If I could describe myself without revealing that I’m an albino, I would. But my birth defect and the fight to appear “normal” probably define me more than I would care to admit. Although some aspects are entertaining, I work hard at making sure people don’t discount me because I look odd — I prefer they dislike me because I’m a rotten person.
TRANSCRIPT
Disneyland, Albinism & Psychology
by Dr. Ken Tangen (2002)
One of the problems of being an albino is the visual part of being seen. So when I was growing up and came to California as a tourist, and like all good tourists went to Disneyland, and there—as you know—they have people walking around dressed up like Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck, Goofey, there was a little boy, he was probably oh, two or three years old, and he spots me and my white hair, and overwhelmed by his circumstances he pulls on his daddy’s sleeve and said “Daddy, is he real?”
Despite what the little one might think, albinos in fact are real. We are not part of the set of going to Disneyland. Despite how movies describe us, we are not maniacal killers either, or superheroes with wonderful strength and power.
In fact we’re just like you. You like going to the beach; we like going to the beach. You go and lie out in the sun, we go and lie out on the sand –course we do it at midnight but it’s almost the same thing. You like getting a suntan, we have moon-tanning, which is really very good. There are some advantages going to the beach at night. See, if I go out in the daytime I have to wear sun protection; I’ve got a hat that I wear, I’ve got glasses, these wraparound glasses and I wear a cowboy hat – I look like a cross between Garth Books, Darth Vader and the Man from Glad.
You put on sun lotion and I can stay out for 30 or 40 seconds. But at night there’s really not much limit to how long you can stay out and worry about ultraviolet protection. I go at night because I can dress like this – don’t I look nice today—it’s true: I have one of those bodies that looks good in clothes. In fact the more clothes I wear the better I look.
One of the things I don’t understand is prejudice based on skin color; people who are fighting over who has the darkest skin. Particularly from my perspective as an albino, all of you are people of color; in fact so am I, my color just doesn’t happen to be tan. According to my daughter when she was about four years old, she had one of these huge coloring sets, and she was drawing a picture of Daddy and she wanted to figure out which would be the appropriate color, so she was going through, and she would hold up the crayon, look at me, and she would pull out the next one and do it; she discovered that I’m not white and I’m not brown. I’m pretty much pink—somewhere between blushing pink and coral red, right in that range.
The real problem with being an albino however is not the visual part of being but the visual part of seeing because albinos typically have lousy eyesight. I suppose it didn’t come clear to me until I turned sixteen and everybody else was driving. Because at sixteen all my friends were driving and I wasn’t. At sixteen everybody else was independent and was going to different places and they were able to control a bit more of their lives. And I felt frustrated and alone, and .. I felt like–I had to rely on other people and I don’t know how to describe that feeling—victimized is an overused word but it may fit in this particular setting. Probably the saddest day of my life in that time frame was when my brother, so was older, got his first car. That sunk into me as being the day I realized that I was not only different but odd.
You have not probably known too many albinos—the odds of being an albino are 1 out of 20,000 in the US—it’s not a common experience. And yet you have experienced all the hurts and pains and frustrations that I’ve talked about. You’ve had different events on which they are based but the same emotions come about, the same feelings come about. The hurts and the pains we experience are what draws us together—it’s what we share as people, it’s the part of being human. We all know how it is to hurt.
As the same is true of the people we’re talking about in psychology. Now you may have grown up in a family that is a lot like James, his father was tyrannical; maybe you grew up in a family like Rogers where he felt that he was not abused but neglected by his family. Or you may have grown up in a family like Adler where he felt inferior to his sibling. You probably weren’t spoiled as a child like Freud, and you may not have been a struggling underachiever like Wundt, but you understand the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional family—that’s the only kind there is.
It changes from time to time over the years and from situation to situation but we all have challenges. I have a physical challenge, a disability that I have to work with, yours may not be as visible as mine but you have the same challenges, that is, you encounter difficulties in your life and things you have to do to achieve. The people we’re going to talk about in psychology are the same way. They had hopes and dreams and aspirations and fears and failures—they are a lot like us.
Psychology is not really the study of theories. It’s not the study of ideas; it’s the study of humanness, of what makes us human and what draws us together as people. It’s the central theme of what makes it important to study. Because if we look at them we will understand a bit more about ourselves and what it was that they experienced. So the story of psychology is not the history of individuals who are far away and different from us, but no matter what their culture, no matter what their background, no matter what experience they have, they are very much people—they know what is, as you do, to be human, and that’s the part we have in common.