4:18pm August 9, 2013

➸ Social skills for autonomous people: Socially stigmatized people still have to respect boundaries

Here’s something I’ve seen happen among autistic folks. I think it probably happens in other groups too.

Someone is subjected to a lot of social violencePeople don’t want to talk to them because they’re autistic and weirdPeople mock the idea that people like them could ever be a good friend…

I had this happen before with someone who basically convinced me I HAD TO be her friend. Except that the reasons I didn’t want to weren’t discriminatory. But in general when people reacted negatively to her she ALWAYS assumed discrimination

Meanwhile she expected to be able to behave in blatantly prejudiced ways to others and get away with it.Like she would call other DD people the r word, call black people the n word, and say things like “well I wanted to hurt them so it’s okay”. She said some horrible stuff about Asian people on a mailing list, got talked to by the moderator, and said stuff like “but I’m just talking from my experience my stepmother is Asian and she’s horrible” and “they refuse to accept me as I am, nobody ever accepts me”.

And basically yeah she would be bigoted, people would reject her for her bigotry, and she would accuse them of being bigoted against her or “not accepting me as I am”.

She didn’t seem to get that if you treat people like shit, it’s not discrimination if they don’t like you. And that if you discriminate against other people in the very areas you’d never put up with discrimination yourself, it’s not discrimination when they react negatively.

She used to basically sit there complaining to me for hours about how “nobody accepts her as she is”, but refused to make the slightest concession that “as she is”, she was cruel and bigoted and picked fights with people but called them abusive if they took the bait.

She actually believed that she was kind and “pure” in a way nondisabled people weren’t. But in the next breath she’d talk about how she wanted to make people hurt so she would choose the cruelest words possible to call them.

And just… it wasn’t her disability that was driving people away from her. It just wasn’t. Autism doesn’t make people call people the n word.

(But, she would tell me, it wasn’t that all black people were n words. Just the bad ones. …oh, so that’s okay then…NOT. She had this word idea that it wasn’t prejudiced to use slurs if you only used them against people you don’t like. And it wasn’t prejudiced to make huge horrible generalizations about people based on race or disability… as long as there was ONE person in the world who fit that generalization. Then it was just “talking from experience” and it was okay.)

Anyway… she was basically this post personified. She thought the world owed her friendship and that anyone who didn’t like her was just bigoted. No matter how nasty or bigoted she was.

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