7:37am May 8, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: vraisemblance-of-normalcy: Trying to find the right words: And...

vraisemblance-of-normalcy:

Trying to find the right words: And also…

josiahd:

Marginalized people can be *ist. Group membership doesn’t automatically generate anti-oppressive values.

Women can be sexist.

People of color can be racist.

Queer people can be heterosexist.

Folks with…

This actually reminds me of something I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time.

But wasn’t sure how.

Partly because there was so much “material” so to speak, and I didn’t know where to get started on it.

Basically, there are like… “rivers” in the world that are easy to fall into (that’s how my brain seems to like to represent them now for some reason). Where it becomes cognitively and emotionally easier for an oppressed person to exist in a world that is filled with hate for them and people who think it is okay to hurt them, by falling into the river of deciding the hate is justified against some people but that they’re one of the “good ones.” And joining in hating on all the people who are criticized as “the bad ones,” or as examples of why some group should be hated on but they’re an exception because they realise how bad the rest of their group supposedly is.

The “river,” the thing that tries to pull you along with it so hard that it’s difficult to get out or even avoid falling in, is the idea that the people who are predisposed to hate people like you, will respect you more if you “prove you’re an exception.” Which doesn’t just involve doing or not doing certain things, but putting down and hating on other members of your group. In many cases the majority of them.

The thing is that it’s all a lie. You won’t actually gain respect in the community of the people who want to hate you. You’ll just become a Token Okay One at best. They will never really see you as being as good as them. Sometimes you need to go over to the side of really extreme hate to be accepted in some communities. But it can become temporarily easier to exist cognitively and emotionally in the world, if you buy into the “I hate on them too so I’m better than the rest of them” fallacy.

But it’s always only temporary. For any number of reasons. One of them is the exhaustion of having to constantly hate to please the neverending supply of people who come in hating on people like you by default. Another is that siding with the haters usually involves using some kind of ideology, or several, which my brain just can’t maintain long-term.

A few years after I found out that I was autistic (or, more specifically, that all these things that no one ever had a name for my whole life except unspecified “problems” and “something wrong with me,” could be called autism), the whole “Everyone self-diagnoses with Asperger’s as an excuse to be rude” meme got started.

I hadn’t participated in any autistic communities at that point or knew where to find them. Although I’m not sure it would have been better if I had, because when sites like Wrong Planet started going up, I saw people doing this all over them too. Anyway, what happened was that I panicked, and out of my fear, began to lash out whenever I was in a place where I saw an autistic person being criticised in almost any way, even if it wasn’t “they self-diagnosed as an excuse to be rude.”

Except I didn’t lash out against the people doing it. I lashed out against the autistic person.

For crap like “using it as an excuse to be rude and thereby giving a bad name to the rest of us who struggle with this disorder.” Basically saying the same things the haters were saying, but tacking on “and you give a bad name to those of us who really have this disorder and struggle with it and know it isn’t an excuse to be rude,” etc etc.

Like real autistic people could even have a fraction of the power that was being attributed to them to overwhelm society as this huge problem, by “self-diagnosing as an excuse to be rude,” if that society wasn’t determined to hate them already. Even if some of them really were people who weren’t autistic and mistakenly thought they were. Or even people who really DID think they could use it as an excuse. People act like there are no places where even suspecting you have a certain condition, or being suspected of it by others, will make you suspect and hated, whether you have the official diagnosis or not. Like most people will instantly believe and love you for “self-diagnosing” and then other people have to hate on you to “protect the real ones.” I was in a social situation once where I was complaining about some things another person, at the time, was doing, that amounted to “sie doesn’t seem to realise how sie makes other people feel when sie does certain things” (like millions of people all around the world don’t say this about other people all the time). Someone else told me, behind the person’s back, that their opinion was that the person in question was autistic and that they knew All About It because they had an autistic relative, and that “they (autistic people) are literally incapable of imagining how other people are feeling.”

I didn’t buy into that but once I knew I was autistic, I did jump on the “let’s hate on this person for using it as an excuse, even if that’s not really what they’re doing because we wanted an excuse to hate them anyway” bandwagon several times, because I was so terrified of being targeted myself if I didn’t.

I don’t know if you could call it a case of a person marginalising themselves or being *ist. I think that what was going on was so deep under words for me that I don’t even feel comfortable trying to use any ideology-feeling words to describe it. The best I can come, in my own mind, is thinking of it as “falling into the river.” Because the river is there in your mind, and it’s so fast and so deep, and even getting too close to its boundaries can grab you and pull you in. And once you’re in, it can take the help of many other people to get yourself out (even if they don’t know they’re helping you just by saying what they’re saying), because you can’t fight back against the current all alone.

And the autism thing wasn’t my first experience with it either. In fact you could say maybe I was predisposed to do it because I had been doing it for a long time already, from the moment I started to notice (mostly by under-words stuff) that a lot of men in this society considered themselves superior to women. Even though I publically identify as genderqueer nowadays, what I thought back then was “well, I must be a woman because I don’t feel like I should be a man.” And also got talked for a while into hating on certain kinds of queer people because of friends who hated on them and had “they brought it on themselves” thinking. (Most of which was based on misinformation as this stuff usually is, but even if it wasn’t, that’s still not an excuse.)

So it’s a thing I want to write about more. I have more words for it than this, but they went off on a bunch of totally different tangents. (Need to write sometime about “web thinking” in my head and how =! mutually exclusive with only being able to focus on one thing or a few things at a time, speaking of stupid stereotype ideas. I think the reason I did so badly on most essays in high school was because every time I wrote something I was supposed to be thinking simultaneously about “how it related to my thesis” which I often couldn’t do, like with the conflict stories thing where I couldn’t constantly think about “the main conflict” when I wrote. Also words like “relate to” and “relationship” and “systems” can be manipulated in so many ideological ways it’s ridiculous, one of the reasons why dropping out of words is usually the best way to understand what’s really going on around me, for me.)