Where the hell is the line between

“people being different is good. You can take pride in being the way you are, because your uniqueness is good and offers things to the world that wouldn’t be available if everyone was the same. The fact that different kinds of people exist, with different abilities and skills and perspectives on life, is valuable and enriches humanity”

and

“you are not immune to exceptionalism, you must run away from any belief that suggests your identity makes you superior and more evolved and better than everyone else”

I mean rationally, obviously, both are true.

But I feel as if sometimes I see people take the second one so far that it… begins to eclipse the first one.

For example.

sometimes I see that sort of rhetoric get yelled in response to any suggestion that autistic people have any tendency towards greater skill at all, in any field, than neurotypicals

Even if no one is even trying to claim that one group is Overall Better than another– only that it is good for both groups to exist, because each one has tendencies toward strengths that are less prevalent in the other

And I mean– I could understand if this was just a pushback against generalizing and stereotyping. Because I can understand being wary of that. It can be a dangerous thing to fixate on. Even if there is some statistical tendency towards different strengths between different groups, focusing on it can very easily be a slippery slope towards bad things.

But that doesn’t seem to be the concern people have.

Because, even when cautioning against feelings of supremacy about one’s own (marginalized) group… the same people will actively reinforce mainstream feelings of supremacy about the dominant, non-marginalized group

For instance, the popular post I’m thinking of specifically warns against autism supremacy by saying,

“our hyperconnected nervous systems give us terrible sensory overwhelm more often than they make us geniuses.”

Like, somebody was so eager to denounce the idea that autistics have any natural advantage over neurotypicals, they doubled down hard on saying neurotypicals have a natural advantage over autistics

So are we supposed to denounce exceptionalism for everyone? Or only denounce it for ourselves, and just go along with the mainstream tradition of celebrating it in the class that’s already oppressing us?

I don’t even fucking know.