9:54am May 14, 2014

How do other white and white-passing autistic people (as well, for that matter, as Indigenous autistic people, who must sometimes get this bullcrap from both directions) deal with this?

Okay so…

I perceive the world as alive, and I interact with the world as if the whole thing is alive, and everything in it is alive, and as if the rest of the world can interact with me as a living thing, and this is heavily affected by my variant of autism. I don’t try to push this view on other people, but neither do I cave to having it patronizingly explained to me what “alive” is and isn’t supposed to mean.

But.

I frequently get told things like that I am “shamanic”, or comparisons to “vision quests”, or “native cultures”. I’ve been told things like this my whole life. I obviously object to this because I am not a part of these cultures, and have no desire to appropriate anything from these cultures – nor to have others appropriate those things on my behalf.

(And I do, strongly, feel as if it would be horribly appropriative for me to start wittering on about ‘vision quests’ and 'shamanism’ as things that I was somehow doing just by virtue of being a certain kind of autistic person. Not that there aren’t plenty of non-Indigenous autistic people who are thrilled to say those things about themselves… ugh. There’s an entire clusterfuck of a book about stuff like that, promoted by a white autistic guy, that makes my stomach turn every time I read it. There was a time when I was young and naive and I bought into those sorts of stories people were telling about my life, but that time has long since past.)

So anyway… what is the best response that I can give, when someone starts telling me how 'shamanic’ I am, or how I 'sound Native American’, or 'vision quests’, or anything along those lines?

The last time someone said that, I said the following:

“I’m definitely not a shaman. I’m just someone who doesn’t experience the ‘inanimate’ world as dead. There’s a lot of us out there, especially among certain kinds of autistic people. ‘Shamans’ and ‘vision quests’ are things that belong to cultures I’m not a part of, and that I’d feel extremely uncomfortable claiming any relationship to.”

I didn’t get into the origins of 'shaman’ and the way it’s misused because I didn’t feel knowledgeable enough to say anything off-the-cuff about it that wouldn’t just increase ignorance even further.

Honestly… I’m not sure which version is worse:

“OMG you’re such a wise shamanic type!11111!!!!”

“Don’t you understand what anthropomorphism is? It’s something that primitive cultures do, which gets translated into the kind of animism that you’re espousing here. You’re seeing human traits in nonhuman things, and therefore living traits in nonliving things. Young children and primitive cultures have a tendency to do that, but older children and more advanced cultures have grown out of it.”

I find both of them really offensive – both racist and ableist. But as a white person, I don’t always know how to speak to the racism other than to say “No, this isn’t me, please don’t attribute things like that to me, they’re from cultures I’m not part of and can’t claim being any part of.”

I also feel like both versions deserve different types of answers. Because one of them is the thing where you’re put on a pedestal for being autistic or indigenous, and the second is where you’re treated like an inferior or a child for being autistic or indigenous. And in both cases the person is equating being autistic with being indigenous, which has its own problems.

I can see, in my head, what the problems are. But I don’t know, in words, how to address the problems. And I do feel like as a white person, it is my responsibility to tell other white people not to do this, for a wide variety of reasons. I just never know how to say it all. So I either fail to say anything, or I flail at it and end up feeling like my words were inadequate or easy to misunderstand.

There have been times when I’ve wondered if it would be best for me to pretend that I don’t have conversations with my environment, and that my environment doesn’t have conversations back with me. But I feel like that would be horrible, because it’s denying a huge part of my life as an autistic person, and a part of my life that many autistic people already feel too scared to talk about. One of the duties I feel like I have in my writing, is to talk about things that other people might be too scared to talk about.

But I’d appreciate any and all advice on how to deal with racist and ableist reactions to this stuff. Both the kind of racism and ableism that put people on pedestals, and the kind of racism and ableism that treat people like we’re too stupid or 'primitive’ to know what we’re talking about. (And in both cases, they always oversimplify our beliefs and experiences as autistic people or as indigenous people. I’ve never seen an anthropological description of 'animism’, for instance, that wasn’t about force-fitting indigenous societies to a messed-up idea of 'how religion evolves’. And no, I don’t claim to be 'animist’, that’s a word other people apply to me, much as they apply the word 'shamanic’ without my consent.)

My worst experience related to all this was meeting a white Newage woman I’ve described as a female Horace Slughorn, in that she 'collected’ people that she thought were 'important’. She specifically collected disabled people and indigenous people (and disabled indigenous people), referring to us as 'hers’ (as in 'he’s my little Hopi medicine man!’), and derived a lot of satisfaction through exploiting us in order to make a name for herself in New Age circles. I was never happier than the day that I finally drove her off by recounting some experiences that convinced her I was… basically too negative, or something like that, for her to hang around anymore. Anyway she was always saying that disabled people and Indigenous people alike were 'shamanic’ and 'angelic’ and all these other things.

Anyway… I don’t quite know how to handle these situations and any help would be appreciated. I don’t like just sitting there not knowing what to say or how to say it, because I know it’s important to nip these attitudes in the bud before they get out of hand. And silence can look like agreement.

Notes: