A VERY prominent and UNAPOLOGETIC socialist. The way history has defanged her turned her into a simpleton who learned to speak is an absolute appalling insult to the strong, principled woman she was.
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dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
“Hellen Keller wasn’t real” is an immediate swipe away from a profile. I don’t care if they’re joking or if they’re actually a nut job conspiracy theorist. If the latter, obviously we’re not gonna vibe, and if the former, that entire joke/line of thinking is prefaced on ableism and the idea that a deaf and blind woman could not have accomplished what she did, not to mention the erasure of a prominent socialist, suffragist, and activist. I fucking hate that joke.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 2 days ago
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
Exactly! She’s one of my favorite historical figures, but when if she wasn’t, even if our politics did not align so well, she does not deserve to swept into the dustbin like this, liberal washed and eventually erased entirely. It’s disgusting.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There are absolutely a lot of awful realizations about how inhumanly the world treats people, but the realization that you don’t even get to have the legacy of the life you lived? That’s maybe the most heinous one.
solidheron@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Doesn’t matter had sex.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This is the first I’ve ever heard about it, and I’m so confused
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
It started as a joke, and now there are actual people who believe that she was either not a real person, or that her accomplishments were faked. People with disabilities are already assumed to be lesser than able bodied people, and this particular trend is stripping away one of the most prominent examples to the contrary. It is also erasing one of the most prominent examples of a famous socialist woman in American history, and a southern American socialist woman at that. Her story is amazing, but more importantly, she is historically significant. She is an example to so many people, and she has been liberal-washed for a century, and now she’s being erased entirely. It’s disgusting.
Flagstaff@programming.dev 1 day ago
Sickening. I had no idea she was being attacked in this way.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I guess this is another moon landing flat earth sovereign citizen thing.
TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 day ago
it’s a nothingburger that people online like to tilt at.
because they are all brave Knights errant.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
This is not at all comparable to bonsai kittens. Bonsai kittens were not at all based in reality. Hellen Keller was an actual, real human person who is being erased by idiotic conspiracy theorists. She was a disabled woman who overcame profound disability to become an incredibly example to millions of people, while also being a highly intelligent political thinker. She has been liberal washed for a century, and now she is being erased entirely. It’s not a funny little joke to disregard the accomplishments of someone who represents something that profound to people who are routinely discriminated against. The woman grew up at a time when disabled people were locked away in hospitals, homes, and attics.
Do you have any idea how utterly insulting it is to see people saying she could not have done what she did, or that she did not even exist, simply because they cannot imagine that a woman with her disabilities could learn language? As if to say that disabled people should be outright rejected because their experience is different from an an able bodied persons?
This has nothing to do with “rescuing damsels,” and the suggestion that it does is insulting in and of itself. The woman is dead, she cannot rescue herself, she deserves the recognition that she has lost. When she is taught in schools, it’s an abbreviated, liberal washed, abridged few paragraphs, when the reality is that she is one of the most important figures in the American disability rights movement, and one of the most prominent examples of a socialist woman in US history, especially southern American US history.