content warning for violence and racism

I don't expect this to change anyone's mind, because it is seeming to me that a lot of my fellow white people just don't care and refuse to acknowledge when an innocent black person is murdered by a white person for no reason. This isn't going to be a very good or original piece of writing, but I don't want to be silent about this either.

Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, Trayvon Martin, and all the other black people who have been killed this way in recent months and recent years, were innocent people who did not deserve to die. The people who killed them were wrong and racist, as were people who defended their killers and the people who, in most of these cases, have allowed the killers to go completely unpunished.

Of course no human being is completely innocent. No one is an angel. This doesn't mean anyone deserves to die for being a normal imperfect human being, and attempting to "tell the other side of the story" by talking about the victim's drinking, supposed petty crimes, or social media posts is hateful. When people tried to defend George Zimmerman by showing that Trayvon swore and talked about sex on Twitter, all they did was reiterate how horrible Zimmerman's crime was by showing the average and infinitely complex young person whose life he cut off for no reason. Yes, Trayvon was "no angel," but only in the sense that he was a regular kid.

After Mike Brown was killed, the Ferguson police department went around looking for something that would make him look like a criminal. They have successfully convinced many people that Mike stole cigars from a convenience store prior to his death, and that he can be seen on video physically harassing an employee at the store. First of all, this wouldn't excuse his murder and it can't possibly have been the motivation for Darren Wilson to kill him, since Wilson could not have known about it at the time. But it is also unbelievable that Mike even did this. There is a video of Mike buying the cigars he supposedly stole and the store owner does not think that the person in the surveillance camera video is Mike. (There are sources for this in item 3 of this helpful master post about Ferguson.)

The situation with Mike Brown's "robbery" is very telling. It shows how if powerful people want to cover up a crime, they can find a way to make the victim look bad and they can make the public believe it. Not only are some white people already biased against black men, but when authority figures show the surveillance video and say it is Mike Brown, it can be hard to question them. It was hard for me to believe that the police were this dishonest in their attempts to protect a murderer--but they really were. The "robbery" brings home that any victim could be portrayed this way. Even if there existed a human being who was impossibly morally perfect, that wouldn't protect their reputation if they were a black person murdered by a cop. The facts could be twisted to convince the public that they were a bad person and somehow frightened their murderer into killing them.

Some of these victims had done illegal things in their lives; some had not; some were big and strong; and some were people who couldn't possibly have been physically threatening, like Renisha McBride who had just been injured in a car accident. But not only can some of these details be misrepresented, they are not relevant.  What these black murder victims have in common is that they didn't deserve what was done to them and their killers should have been unequivocally condemned by public opinion and the law. The fact is that over and over, their killers have been excused.

olympics

I remember feeling annoyed by some of the comments on Ari's Wired interview in the ontd_political community on LiveJournal. Basically the interviewer wrote something like, "Imagine a world where most of the public discussion of homosexuality was about curing it." And everybody flipped out and was like, "but that IS what it's like!! Oppression Olympics!"

First of all, the interviewer is gay, which I think matters. His experience as a gay person obviously hasn't led him to feel that most of the public discussion of homosexuality is about curing it, or he wouldn't have made that analogy. I understand commenters may not have known he was gay, but they assumed he wasn't. And I think the fact that a gay person made that analogy indicates that "public discussion of homosexuality is mostly about curing it" is a disingenuous statement in the US. I wouldn't make that analogy just because I don't think it's particularly helpful (plus I'd expect all the Oppression Olympics accusations), but as a gay person I don't think the basis of the analogy is untrue. Of course SSA people are oppressed but I think we moved out of the medical model a long time ago, which is a triumph.

I was also really pissed because at one point one of these people said, "Hey, people get KILLED for being gay, that's not a fair comparison." Getting pissed at someone else for doing Oppression Olympics on what you claim is not a true assumption, and then starting your own Oppression Olympics round based on an assumption that is incredibly untrue, and obviously so to anyone who's engaged with disability issues...is way way worse than what Steve Silberman did.

Oppression Olympics--let's call it "comparing oppressions" to be a little more measured--is a tricky issue. A few months ago I posted about this person who was saying, "Pop culture is so into portraying autism but eating disorders and depression should be portrayed too." That person's post really frustrated me because they obviously didn't have a good grasp on how autism is being portrayed or how people with autism feels about those portrayals. They didn't have the compassion, or didn't do enough research, and ended up complaining about how good people with autism have it in pop culture compared to them and their friends with psychiatric disabilities.

However, I do think that comparing oppression can sometimes be a good thing. Because I'm queer and disabled I'm obviously aware of things straight and non-disabled people do like "trying to explain alternate points of view and get you to think more objectively." (I'm not going into detail on this, but do you know what I'm talking about?) So I think this means that while I definitely don't "get" what it's like to be a person of color, etc., I'm at least a little more aware of my privilege and try not to go all, "But you're being mean! Think about white people!" This term I have also felt sort of weird in my fiction class because I've felt kind of synced-in to classmates of color's stories which address identity and experiences of oppression, but when my instinct is to respond to those stories as a minority, I worry that it will be rude because they may not read me as a minority or as the same kind of minority as them.

I recently had the interesting experience of saying to someone, "I mean I know comparing oppressions is wrong, but--" and having the other person cut me off: "I don't think it's wrong. I think the only way anyone ever learns anything about someone else's oppression is by having it related to a type of oppression they're familiar with."

Which...damn, I'm sorry, but that is how it's worked for me.

I feel like one way of looking at this is that there are just two different kinds of comparing oppressions and one is trying to prove that someone has it worse than someone else (which I guess you should say is about dividing people), and one is trying to help people understand other people's experiences (which is about allyship and connection), but I think this is really an oversimplified way of putting it, because a lot of the time someone will think they're doing the latter, but other people will feel that they're doing the former. For example, when the Special Olympics did ads where they used racial slurs to try to make people more aware of ableist slurs. That was really fucked up. At the same time I feel like trying to relate ableism to other forms of discrimination can be useful sometimes.

some more passing thoughts

I wrote a long thing in a notebook to be a possible intro to my passing project if I do it...then decided I kind of don't want to have a big intro, I can just include my experiences mixed in anonymously with everyone else's. But anyway.

I talked about passing. I said it is often conventionally associated with people of color passing for white. I said that trans men and women talk about "passing," but it's not exactly the same since you are actually trying to be perceived as the correct gender, not the wrong one. But then I thought, if you are passing for cis that is kind of "passing as something you're not" because being cis implies stuff about your history and physiology, but nonetheless you are misleading people about small things in order to get them to recognize a big, true thing: your correct gender.

But then I thought about how passing as straight had once felt a little bit like this for me. When I was [one of] the only visible queer kid[s] in my school, everything else about me disappeared, so the person I was being perceived as wasn't me at all. When I started going into new environments and intentionally keeping quiet or lying about being SSA, I felt like myself again. People again noticed the details of who I was.

And also, the way normal people talk about people with ASD often deprives us of agency and an inner life. It is assumed that for example people wouldn't stim or monologue if they just understood that it is not normal. The way a person walks or talks is analyzed; the abnormalities are pointed out with no thought of how a person who walks or talks that way might feel as they are going about their life. Things are said, like, "The 'active and odd' type...I worked with an autistic boy and when I said hello how are you, he talked about his special interests. He wanted to engage with me--that's active--but he did so in an abnormal fashion--that's odd." So our choices and personalities just become symptoms.

I am canny. And I am careful to the point of having significant anxiety problems. So for a long time, I felt that being seen as ASD would actually erase who I really am. The fact that I have green hair wouldn't be seen as a choice or even a covering mechanism, but a sign that I maybe am not good at dyeing my hair and made a mistake, or don't understand what is a normal way for a girl to present herself. And I felt that stylized and strange things I do because I have too much anxiety to do things the normal way, or just don't know how, would be seen as thoughtless, and just "behaviors" that show what people like me are like.

The other week, I wrote an email to a kid I don't know super well, but would like to know better. He knows I have ASD because of a workshop we were in together where I wrote about it. My email said something like, "Dear ___, I would like to be friends with you, and when we ate together the other week it was very nice, but now when I see you I feel like you avoid talking to me for very long, do you think I'm weird? Sincerely Amanda. (This is a joke.)"

Now, the reason I said "this is a joke" is because I sometimes tend to try to initiate friendships in ways that seem very abrupt (although this kid has done some friendship initiation towards me, such as sitting with me in the dining hall and stuff) and to avoid being self-conscious, and because I'm not going to agonize over phrasing something in a super normal way, I will instead intentionally phrase something in a very twee, stylized, overdramatic way. It's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl act, a little bit, but I've dropped a lot of that I'm glad to say, but I still have an instinct to approach people in the twee stylized way, and you know, it works for me, I don't really regret it.

But anyway, then as I was going to send it I thought "But he knows I have ASD. So maybe he'll just think that I really write like that all the time and don't know any other way to write, and that I genuinely think he doesn't like me because the last time we said hi to each other we didn't have a conversation." So I added "This is a joke." And a while later he wrote back expressing positive/friendship sentiments (we'll see how this goes, but I don't think it was different than the sort of thing normal people say to other normal people when they're thinking of becoming friends) but also wrote "I don't know what you mean about it being a joke" and then I wrote back explaining.

Anyway. Um, I would like my passing project to be kind of a collage of voices, and maybe some actual collaging with images too around the words. But then I feel concerned that I will almost be taking away people's agency and using them as examples, just like I'm afraid of professionals, or people who are "interested in autism," doing to me. For example, if someone writes a very low-key, long, almost cheerfully listless description of some experience, but at one point buried in all that is the sentence, "The way she was acting was making me want to kill myself." If I take that sentence because it's striking and use it as a headline, isn't that a way of kind of erasing who the person really is?

This is part of a larger discussion so maybe start at the beginning, but I really really love this comment and its continuation:

Who is the "we" that is going to move on?

I don't want to appropriate someone else's feelings and the situations in which I feel this way are very different--but I am extremely grateful for this explanation of why explaining isn't always good enough.

Zoe decided to win at life

Why Glee Makes Me Want to Kill Someone

other recommended reading while I'm at it:

Just Stop It (really old Dave Hingsburger post about trying to get ID people to act "age-appropriate")

I am not responsible for your discomfort (another really old post, by the person who wrote the "Growing Up With Sky" post that I linked in a previous recommended reading)

(I know I need to do a "mental age" tag and maybe do some more in-depth posts about mental age etc. I have a lot to say about it.)

oh wait, edited to add: A Five-Year-Old's Explanation of Autism

AWWWWW

(This is the best day of the year because it's the day that everyone else thinks and talks like me.)

The harder fallacy 2: the uncomfortable fallacy

So I was talking to my friend who wants to apply for Teach for America, which if you didn't know is one of those things that absolutely everyone in college thinks about and wants to do all the time (even I find myself wanting to do it--frequently I have to remind myself that I've rarely been at all interested in being a teacher, I just want to say I'm doing Teach for America). Because everyone wants to do Teach for America, it's really hard to get picked, and I suggested that my friend should apply to teach special ed because they really need people to do that.

But I knew she would say no. People always say no when you suggest that kind of thing. "The girl I know who applied to teach special ed has a lot of experience with that," said my friend, "and I don't."

I know I push a little hard but I said, "They're just kids."

"I'm not really good at that stuff," said my friend.

"But I've seen you with people with disabilities and you were fine."

"I was trying really hard. I was really uncomfortable."

Okay.

I'm hesitant to start my post with this conversation, because it makes it sound like I go around trying to force people to be special ed teachers all the time. I don't care if any particular person isn't going to be a special ed teacher, but I just have these exchanges with people that I think are sort of strange. I don't really get it because a lot of the time it's easier to get a job if you're willing to work with people with disabilities, but people have this attitude of, "I could never do that," or, "I'm not kind of person who can do that." Do you know what I mean?

Do what exactly? What kind of person?

The time I was referring to, my friend was encouraged by three of her friends to come and spend time with people with ID who the rest of us knew pretty well. I thought she acted normal and seemed to get along well with the people with ID. Given she doesn't really have experience with ID people at all as far as I know, it seems like that's a good outcome for her first try--kind of uncomfortable, tries really hard, does fine. That's what my first experience with ID people was like.

Also, as you might remember, I used to get really nervous about this kid in my building who is blind because I was like "how do you treat a person who's blind? What if I do something wrong?" Then we actually had some interactions, and now he's just another person. Until I was nine, I went to a school with almost no people of color, so whenever I did encounter people of color, I was always afraid of doing something racist. Then I changed to a school where there were a lot more people of color, and soon they were just other kids who I liked or didn't like.

I think I just sounded like I was doing some "I don't see color, I don't see disability" bullshit, which is not at all what I intended to say. After this change in you takes place, it's not like you don't know that people are different--it's just that you're familiar with the difference, so it's not scary. Depending on what it is, it might still be important. For example if someone is nonverbal and you're verbal, that's obviously going to make your interactions different from the interactions between two verbal people. But once you're familiar with people being nonverbal, communicating with a nonverbal person is at worst a challenge. It's not like "OH MY GOSH HE'S NONVERBAL."

A while ago I made a post called The harder fallacy which was about the idea that it's okay to talk about disabled kids in an insulting way because "it's harder to raise a kid who is disabled." This post could be called the harder fallacy #2, or maybe the uncomfortable fallacy. Basically, I think it's normal--or at least normal in our fucked-up society--to feel uncomfortable when you meet people from a group you haven't had much exposure to. But I think this reflects on you and not on the group. But I think that some people develop this idea (probably as a result of the harder fallacy or something similar) that there actually is something especially difficult and complicated about spending time with people who have certain kinds of disabilities. They think that people who don't find it difficult are somehow special or have special powers or are incredibly kind. I think this is insulting.

Again, I'm not trying to say that my friend should be a special ed teacher. Just getting not-uncomfortable with a certain minority group doesn't mean that you have to want to be around people from that group all the time. But I think it does lead you to feel neutral about people from that group instead of building them up as some sort of special skill that you have to have a gift for or a ton of practice with.

It's weird because if I suggest something disability-related to someone who's having trouble finding a job, I feel kind of shifty, like I'm forcing my beliefs or preferences on them. Whereas if I was like, "Hey, you should try to get a job at the stationery store," and the person was like, "Oh, I don't know, I don't think I'm the kind of person who can work at a stationery store," and then I was like, "What do you mean, you've worked at stores before," and the person was just like, "But oh man, stationery, it's just a big challenge," I'd be like, "...well if you feel that way maybe you should spend some more time with stationery."

some messy things, invisibility, etc.

(edited because I was pretty consumed with anxiety about these possibly being hateful things to say, but I thought that parts of this were good, so I chopped it up)

Being brutally honest: I'm uncomfortable around people who have Real Disabilities. Well--I'm uncomfortable around a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It's sort of a spiraling, compulsive fear. If the person belongs to an oppressed minority, I get anxious and act/look really strange because I'm afraid they'll think I'm prejudiced against them (and this obviously feeds itself, "look, I look so strange, they'll think I'm afraid of them, fuck I'm freaking out, I can't make eye contact, shit, do a facial expression, try to look depressed and distracted, okay"). This can happen if it's a minority I don't belong to, which can certainly be called racism, transphobia, etc. (and I don't think it's right for me to call it something else, if I am reacting differently to someone because they're a person of color, trans, etc.--that is what it is, in practice). However, it can also happen with the two minorities I invisibly or semi-invisibly belong to--gay and disabled. And in those cases, it is kind of a mixture of the ordinary compulsion and anxiety, and also a desire for kinship that I become anxious about because I think it's unseemly and I don't really belong.

The most common way for a person to be visibly same-sex-attracted is if they are romantically paired with someone of the same sex. I guess relationships are like wheelchairs. I know I'm gay, and I'm more inarguably gay than I am inarguably disabled, I suppose. If I was accused of being homophobic, I could just produce a statement of fact: "I can't be homophobic, I'm gay."

Actually, one time, at academic summer camp, this girl who I'd just met made some joke about kissing me, and I froze up and looked really uncomfortable, and she laughed to her friend, "I probably shouldn't be scaring young heterosexual girls," and then left. So that's an occasion when I wasn't able to produce the statement, but I think I'm better now. Or am I? Probably not. My nightmarish employment at a drive-in movie theater the summer before last, which culminated in derealization and a processing speed slower than molasses while I was cashiering (I couldn't recognize the food), which resulted in me getting yelled at by the same person who'd caused all my anxiety, who ironically was a special ed teacher, but didn't know that I was "special," and I didn't know how to explain...wow, I don't think I even realized how ironic and intersectional that story actually is. But anyway, it was in Cape Cod, so lots of gay couples came in all the time, and this middle-aged lesbian couple started working there, and I just wanted to talk to them so bad, I wanted them to like me, or something, and know I was gay. Especially the one who was a special ed teacher. But how do you just say "I'm gay?" Most of the people who worked there didn't especially like me, so why should they like me? When I tried to talk to this woman, I just misunderstood the things she said, and she rolled her eyes.

Also these two beautiful girls who came in and ordered sandwiches and made out for a while and I tried not to look at them, and then they said they didn't want the sandwiches. I was supposed to yell at them for this, but I just couldn't even look at them. Seeing all these beautiful, happy lesbians just made me feel like less of something. Like, even if I was able to produce the statement, was that going to make any of these people say, "Oh, okay, you're one of us?" How am I one of them? I haven't even had a relationship. I'm a defective gay person, not because I'm invisible, but I'm invisible and defective for some of the same reasons.

Yeah, so anyway, yesterday the guy who lives across the hall from me moved back in for spring term. I was introduced to him. He's the only person at our school who is blind. Sometimes I have watched him putting on his coat and putting his tray away in the dining hall, because of the way he moves. But this isn't a real reason to like someone, because he didn't choose to have to develop those ways of doing things, and would probably be offended that I like them. Also, one time in the dining hall he asked me what the ingredients in the omelets were. I am curious about this because I rarely ask people for the things I need; I wonder if it used to freak him out, and his teachers or parents made him practice doing it, or if he's always felt confident about it, maybe because everyone can see without him telling them that he has a good reason for needing things explained.

Basically, I want to talk to him so much that I maybe never will, because it's probably offensive. On the other hand, I also feel concerned about ordinary people things, like not knowing if I should identify myself when I say hello to him, or if I should assume that he can tell. If a lot of people have that problem, maybe people don't talk to him very much. So in a roundabout way, even if I complain that it sucks for me to have to explain that I'm disabled (i.e. I don't explain, and the results of that suck), he definitely has it worse because it's the first thing people notice.

So I don't wish I was Real. That's a stupid thing to wish. Also, being Real isn't possible for me. Even if I didn't try to pass at all, Real ASD doesn't exist because it doesn't look like anything. Some people would treat me like I was "special" (whether ASD or intellectually disabled--although, if an ASD person is read as intellectually disabled, does that mean they're passing?). Other people would think I was high, or traumatized. Other people would yell at me and try to grab me to see my reaction, like when I was a kid. I don't want that to happen, but even if I let it happen, it wouldn't mean that those people thought I was Real. They just wouldn't be thinking of me in words at all. With ASD I feel like there's being fake, or prey, or disorderly conduct. Or being read as intellectually disabled. Or even more than one of those--intellectually disabled people can be prey, after all. But there's no Real option.

The other day I snapped at my roommate because she didn't answer me when she was on the phone. My roommate only has one working ear, so when she is on the phone, she can't hear anything else. I've known her for three years but I rarely keep this in my mind (except in the last few days, when I've realized how shitty I am about it). I guess she could maybe be Real if she made an effort to tell people, but it doesn't affect her that much, except on the really low level of people like me snapping at her without thinking, or thinking that she's ignoring them when her good ear is turned away. At the same time, a low level builds up over your lifetime. My roommate's Facebook description of herself says, "I probably didn't hear you." But she doesn't identify as disabled, and if she did, I'm not sure what people would think.

It's hard to say what's Real. I just know that I'm not it, and that as frustrating as that sometimes seems, it's probably good, because if I was Real, people would make everything about my disability. Just like I do to Real Disabled people when I make up stories in my head about how they probably hate me.

The end.

A bit more on Glee

Seriously I think this is what Ryan Murphy knows about intellectually disabled people: they're inspirational or something! But they're not good at anything and they live in hospitals waiting for us to come and read to them! But we have to pretend that they're good at things to make them feel better, but then we'll yell at them for being bad at those things, because we don't want to discriminate!

I could write a million essays on how weird the portrayal of characters with Down Syndrome was. For example, the joke about Brittany cheating off Becky's math test. Obviously the joke is, Brittany's so ditzy she thinks people with Down Syndrome are good at math, or else, Brittany's so bad at math that a person with Down Syndrome is better at math than she is. I don't necessarily mind this, because people with Down Syndrome usually aren't good at math; I can imagine a show making fun of disabled people's impairments in a blunt, dark-humor kind of way, that I wouldn't find offensive.* But this particular joke is just so weaselly, you can even pretend that it isn't a joke about Becky's disability if you want. In a previous episode Terri said she didn't want a baby who was a "Mongoloid," and obviously this was supposed to be shocking-funny, but I bet that no character would be shown using that word to describe Becky. And I think that's because the writers of the show aren't willing to face the fact that they are insulting actual people when they use words like Mongoloid.

They want to be seen as shocking and offensive in a daring and funny way but they're not willing to own it. And that's what really annoys the hell out of me about that episode, and the show in general. And also the show's fans who claim that offensive elements of the show are "satire." If it was satire, it would be funny. Mercedes's constant complaints about the music are not supposed to be quotable one-liners, nor are they supposed to be a parody of stereotypical black characters. She's just a badly written character whose creators rely heavily on stereotypes when they write her dialogue.

*I'm not especially fond of the Retarded Policeman videos on YouTube, but at least they're not weaselly; most of the offensive material is performed by an actor with Down Syndrome. The videos make fun of intellectually disabled people, but in the end I think it must positively affect viewers to see an intellectually disabled actor who is talented and funny. When Glee makes fun of deaf people they're not as brutal as the Retarded Policeman videos are about intellectually disabled people--but they imply that deaf people exploit their deafness for personal gain and can only be successful because of others' pity. The makers of the Retarded Policeman videos actually know that intellectually disabled people can be talented, which makes them automatically better than the creators of Glee.

eta: okay this one is kind of good



but I still think How's Your News? is a million times better (actually, it's a million times better than just about anything):



this is my favorite:

The coolest/saddest thing ever

this morning I was talking to my friend Ralph when I left to get a soda. When I returned to my computer Ralph had gone to bed (he lives in California). Before signing off, he'd written:

so two asperger things
8:54 AM 1. a guy in my program has it and everytime I talk to him I remember that and go "FUCK! I WANT TO HANG OUT WITH AMANDA"
2. DId you hear about the kid who ran away from home and spent a week living on the subway in NYC?

I had not heard! But I have now. The kid is named Francisco Hernandez Jr. and he lives in Brooklyn. He's 13 and was diagnosed with Asperger's three years ago. When he's under pressure, Francisco (in the words of the doctor who diagnosed him) "freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say." On October 15, he was yelled at for not completing an assignment, and the school called his mom. When Francisco called his mom to say he was coming home, his mom told him that she wanted to have a serious talk with him. He was so anxious that he got on the subway and continued to ride the subway for 11 days, using his bag as a pillow and using the ten dollars he had on him to buy junk food at subway stations.

His parents feel that the police didn't work hard enough to find Francisco because they are immigrants and didn't "understand how to manage the situation [or] speak English very well." A detective told his mom that Francisco was probably staying with a friend--but he doesn't have any friends. Francisco says he "stopped feeling anything" while he was riding the subway. When asked what he thinks about the fact that no one noticed him or talked to him for eleven days, he said, "Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”

This story is both the saddest and the coolest thing ever. Like many ASD people, I love trains, and living on a subway train is the kind of thing I made up stories about when I was a kid, writing up elaborate plans of how I'd survive. Francisco has accomplished a feat of E. L. Konigsburg proportions. There's also something iconic about the unselfconsciously gloomy statements he made to the New York Times--"nobody really cares about the world and about people"? I'm pretty sure he could become the next Edward Scissorhands or Jeff Mangum.

But while it's nice to imagine Francisco bragging about his adventure to his friends when he's 19 or 20, the time when this will be just an awesome story is a long way away. The time when Francisco will have friends is, probably, a long way away, and I bet it seems so far away that he doesn't believe it exists. He said he was planning on staying on the subway forever; he lost all sense of time. I think people lose their sense of time when they think that things are so bad they'll never change.

The words "eighth grade" are the two most painful words in the English language, at least for me. But I still believed in a better future, sort of; not with all my heart, but enough that I didn't try to disappear from life altogether. I held on. It breaks my heart that Francisco didn't believe there was anything to hold on for, that the world was just too scary for him to stay.

I want to write him a letter. I want this period of his life to be over. I want him to go the school where his doctors want him to go, where he can be with other kids who have disabilities, instead of staying at the school that claims he's doing fine but terrified him into disappearing for two weeks. I just want him to be older, playing video games with his friends and saying, "hey, did I ever tell you about the time I ran away and lived on the subway?"

Privilege + ASD

This is something I said to someone in the comments of my Mad Men Asperger's post on livejournal, about Fuck Pete Campbell and its ilk:

I don't know, I mean I'm white so I feel like it's not really my place to say how people who aren't white should feel; I don't know if I would enjoy watching the show if I wasn't white. And I think that having a lot of privilege and being really unhappy about it is sometimes hard to sympathize with if you don't have privilege. For example, as a gay person I tend to get pretty bored when straight people complain about how hard it is being straight.

Also (I think I wrote about this a bit in the original post, or intended to) it's interesting to think about how different Asperger's looks in different people. For example with women you can't really tell. It seems pretty likely to me that this is because society comes down harder on women who have bad social skills. And it's probably the same with people of color. I mean, Pete's life is crappy now, but if he was a black guy in the 60s with the kind of social skills and temper he has, his family would probably be scared that something would happen to him; like, something violent. (I also think that they'd have more of a sense of him having a disability, even if they didn't call it that. I wonder if he would be sort of a family responsibility, like "shit, who's going to take care of Pete now that so-and-so died.") The way I'm writing this essay comes off as a little anti-Peggy, but of course it's totally not her fault. Peggy would have been fired if she acted like Pete. Peggy sure doesn't have the option of muddling around until she meets a nice guy who will devote all his energy to managing her social impairments.

When Pete feels powerless he kicks around women. When Peggy feels powerless--well, she better find another outlet, because she doesn't have anyone to kick around.

I hope it doesn't come off like I'm saying this all in response to what you said, and trying to correct your reaction or something--I just started thinking about it while I was typing. To be honest I do feel personally hurt when I see all this "fuck Pete Campbell" stuff, or just sort of this attitude that guys who pretty clearly have some kind of social impairment are just The Oppressors, and there can't be any more to them than that. I remember seeing this a few years ago in a post about RealDolls. The guy the article was about clearly suffered from a lot of social anxiety that made it hard for him to handle relationships (or even find them), but everyone on this blog was just like "oh, he hates women, he thinks women are untrustworthy." I love Pete, very much, probably more than someone should love a fictional character. I don't want to ignore his privilege but I don't think it's fair to ignore the fact that he has lower status as a disabled person, whether or not other characters consciously perceive him that way.