Friday, February 17, 2006

Outside Binaries

A few weeks ago, my partner came home from class frustrated. He had asked another classmate not to use "black and white" to talk about dichotomy, noting the racist connotation that black=bad, white=good.
His classmate got upset, and said, "well, what's the politically correct thing to say then?" He tried to explain how it was about being anti-racist and sensitive to the connotations, but didn't immediately have a response to alternatives.
So, here's the list I came up with for other ways to express moving beyond a dichotomy:

* Beyond Dichotomies
* Outside Binaries
* Seeing more than two possibilities
* Bigger than either/or
* More diverse than two labels
* Outside the two small boxes
* Multicolored versus monochromatic
* Seeing the whole spectrum

Any other ideas?

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