3:39am July 10, 2014

I really don’t like autism being called a “rich white kid disease”

I guess eugenics is becoming a fave topic of mine by now

but to be honest, you’re not dissing white people who are “making up diseases” by claiming that autism is just something that white people have

you’re just stigmatizing autism (please correct me if i’m wrong) for people who aren’t white more. What if you’re black and autistic and someone says that? someone you know calls it a ‘rich white kid disorder’ (and like 75% of these people who call it ‘rich white kid disorder’ are white anyways)? isn’t the term ‘oreo’ bad enough? do we have to throw a mental disorder under the bus with race just because eugenics never died

Because it didn’t. Autism is probably diagnosed in white people at higher rates because it’s being looked at more seriously with white people. When it is diagnosed, there is a year and a half gap between a black person’s diagnosis and their white person’s counterpart. Why? Why is there such a focus on autistic children and never autistic adults? (where do they think we all go? what do we look like to them?) Why when there is a poster for Autism $peaks are there always pictures of white children? Does anyone not get that this focus on ‘saving the kids’ is literally just…trying to ‘save’ white people from having kids that aren’t autistic? does no one get that this has seriously racist implications based on how much history came before the ideas that built up into the fears surrounding the disorder? or any disorder affecting the mind? people were medically torn up and locked into asylums (which took both mentally ill and black/native american people) because people wanted to see the “survival of the fittest” not “impeded” by it’s own devices or however they backpedal to describe why if, “the strongest survive”, mental disorders and other disabilities can still exist and function if they’re examples of ‘weakness’. Or why people aren’t being weeded out like cows that don’t produce milk or something (most farm animals are selectively bred?) .

When you call autism a “rich white kid disease”, you’re saying you can only see autistic children and Mendelian squares in your picture of what autism is but don’t see what implications this holds on everyone else