Seemingly Positive Stereotypes

Some people may be surprised at how rights activists sometimes object to stereotypes that seem positive, such as the 'noble savage' or 'innocent retard' stereotypes*.'Why would they be upset about being portrayed positively?' people ask. In reply, many activists fumble with comments about not wanting to be seen as different or wanting to be viewed as people, which often don't clarify much.
I think I've figured out one of the real problems with those stereotypes. It's a matter of the perspectives they suggest. When you think of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent retard', you typically don't think of that hypothetical person from xyr own perspective. You think of these people from the perspective of an observer. And how would you go about understanding their perspectives? You can't ask them - the 'innocent retard' would probably not understand the question, while the 'noble savage' would reply in some riddle you can't understand. At least, that's the perception, and comments from people viewed in the lenses of those two stereotypes will be interpreted in those ways.
Native people and disabled people are not like nondisabled whites. We all have things in common, sure, but there are also differences, and often the stereotypes catch an element of those differences. But they hide the most important perspective on that group - their own. If your stereotype is of someone you can't imagine being, yet can predict the actions of, then it's probably not a stereotype that the people described will be happy with.

Finding Agreement

There is a listserv I've joined recently, about girls/women on the autistic spectrum, called Autism_in_Girls. It's got a mix of parents of autistic girls, autistic women and various other people.
Anyway, I started out commenting on what people said that triggered posts from me, just as usual. Some were about various features of autism, such as one person wanting to know about anxiety in autistic girls, but when some people posted about biomedical treatments for autism, I commented on that as well. I wasn't as careful as I sometimes am about phrasing my comments diplomatically, and this list has a number of people who support biomedical treatment of autism, so an argument broke out. When someone asked whether I'd come to this list in order to upset people, I felt terrified. It was like I was in a village hearing someone yell "we'll drive the witch out of town". I felt like I was about to be cast out.
So far in this story, it's just what I've had happen on many lists. I say what I think and feel, and everyone likes my unique contribution, then I say 'the unsayable' and people suddenly turn against me. Usually what happens next is that I fight for awhile, and then leave the group, feeling beaten down emotionally. But that's not what happened on this list.
I argued awhile, trying to clarify that I hadn't said any of them were bad parents and the various other things people had read into what I'd said, trying to explain what I really meant and why it was important, and then something really unusual happened. I connected with one of my fiercest opponents.
To summarize what happened, the other person (a mother of an autistic girl) said she'd learn much more from me telling my story than posting inflammatory comments. I replied with a reference to the definition of self-narrating zoo exhibit, saying I didn't want to be one. She replied to that by saying she didn't want me to be a self-narrating zoo exhibit - she wanted me to say what was meaningful and why, how my story shaped my view of autism, what made me say the things I said. She wanted to understand me, in short.
And in reply to that, I took a risk and gave her exactly what she'd asked for. I told my story (in two segments). For those of you who don't know, I was sexually abused by my cousins, attended a really bad school from K-4, attended a somewhat better school with a bullying problem from 5-6, was homeschooled from 7-9, read about neurodiversity and self-diagnosed as autistic at 14 or so, attended a high school for grade 10, was diagnosed autistic at 15, and have been homeschooled for grades 11-12. My parents never thought there was anything 'wrong' with me and refused to have me diagnosed with anything other than PTSD, not because they didn't realize I was different, but because they saw no problem with how I was. This is a brief summary, I told my story in much more detail on this list.
And the risk was worth it. I felt very exposed, saying so much about myself to people who were hostile to me, but after that they weren't hostile any more. They still don't agree with me on many things, but I think they're coming to understand my viewpoint. We've made peace, though I don't know how to go on from here to regular conversation again. I'm still trying to figure out what happened. I'd love to know how this can happen in other settings, but I don't understand it, or how much of it was under my control.
On thinking about it, though, I have some theories about things that may have made this different from other similar encounters.
Firstly, I wasn't the only one. There are several autistic women on this list, one of whom was quite vocal in supporting me (and one who was confused by much of it and kept asking people to clarify, which we did as much as possible). I've read in social psychology textbooks that one person expressing a minority viewpoint in a group has little impact on other group members, but if even one other person expresses agreement, the minority is much more powerful. So that might be part of it - though I've seen times in which multiple autistic neurodiversity advocates argued with a majority of people looking to cure autism and eventually each of them were successfully driven away, so this can't be all that made a difference.
Secondly, a major person on the other side of the argument, though she attacked me personally early on in the argument, used quite a lot of logical discussion and trying to clarify her understanding of my viewpoint as well. Not only did this make it much easier for her and I to come to an agreement in itself, but it also encouraged me to argue better myself. I admit that I did some personal attacks, though mainly towards people group members supported rather than group members themselves (eg, I said 'reputable DAN doctor' was an oxymoron), but in reaction to her model, I stopped doing that.
Lastly, I think I was different. Some of this took place during the lead-up to the ARM conference, when I was getting a really heavy dose of anti-autism stuff while simultaneously having a lot of personal support, and the bulk of it took place right afterwards, when I'd had a big shift in my viewpoint of parents of autistics as a result of my mother and the numerous activist mothers I met at the conference, as well as a shift in understanding myself and my own story (which I should probably blog about soon). That conference made me much more confident as well, and therefore less prone to defensiveness in reaction to that argument. I was able to confidently say 'no' to a request for proof of my diagnosis, and rather than feeling like my story was too atypical to teach anyone and would just show I had no right to talk about autism, I felt that my story illustrated something useful and significant.

The Missing Voice

There's this one style of writing that really bothers me. It's when someone writes 'nonfiction' from the perspective of someone else who can't describe their own experience - usually a disabled child, although people do this with pets as well. An example is available here.
It's not that people do this both with pets and disabled people that bothers me. I think very often the offense at being 'treated like an animal' is about things that are problematic when done to animals, as well. And that's true in this case, although I'll be discussing why it's problematic to do this to disabled people.
Although one problem is that it can be hard to tell who actually wrote it, that's not the biggest problem either. Often it's obvious - frequent references to 'mommy thought' with too much detail to be anyone other than her, statements like 'I can't speak or write', etc. Other times, it isn't. One website I found, I actually couldn't tell who had written it - the disabled man himself or one of his parents.
In the Faces of Autism conference I went to, they asked people to put up their hands when they named certain groups of people attending. They listed parents of autistic children, teachers, therapists, etc. At the end, they said 'did we miss any group?' I and one other person put up our hands. They'd missed two categories of people - politicians and autistic people. (There's a funny Monty Python skit about this, too. You can see it here*.)
I think these are related problems. People tend to lump disabled people and their family into one group, and act as if their interests are the same. This is especially true with disabilities that are usually diagnosed in childhood and that affect communication. And lumping those two groups together almost always means only listening to parents.
Now, parents of disabled children need to have a voice, and they need to be heard. But that's not a big problem. It's not that hard to get people to listen to them. But so often, people don't even realize someone's voice is missing. They don't even realize that they don't know what the disabled people themselves actually want, how they actually view their own lives.
Back to the 'nonfiction' written from someone else's perspective. The big problem is that they don't seem to realize it's actually fiction. You can't actually write from someone else's perspective, and really get it right. I'd find nothing wrong with it if it came with a clear message that this was written by someone else trying to imagine what it's like from their point of view. I want people to recognize what that kind of writing really is - fiction. It's fiction just like a story from the perspective of a famous person (like the Royal Diaries series) is fiction. Technically, you might call it 'creative nonfiction', which is really a fictionalized account of real events. But it's not equivalent to telling the story from your own perspective or taking dictation.
Another concern I have is that people only tend to do this with those who can't tell you their own story. Imagine writing your husband's life from his perspective - not showing him what you wrote or asking him what it was like for him, just writing it. If you wouldn't be willing to do that, then why are you willing to do the same with your child's life?
This also ties in with the saying to parents: 'you are the expert on your child.' Well, you aren't the expert on your child. You're one of the experts on your child. But the one who really knows the most about your child is not you, but your child themselves. Even if you can't talk to them and find out what they know about themselves, never forget that they do know themselves in a way no one else can. Just because you don't know their perspective doesn't mean they don't have one, or that their perspective brings no new information. And your voice may speak for your child out of necessity, but never forget the voice that is missing.

* Sorry, no subtitles.