astercontrol:

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.

I mean, sometimes the thought seems to be “it doesn’t matter if the group has advantages in any area– it’s valuable just because it’s a group of people and that’s who they are.”

But I think that’s not exactly what anyone is feeling in this debate.

I have certain congenital tendencies towards chronic pain and circulatory problems. They are awful. They suck. They’ve shaped my life, a lot. I would be a very different person without them. I would not want to travel back in time and change them, but that’s simply for the same reason I don’t want to go back in time and change anything about my past– even the worst and most traumatic bits that I would never want happening to me or anyone else in the future. 

Because it’s MY past, and that would be literally erasing the person I am NOW to be replaced with a whole different person. And I’m not miserable enough about my current self to want suicide.

But when it comes to, like, potential people in the future?– I see absolutely nothing valuable about having those health problems. If they discovered causes that could be avoided, preventing anyone from developing those conditions…

…well, I can see how that could be misused, but I wouldn’t feel the same sort of outrage, the sense that they’re trying to exterminate “my people,” like I do in discussions about curing or preventing autism.

Same with those other traumatic bits of my past that I mentioned, actually! “People who’ve been traumatized in the ways I have” are a group I identify with. We’ve got things in common, and it’s definitely shaped who we are. 

But belonging to that group doesn’t bring advantages that make the trauma worth it. So I’ll still do everything I can to help prevent that sort of trauma happening to anyone in the future.

And I won’t feel like I’m “exterminating my people” by doing that.

So…. what is it that makes us identify with a group in a way that makes us NOT want to eliminate that group existing for other people in the future?

Well, I feel like that has to be related to believing that there’s something good about being in that group. Some reason one might be happy to belong to that group instead of a different one.

And I feel like there’s some people who don’t even want us to talk about those good things.

YMMV.

Anyway I’m done ranting about this. It just makes my brain itch in a bad way when expectations of “don’t do bad thing” start to creep into “you must do bad thing in the other direction.”