The Odd Minority Out: Why Doesn't Society Accept Autistics Yet?

Recently, www.cracked.com ran an article about just how complicated life really is for autistic people.  It's a useful read for people who still don't get it, albeit a great deal more depressing than what most people likely want from Cracked.  For myself, and probably most other autistic readers, it's almost completely old news, and also a great deal more depressing than what we want from Cracked.

The question that needs to be asked, is why this is old news for many, but compels others to write articles.  The answer is that unfortunately, it's still needed.  Everywhere else we look, we see signs that our progressive, tolerant society should be past disdain toward any minority based on past experience of disdain toward others, and yet ignorant attitudes towards autism that range from misguided naivete to outright hatred and fear are still widespread.

We still hear of devious teachers who mobilize their classes to ostracize autistic people, maybe against some of their wishes.  We hear constantly of how Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine hysteria continues to delude a hardcore of followers, despite ridicule by almost everyone else.  More troubling still is that more backlash I read towards her is in the form of "No; vaccines don't cause autism" than "Why do you hate autism?"  If McCarthy's line was that vaccines caused homosexuality, and this was an intolerable problem, then I suspect the PC-brigades would be on her doorstep protesting within two days, but what is most troubling of all is that even these people are absent or even hostile when it comes to autism.

Several times now, a group called www.forcechange.org has advertised on Craigslist looking for progressive writers who want to work towards addressing the important social and economic issues of our day, several times I have responded saying that I am autistic, greatly value the input of progressive organizations in improving autistic lives, along with important environmental issues like curtailing litter, and at no point have they replied.  We can see just how bad it gets when self-righteous ideologues like Leigh Alexander can, in the name of promoting a more diverse culture, paint autistic people not only as unfitting potential new recipients of that culture, but as the opponents of that culture; as people who are likely to grind their heals against inclusion.  The question of how so much ablism can fly in the name of progressivism may well be answered the same as why, even after decades of celebrated diversity, we autistics still get a raw deal from society as a whole: Because unfortunately, we are an affront to diversity such as idealists promote it.

Not that we're the Ku Klux Klan.  We don't have a political or economic drive to keep others out of power, as if it would do us any good when so many of us aren't in power.  I for one, having lived a rather unsatisfying life, am more likely to sympathize with other marginalized groups--and it's not hard for me to think of basic human dignity when framed in such political terms.  Yet autistic people, with how we think, talk, and act (or, as the case may be, how we don't), wreck the naive ideal of socialized diversity that we've been pandered for decades, with authorities who also received said pandering left tragically unsure of how to pick up the pieces.

Even Oscar smiles come time to drop the anvil.

Socialized diversity is everywhere we look--at least when we're looking at screens or paper.  It's in posters displayed for our schoolchildren, it's in books, it's in educational public TV shows, it's in profit-oriented TV shows, it's in commercials.  Between the lot of them, they've made the iconic image of the "Rainbow Gang" our benchmark for a healthy tolerant society.  They've hammered the same few tropes in repeatedly: In a proper diverse society, everyone is together all the time, everyone is smiling, everyone seems to be charging up each other, and everyone tends to focus in on the same thing, whatever it is--because it's almost always one thing or another.  Maybe it's an environmental message, maybe it's the product being advertised, maybe it's as simple as the camera snapping a picture, or maybe it's an activity, in which case everyone is likely to be enthusiastically in favor of that activity.  In my experience of such media, the activities tend to be rather trite and and culturally-generalized.  If a work based in something like the real world contained a rainbow gang of boys (plus maybe a tomboy), at some point they'd play sports--baseball if in the suburbs, basketball if in the city.  If the rainbow gang was female, malls could be expected at some point.

Apparently, drawing over-sized lips on a black person is okay if you do it on every other race, too.

This sort of paradoxical depiction of diverse people, samey interests isn't just playing to people who share an identity with one of the people depicted, it is telling America as a whole the feel-good story it wants to believe about itself; that is, its preeminent institutions and pass-times have a magical ability to bring together all types of people in perfect, happy harmony.  Shallow and naive as the expectation might be, to be fair it's not a bad ideal to paint for society.  The United States, as a nation designed on the founding principles of "All Men are Created Equal" and "E Pluribus Unum", has a lucky ability, probably lacked by other nations simply evolved by circumstance, to erect a sense of national pride not connoted to some degree with racism and Divine Right.  Yet wounding the pride of a whole society will make someone unpopular in a hurry, and few things wound the pride of a society that has bent over backward for decades to erect the rainbow gang ideal, like the advent of a person who takes a look upon their work and dares to be unimpressed.

Autistic people are just that; we break the standard tolerance mold.  Many of us do not become happy simply from being in a group; sometimes we become visibly unnerved by it.  We do not enjoy the casual conversations that hold groups together when nothing more meaningful is available; even if others make all the initiatives at being friendly, we might just grunt "uh-huh" or "I see".  Those conversations we do enjoy, they may well detest.  We will not necessarily feel compelled to focus on whatever subject or activity the majority of the group has elected to focus on at the moment--that verb is not chosen on accident, because whenever majority rules in social settings, expect it to rule against autistic wishes.  We zone out defiantly when that at hand displeases us.  Our interests may differ radically from the heralded standard Americana pushed onto rainbow gangs in the media.  If a rainbow gang does manage to contain an autistic person, and they go to one of those typical rainbow gang baseball games, chances are high the autistic will be that party pooper who squats down and looks for clovers instead of playing.

Tolerance does not see mental states as interchangeable as it sees physical states, because tolerance in itself is a mental state, and how could anything else be right?  Yet autistic minds challenge its scope with what may come off as a paradox; we feel we have a right to demand tolerance the same as other oppressed groups demand it, yet we ourselves tend to want everything just-so--what "just-so" is may vary from autistic to autistic, but again, it's liable to be very different from what the neurotypical people value.  We don't have the same views on what is and is not to be appreciated in social situations; for example, for much of my childhood I was extremely bothered by bad grammar and interrupted people to correct them, which they hated, and I did things unprovoked that they hated, too.  The autistic, from the perspectives of both peers and overseers, can seem to take one look at the olive branch they handed him or her, and chuck it into the dirt disdainfully.

Socialization can, should, and usually does play a role in addressing these things, but there's only so far you can go in conditioning people before they--neurotypical as well as autistic--begin to resent it.  When, for example, there's a schism in where they want a conversation to go; an autistic person wanting to talk in excess about his or her obsession (trucks, cats, vacuum cleaners, etc) to a point maddening to everyone else, while they want to let the conversation evolve freely in ways that will likely bore the autistic, there's a few things overseers can do: They can teach their autistics that others are annoyed by their obsession, and they should tone it down.  They can teach their other people to accept the autistic's quirks and not tease him or her about it.  They can teach people to smile and nod politely; maybe to feign interest if they're good actors.  What they cannot do, however, is teach any of them to like it.  An autistic person might learn not to snap at people for doing and talking about things he's not into, but he's still bored.  The neurotypical might learn not to tell an autistic person to "Shut up about trucks already!", but they're still annoyed by his incessant prattle about trucks.

These conflicts of interest within group settings are likely to begin early-on for autistic children.  Many will be bullied for their quirks, while others, in the lucky event that proactive overseers intervene and teach children right from wrong, will benefit from the new knowledge of social obligation, but for these sorts of dysfunctional relationships, social obligation can easily manifest itself as social abstinence.  People, when they've seen repeatedly that, try though they might, they simply can't enjoy each other's company, may just call it quits and go their own separate ways; parting with the mutual conclusion that not infringing is the better part of respect.  That's true for any relationships, but it's probably going to be autistics left the worst off in the aftermath, since the others will likely have far more people left whom they still care to associate with, while the autistic merely drifts in hopes that he or she will find that special someone who's more like them--somehow, somewhere.  The overseers schooled in preaching about rainbow gangs may remain sympathetic, but whom can they realistically serve when someone has to give, the sides are disproportionate, and one side's desires are less complicated?  To tell a group of white boys "You must let the black boy play baseball with you if he wants to" is, despite some embarrassing racial hiccups in our past, the version of tolerance that gels perfectly with American ideals; telling a group of neurotypical boys "You must not play baseball if the the autistic boy with you doesn't want to" is simply an impossible sell.

People can learn to give a little in order to get a little.  They cannot, though, be reasonably expected to make the attempt when vastly different attitudes reduce the chances of a beneficial exchange.  The rainbow gang ideal runs on the often-repeated "Golden Rule" that we should treat others as we wish to be treated; alas, that staple of social ethics presumes too naively that people all want to be treated alike.  The image of a superficially diverse crowd standing together and smiling in unison, unanimously devoted to a given subject, in effect is saying that our differences don't matter; that it's what's inside that counts, and we're all the same on the inside (There's some more talking-points you've heard a bunch of growing up.)  With the exception of it being what's inside that counts (especially for those with a desperate need of mutual interests), those claims are false.

Rubbish

We are different on the inside; both from those of our own skin tone and of different ones, and some of us are very different on the inside; too much so for it not to matter in how we interact with others.  Some of us have no attraction to the average gang; no matter how colorful it is; we seek the special company of those who think like us, and we cannot be burdened with the embarrassment of seeming intolerant if it happens they also look like us.

If this essay sounds depressing and cynical, that's because it is a depressing and cynical subject, and I am not going to claim I have the exact solution to this problem. I'm not some great civil rights leader even if I wish I was, and that insight I do have into this was in part learned the hard way by doing my part in the past to alienate others, just as they did their parts to alienate me, some parts done in reaction to others.  I had to stop typing this several times because it got too upsetting for me.  Yet I insist on confronting this problem, as humiliating as its existence likely is to acknowledge for a society that has fancied itself progressive for four decades, because autism seems to be on the rise, and life is still hard for autistics.  We are the odd minority out; we may never be in so long as society views negating the differences between people as a requisite step in achieving the rainbow gang ideal it's been fed for decades, while we know well that our differences cannot be negated.  It is time to rethink the way we portray and attempt to achieve diversity and tolerance, and perhaps simultaneously the most important and most harsh thing we must realize in the process is that it's not supposed to be easy.  Then again, those things worth fighting for usually aren't.