack of personal space in that country. She hated how people would reach out and touch her pale hair without asking. She then continued to complain about Asian culture as a whole, and their lack of respect for personal space. “But I know it’s just because they’re ignorant,” she concluded.
Anger boiled as I mentally scoffed. Disregarding her massive generalization, how could she, the foreigner, just show up in a different country and claim that their cultural norms were “ignorant?” How could she not see that it was she who was ignorant of their culture, and that the way she held up her own views on what a “normal” social culture entailed was so stereotypical of her background?
I didn’t say anything because, as always, words and logic escaped me when my emotions surged, leaving me speechless. However, reflecting on this interaction under the lens of the concept of normal shows how toxic the concept of what normal is can be.
How Normal Affects Perception
Societally determined definitions of normal have permeated our language, making it discriminatory and degrading to those who are not in that range. And the discrimination comes from the way that language makes others feel about the person being described.
A study on teachers proves the consequence of labels. The abstract of the paper “Teacher Expectancies and the Label ‘Learning Disabilities’” demonstrates this phenomenon.
“Prior to viewing the tape, the control group was told that the child was normal while the experimental group was told that the child was learning disabled . . . The experimental group rated the child more negatively than did the control group. It was concluded that the label “learning disabled” generates negative expectancies in teachers, which affects their objective observations of behavior and may be detrimental to the child’s academic progress.”[1]
In this experiment, the child’s actions weren’t even what was making the teachers think they were normal or had a disability, it was what other people told them they were. This highlights how important it is to be aware of the language that we use. After this language came the confirmation bias, making teachers believe whether a child was “normal” or not.
This relates to inclusive design because who we perceive as a normal user group is the core of what makes our creations exclusive. As a society, we need to stop using these labels. The concept of normal was founded by the correlation between two theories that weren’t meant for each other and then compounded by confirmation bias.
To prevent being affected by what society generalizes about people, we can implement more inclusive language. Speaking inclusively — as in, not defining people by their deviance from societal generalizations, but instead by their actions and abilities, we can move away from labeling those who are different from us not as “other” but as just . . . different, since we all have differences.
We can also think more inclusively by identifying the fact that our typical life norms have been built by our personal life experiences — and these experiences are not always going to be universal — just like the social norms surrounding personal space in Western cultures and in Asia.
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In this article series, I share excerpts and stories from my book, Our Exclusive Society: Pathways Toward Inclusion by Design. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect you can reach me here via email rhrodney97@gmail.com or connect with me on Twitter @RachelHRodney1. Also, you can also find my book on Amazon — here’s the link.
Sources
[1] Glen G. Foster, Carl R. Schmidt, and David Sabatino, “Teacher Expectancies and the Label ‘Learning Disabilities,’” Journal of Learning Disabilities (1976).
