This was helpful to me. Hey fellow white #ActuallyAutistic folks, give this short video a watch to get a tiny bit of context into what our Black friends are dealing with. We need to do better.
White autistic privilege:
1) If I start stimming or otherwise acting "Autistic" in public, many people have a framework for understanding what's happening.
2) When I talk about my experience being autistic I'm going to have a lot of (white) people telling me they share my experience, because they have the privilege of recognizing and diagnosing (or self-diagnosing) more easily.
3) When I'm struggling with meltdowns or other behavioral control issues I have the knowledge, now, that it's the result of an overactive nervous system and not a character flaw.
I'm not going to be treated as "just another example of my race" at my worst.
4) When I tell people I'm autistic, I do it with a big smile and a welcoming tone and all of the expressive masking skills I've developed over the years that cater to an audience _that wants me to succeed_. It wouldn't work with a hostile audience.
5) If I get in trouble with the legal system, my neurotype can be used as justification for nearly anything, apparently. Because I'm not diagnosed with "ODD" or other "problem" diagnoses, because I'm white and privileged.
6) If and when I have a spectacular failure, which happens (at work, at home, in relationships, whatever) it's seen as the exception, not the rule. It doesn't define my identity and reputation.
7) I am generally afforded trust before I have earned it. I am generally treated well until/unless I have some sort of problematic need. Things _round up_ for me, in a way I know they don't for Black Americans in particular.
I _rely_ on my privilege to cope.
8) It is generally much, much safer for me to admit to vulnerability, confusion or disability than it is for someone who is fighting every day to be seen, taken seriously and not treated as less than.
9) Because this is America: I can have a public meltdown and odds are a police officer won't shoot me.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If you're looking for new engineering opportunities please consider joining me at @ModeAnalytics. It's a great place to work with a solid, well-positioned product. We need good engineers to help us improve our offerings.
We've got open roles for Java, Ruby, Go and Typescript.
Our Ruby is a monolith solving interesting problems.
Our Typescript is an Angular app.
Our Go and Java are used for standalone services.
Why is this a good place to work? A lot of reasons, and I don't say that lightly. A flexible schedule, fantastic colleagues, challenging but solvable problems -- and my manager and I are working on a promotion path for ND people specifically.
For a long history of predatory "medical" professionals selling snake oil to desperate terrified parents (who they are explicitly terrifying) re: autism treatments, pick up @stevesilberman's Neurotribes.
People hate autism so much that parents will make their kids drink bleach, will subject them to chemical chelation, will put them on highly restrictive diets, etc. All to "cure" the autism.
But the autism can't be cured. The TRAUMA can sure be addressed, though!
Thank you especially to @AnnMemmott and @AutSciPerson for leading the charge on this. They are both leaders in our community and you should follow them if you don’t.
Yikes, wow, unfollowing now. Was a big fan of successfully and predictably replicating measurements to prove theories, did NOT know about the total inability to engage meaningfully with the subjective domain of experience.
But yikes, unfollowing now. I was a huge fan of its ability to treat illness using scientific rigor, I did NOT know it pathologized everything it didn’t understand and normalized anything it couldn’t address.
Big yikes, unfollowing now. Was a huge fan of the ability to use numeric values to explore relational truths, did NOT realize it was impossible to do this with any kind of internal consistency without injecting external context and meaning.