11:13am October 30, 2013

Being autistic does not mean being entirely alien from the normal human experience, or alien from your own culture. (And a bunch of tangents.)

youneedacat:

But it seems like the more severely autistic people think you are, the more they expect that everything you do comes from experiences so far outside the norm that they get weirded out if you do anything remotely “normal”, or anything that obviously comes from your culture.

When my video went viral, for some reason people focused really hard on the idea that was “very severely autistic” and that the whole point of the video was somehow changed by that. Which annoyed me because the point of my video would’ve been the same if I still had any communicative speech, at which point people would’ve been saying, I don’t even know what they’d have been saying. The video wasn’t even about fucking autism at all, it was written for a girl with severe CP. But everyone seemed to expecting my experiences to be completely outside of both humanity and culture.

So then I’d see people picking it apart on the basis that I clearly sang with notes that were normal Western notes.

And I was like… what did they expect, I didn’t grow up in some kind of cultural vacuum where I never heard American music and never had any musical training for that matter?

But no autistic person grows up in a cultural vacuum. No matter how severely autistic people think you are. It doesn’t matter. None of us grow up in that cultural vacuum. Even those of us who truly don’t understand language don’t grow up in a cultural vacuum. Everyone is influenced by their culture, because we’re all surrounded by it. You can’t escape that just by having a cognitive disability.

But you’d be surprised how many people actually believe this is true.

As in, some so-called scientists study autistic people to learn how people who are uninfluenced by culture react to certain things.

Which is bizarre.

It’s like they take at face value, they never question, the idea that we don’t pick up on cultural information. And that’s a ridiculous idea to take at face value. Hell, it’s a ridiculous idea, period. I don’t know who came up with it, but they can’t have understood autism pretty well.

What’s even worse is when actual autistic people believe it, and thus believe themselves uninfluenced by the less-than-pleasant aspects of their own culture. Honestly I see autistic people and people with other cognitive disabilities as more likely to showthe unpleasant aspects of our cultures that we’ve been influenced by. As in, autistic men are more likely to show their sexism more obviously than nonautistic men, autistic white people more likely to show our racism, etc. Because it’s harder to hide things like that when you have problems with social communication or problems with hiding things in general, and most cognitive disabilities make it harder to hide things and cause at least some social communication problems. It’s not that people with cognitive disabilities are more racist and sexist than people without them. It’s just that people without them are better at hiding things like racism and sexism. And I hate when I see autistic people running around saying in one breath that they’re ~uninfluenced by the culture around them~ and in the next breath saying something sexist or racist or anything else along those lines.

I think this is connected to the idea that autistic people (and cognitively disabled people in general) are ~pure and innocent~ and ~unsullied~ and crap. Holy innocents. Ugh. Makes my skin crawl just to think about being seen that way. Makes my skin crawl even worse to remember people I’ve known who saw themselves that way.

Actual conversation I witnessed in the offline world: An autistic woman was fighting with a nondisabled woman. The nondisabled woman was being, by far, the more reasonable one in the argument. The autistic woman was just unleashing this pure vitriol all over her that made me feel icky just to watch. (Not because she was autistic. Because she was a mean person in general. We aren’t exempt from that, either.) The nonautistic woman objected to being treated in this way. The autistic woman said something, and knowing her there was absolutely no sarcasm intended here, something like “People like me exist to teach people like you what really matters in the world, so you have to listen.” That same woman explained to me that she wasn’t like nondisabled people because she was pure and untouched by evil, or something along those lines. And to see that line pulled out right after the amount of meanness she’d just shown to the person she was supposedly “teaching what really mattered”, was really disturbing.

But that interaction showed exactly what’s wrong with believing ourselves to be pure and innocent and unsullied with all the bad things in this world and in our own culture. The moment you believe that of yourself, you’re incapable of seeing that you’re doing things wrong. And if you’re incapable of seeing that you’re doing things wrong, then you’re incapable of learning to change yourself for the better. And if you’re incapable of learning to change yourself for the better, you’re going to be hurting a lot of people without knowing it. Because everyone hurts people without knowing it. What allows us to stop, is being able to understand that we can do wrong, watching for what we are doing wrong, and learning not to do so many things wrong.

Which means that anything — anything at all — that interferes with a person’s ability to believe they can possibly be hurting someone else, is a terrible thing in my book because all it does is promote suffering. So this idea that we are innocent and uninfluenced by culture has a really ugly underbelly to it, and that ugly underbelly involves us being taught that we can’t do any harm, or at least can’t do any harm in certain areas. That’s also why I think any ideology that promotes the idea that hurting certain people doesn’t actually matter, is equally dangerous. For instance, it’s absolutely true that people without a certain kind of privilege can’t do the kind of damage to people with that kind of privilege, that people with that kind of privilege can do to people without it. And that idea is absolutely true on the face of it. But I’ve seen that idea used to mean that any hurt done by people without a privilege to people with that privilege does not actually matter just because it’s dwarfed by the hurt done in the other direction. And that’s still sometimes relevant, but it has to be used with extreme caution. Because I’ve seen that idea used by some people to excuse actions that nobody should ever do to anyone else, ever. And in some cases, specific people habitually use that idea, until they believe they are doing no real harm that actually matters in the world… and they do a world of harm to a lot of people who don’t deserve it. In the absolutely worst cases, people become absolutely cruel and vitriolic on an everyday basis and excuse it on those grounds. Which is why such ideas have to be applied carefully on a case-by-case basis, not across the board on an everyday basis. They have their place, but that place is not to promote a constant state of self-delusion about one’s own capacity to hurt people. That not only leads you to hurt other people, it hurts you, too, in ways you can’t even imagine at the time. And your hurting people with privilege doesn’t stop there, it always ends up hurting people without it too. You can’t be a selectively hurtful person, the hurt you cause will inevitably make its way into all of your interactions, including with yourself.

I see a lot of people who do this on an ongoing basis and I don’t even know what to say to them, because anything I say will be taken as a ‘tone argument’ (gods how that idea gets misused, because yes there is a real thing that tone argument means and it is not this… misusing that term only means that people stop believing in it and then when you really need it, nobody will believe you)… cruelty isn’t a tone. It’s a real, genuinely harmful thing, and it does absolutely no help to anyone anywhere, not even the person who is being cruel. There’s a world of difference between being criticized for being (or even just sounding, that happens to me all the time) ”too angry” in response to injustice so that people can dismiss what you’re saying (that is a tone argument, and is absolutely horrible to do to someone, because it basically means you’re not listening to someone speak up about injustice until they can sound absolutely calm and collective, it’s just dismissive and wrong)… and being cruel to people on an ongoing basis and being told “Hey, you’re being really cruel, you’re hurting people.” Yes, there are people who will say “Hey, you’re being really cruel, you’re hurting people” as part of a tone argument, but it does not mean that everyone who says this is engaging in a tone argument. Context is everything.

And please take everything I said above in context… I’m talking about genuine, habitual cruelty, not a million other things that get mistaken for it on a regular basis. Just the fact that you can mistake me talking about real cruelty, for talking about all these other things, is part of what allows people to continue being cruel with near-impunity in some of these communities.

And believe me there are people actively taking advantage of this lack of distinction people make. The people I talked about above are mostly people who are fooling themselves. But there are also people — lots of people — who are cruel and know they are cruel. Who want to be cruel. Who are oppressed in some way. Who deliberately come into communities where lots of people aren’t making these contextual distinctions between “Sometimes you have to hurt people’s feelings to fight oppression” and “If I’m oppressed, I don’t have to watch myself for cruelty towards anyone who isn’t oppressed.” And who use those communities and the fight against oppression and injustice, as a place where they can be horribly cruel to certain people with total impunity… and in some cases will even be looked up to for being as inventively cruel to people with privilege as possible. These aren’t people who are fooling themselves, they’re people who get off on being mean and nasty. But if they can be mean and nasty and sufficiently witty and use the language of fighting oppression, then they basically have their own little niche where they can be as cruel as they want to be, and people won’t mind, may even admire them for it. If you think the SJ community isn’t crawling with them, you’re thinking wrong. (To be fair, the anti-SJ community is even more crawling with them in many cases. Because in that community it’s frequently acceptable to be cruel to anyone who is, or just seems, to be “SJ”. This is one huge reason that despite my problems with the SJ community, I refuse to be part of either community or identify myself as either “SJ” or “anti-SJ”.)

Any situation or community where some cruelty is tolerate, will rapidly become a situation or community where two things happen: Some people stop monitoring themselves for cruelty because “it doesn’t matter anyway,” and begin deluding themselves about their own capacity to hurt others. Some people know they’re being cruel and deliberately come into that community to hurt people. Why do you think nursing homes attract serial killers in surprisingly large numbers? Why do you think mental institutions attract people who get off on power and abusing people? They’re both places where the very structure of the place means that, for the people with power, it’s very hard to avoid doing serious harm to those without power. That means that otherwise good people get corrupted by the power, and that otherwise horrible people flock to these places on purpose. This will happen anywhere that cruelty, abuse, and hurting people is excused for any reason.

That’s why you have to be incredibly careful with how far you take the argument that the hurt that oppressed people do to privileged people isn’t important in comparison to the hurt that privileged people do to oppressed people. It’s not that there are no important truths in that statement, or that you don’t need to apply that idea in certain circumstances, even quite frequent circumstances. It’s just that if you apply the idea wrongly or too much or without looking very carefully at context on an individual basis, you’re going to end up with a community that corrupts some people (through illusions), and attracts other people who have no illusions that they’re not cruel and don’t care that they are cruel and want a place where they can be deliberately cruel with impunity.

(Please, again, take this in context. I’m not saying that the idea is entirely false, and I’m not saying that people genuinely engaging in tone arguments should get away with it. I’m also not saying that privileged people can do no harm or deserve no anger, or that they aren’t capable of doing far more harm with their own cruelty (or even with actions that aren’t even intended to be cruel). If you think I’m saying those things, you’re reading me wrong, end of story, I don’t have the time or energy to engage with you and I just won’t, you’ve been warned.)

And to get back to my main point…

The same thing happens in places where autistic people and other cognitively disabled people believe, or are taught, that we are basically innocents untouched by our society or by the corrupting influences that affect everyone else in the world. Two things happen:

1. Autistic people who don’t mean to be cruel can become cruel.

2. Autistic people who do mean to be cruel will be attracted to these places, because they can get away with it.

I’ve even seen autistic people who are absolutely cruel in a deliberate, calculated way, co-opt the experiences of autistic people like me.

I have a communication style that means that regardless of what I do, some people are going to read me as angry or deliberately nasty. Even if I have no intentions of the sort. I can’t control this. I have absolutely no control over this. For years, I bent over backwards trying to control this, and got nowhere. The more I tried to reassure people that I wasn’t angry or cruel at all, the more they would throw accusations of anger and cruelty at me. Until I’d be literally curled up in a ball crying and they’d be attacking me in ways that really were angry and cruel. And mind you, this wasn’t even necessarily during discussions of emotional or emotionally-provocative topics. I could be pretty much discussing the weather and be asked “Why are you so angry?” just before someone launched a weird, enraged attack on how angry and awful I am. I learned over time that I have no control over this. I can actually be angry and unnecessarily hurtful, and have people assume I’m absolutely calm and collected. And I can be calm and collected and talking about as neutral a topic as you can get, and have people flip out at me for being angry. I don’t know what on earth causes this and I can’t prevent it, believe me I’ve done everything. And in some situations this has endangered my health because a doctor has misread my tone or my words or my facial expression as “hostile” and become incredibly hostile and dismissive in return. It’s utterly terrifying and it’s a very real thing many autistic people experience.

But.

There are autistic people I’ve known who are habitual bullies. True bullies who deliberately provoke and hurt people in a twisted and nasty fashion. There’s a huge difference between that and just a “communication style”, and if I have to explain it to you then you’ve never seen what they do to people. But they’ve co-opted this real experience that many autistic people have. And they’ve started saying that anyone who objects to their bullying is “prejudiced against their communication style” and is the “real bully” and is “abusive” to them.

(It gets really really twisted sometimes. I’ve been attacked and bullied by one such person on a regular basis for my real actual communication style, and then when I objected to actual personal attacks and bullying, they turned around and accused me of being a “bully” who “attacked people for their communication style” and even wrote a long description of autistic people who get attacked for their communication style and said at the end of it, “Amanda, don’t even think of saying this happens to you, because it doesn’t.” I was so upset by this experience that I could say nothing at all, even as — this was in a large group of people who’d known me for years and seen it happen to me time and time again — I wanted to shout, “It doesn’t happen, eh? Well (insert name here), why don’t you tell them about (experience #1), and (insert other name here), why don’t you tell them about (experience #2), all the way up to experience #50 because that’s how many times they’d seen it happen”. But I didn’t, I felt too violated. It was really horrible and upsetting to have my own experiences thrown back in my face like that so someone could continue their agenda of bullying me and many others. feliscorvus was a witness to this conversation, by the way, if you want an outside opinion on the matter. And she was the one who made the comment, later, that it was really obnoxious for this person to misuse that idea, given the amount of people, including me, who actually have that happen on a regular basis. Many such people were people that person bullied, in fact.)

So I know that there are people who will co-opt any experience of being wrongly mistaken for being hostile and cruel, in order to further their own hostility and cruelty. They’ll say things like “It’s just my communication style and you’re a bigot if you object to it” and “You’re engaging in a tone argument” in situations where neither one is remotely true. Which hurts the people who really have communication styles that get mistaken for hostility, and who are really being attacked through the tone argument. It hurts us in two ways — one by co-opting our experiences in order to be cruel to people, and two by making people assume that when we really need to reference being mistaken for hostile, or the tone argument, then people will believe us less because they’ve seen truly hostile people use the same words we are using. It isn’t always possible to prevent this misuse of our experiences — just about every deliberately cruel person who can manipulate in that way, will manipulate in that way.

But.

It’s one thing to have your ideas about such things and your experiences randomly co-opted. It’s another to have an environment that actually encourages people to take it the wrong way, by not looking at context when applying certain ideas. And that’s why you have to be extremely careful when and how and why, you apply ideas like the tone argument, or “people without privilege can’t do as much harm as people with privilege”, etc. And it’s why you never want to apply an idea that’s just flat-out wrong, like “Autistic people are uninfluenced (and uncorrupted) by society.” Because then you’ve got an idea that isn’t even right, in any circumstance, but that can absolutely corrupt previously-innocent people and be used by corrupted-and-I-don’t-care people. But you have to be careful even around ideas that are true some of the time, or are partially true, or have a grain of truth in them. In fact those ideas may be even more dangerous because you can’t completely refute the idea without being wrong, but you have to somehow get people to understand how dangerous the misapplication of idea is at the same time.

madeofpatterns said:

There are these things where - you are supposed to be able to tell who is acting right based on things *other than what they are actually doing*

You’re supposed to be figuring out if they’re the kind of person who does those things. Or if they’re the kind of person who it matters if they do those things. Or if they’re capable of doing those things in a real way rather than a shadow way that pales in comparison to what other people have the power to do.

And just… what people actually do never stops mattering. Context matters. But it doesn’t erase *what people are actually doing*.