8:44pm June 28, 2014

Another thing I can’t stand in some communities that are supposedly about “justice.”

People who start from the base assumption that the only kind of relationship that can ever exist between them and members of a more privileged group is one of mutual enmity. They literally don’t seem to know how to interact with people who do not approach them as enemies, if those people are not part of their yes-man “ally fandom” (I should explain that concept sometime in more depth). They don’t know how to react when they get any response other than fighting, anger, or declarations of hurt feelings, and will try desperately to search for a glimmer of those things where they don’t exist.

And of course, cognitively disabled people or people with a tendency towards interpreting things literally often get ground up mercilessly in the gears of these communities. It’s like people can’t or won’t believe that a person could genuinely have any confusion about what is meant by certain things, and sometimes they’ll accuse them of having cognitive disabilities as an insult, without ever realizing that there is a massive problem with the idea of calling people cognitively disabled to insult them.

I understand suspicion. I understand having been burned too much. I don’t think we’ve ever met a non-autistic parent to an autistic kid who prided themselves on being an ally, who hasn’t imploded all over the autistic adult community at some point. But I still don’t discount that they could exist. (And a lot of the problems, in those cases, came from the parents trying to practically barge themselves into the community and thinking they were terrific allies, and never seeming to understand that just repeating for the nth time that vaccinations do not cause autism does not make you an ally. I’m sure there are people who keep a respectful distance trying to learn as much as possible.)

-S.

Worse, with the cognitive disability thing?

At one point, one or two white autistic people said things that may have been racist. And I only say may have been because I wasn’t there and I didn’t see what they said.

And part of what they said, when confronted about it, was that they were autistic and had trouble with… language, or reading social situations, or something like that.

And immediately after that, in anti-racism tumblr circles, it became this whole thing of “Now there’s this trend of white autistic people using autism as an excuse to be a racist so now if an autistic person says something’s because they’re autistic, we know they’re just being racist and can ignore what they have to say about not understanding the social situation or the language or whatever.”

So in certain circles, all it took was one or two autistic people doing this (and I don’t know, because I wasn’t there, whether the autistic people were in the right or the wrong, but it barely matters), and now autistic people (at least white autistic people) can no longer discuss the difficulty we have navigating loaded social dynamics around oppression, without being accused of making excuses for some kind of ism.

I remember it getting to a point where even “I’m autistic and this is confusing for me…” got lots of sighs and eye-rolling and such in those crowds. And somehow autistic became synonymous with white autistic, and privileged autistic in general, and people started treating autism as if it was a form or privilege, almost. I can’t describe it well.

And it was all over one or two interactions that went badly.

That’s one thing I notice too: All it takes is one or two interactions, and people will start treating it like a trend.

Like I got into a fight with a trans woman awhile back. Totally unintentionally, and in fact autism played into the situation a huge amount (every person who got on her bad side was autistic and misread the situation drastically). I tried my best to handle it well, but she wouldn’t accept sincere apologies unless they involved agreeing to her entire assessment of our character and motivations.

Anyway, I basically moved on and forgot about the whole thing. Then I tried to post about something totally unrelated in a totally different place. And she came swooping into the thread to inform everyone that they should not listen to me because I had a history of treating trans women badly.

And you see what she did there? First, in the initial conversation, the very first thing she did was make the interaction about an oppressor/oppressed relationship, even though it wasn’t. (Or if it was, it was far more complex of one than she was giving it credit for – it was one in which she was the oppressed and I was the oppressor, as far as she was concerned, and I was totally in the wrong and she was totally in the right, black and white, no room for grey area, no room for discussion.) And then, in the second conversation, she made a single incident into a Habitual Thing I Do.

And I see that happening all the time – people will refer to someone, or a group of people, as habitually doing something to some other group of people, in the context of oppression. And it will turn out, if you actually go back and read everything, that what happened was the person had one altercation with one person that might have been possible to read as oppressive (but might also have been possible to read as something else, depending on the situation). But the way they describe it, it’s as if the person is repeatedly doing this all the time. And people get away with this kind of sleight-of-hand trick a lot and it bothers me, it’s dishonest.

Anyway I was thinking of that because of the cognitive disability thing. There’s now this idea out there that cognitively disabled people, including autistic people especially, use our disabilities to get out of having to face our own privilege, especially white privilege. And as far as I know it stems from one or two tiny incidents that happened ages ago, at least one of which really was pretty ambiguous in terms of whether the autistic person could have possibly known to do anything any different.

So it’s not just that there’s cognitive ableism going on in anti-oppression communities. It’s that now, there’s cognitive ableism going on in the name of fighting oppression. Because those cognitively disabled people, you know, they’ll use it to pretend they didn’t know they were being racist or classist or whatever.

Which I’m sure happens, but not anywhere near to that extent. And it’s being used to silence us.

I have more to say but I think I’m going to make another post about that. I feel like I’m getting way too far off the topic of allies in general. Damn, I’ve already forgotten what I wanted my new post to be about, and it was something I considered more important than what I’m writing here. Oh yes now I remember. Going off to write now.

Notes: