Diversity

Diversity, we stress.

Diversity is good.

We should strive for diversity.

But only for so much diversity.

We should be ourselves.

But only if our selves are within an acceptable range of difference.

And even within that range,

Even within acceptable difference,

We still push, sometimes for sameness.

Why?

Why do we say one thing and do another?

Are we not always told that actions speak louder than words?

Are we not always told that we should treat others the way we want to be treated?

Are we not always told that it’s OK to be different?

Why do our actions always belie our supposed values?

I think we are afraid of what we do not know.

I think we are afraid of those who are not like us.

I think we don’t REALLY want diversity.

We just want to THINK we want diversity because we’ve been told we should.

Actual empathy

I'm taking a literature class this summer because it's for a general education requirement. To graduate from my university with a bachelors, you need to pass a literature class. (Where besides education can you be forced to pay for a service you do not want? Well, also this health insurance thing, since some people in my country are deciding is the way to go: REQUIRE people to buy health insurance from a corporation to fix the fact that these corporations have lots of problems and our health care system is a mess. But there is a huge outcry at that, and none at this.)
Anyways, we read a short story where a blind man visits a couple after his wife dies. The story I actually liked. The narrator talks about how the blind man meets none of the stereotypes he had about the blind, and how this blind man can and does travel alone. The blind man is clearly competent and not asking for pity. I don't actually know anyone blind, but I could believe that a blind man like the one in this story exists.
My problem is with classmate and teacher reactions to the idea of being blind. No one went as far as to call it a tragedy, but they did call the concept of not having sight unimaginable. That's just not true. People imagine it all the time. People LIVE it all the time. It exists. They use seeing eye dogs and canes, or not. Some learn to navigate using something like echolocation. There are blind cyclists and all kinds of other things. There is a HUGE difference between being blind or deaf and imagining blindness or deafness by closing your eyes or blocking your ears. If you close your eyes, you who is used to seeing, you feel the loss. You are missing information you expect to have. If you are blind, and you have been blind for a while, you are used to not having that information. You are used to working with the information that you normally have, which does not include sight. It's like any disability: you learn to cope, and for you, it's just life.
What we imagine disability is like from an abled perspective is not true empathy. I'm not sure true empathy is even possible for an experience so different. But that doesn't mean we should claim that our tragic view of disability has anything to do with empathy. It really doesn't.

Vis a Vis French

So, I am making an attempt at learning French on top of Chinese on top of everything else I am doing, since a good french text for beginners was on sale for $3.at my university bookstore when I went to get the literature text I need for those pesky general education requirements. The french text is called Vis a Vis. I want to know french. Because I liked it back in fourth grade that one year that I actually took French. And I forgot almost all of it. That's not cool. I need to go learn French again.

I'm not usually mad at you, but I have every right to it when I am.

Seriously. I am usually quite happy to interact with allistics (means non-autistics, and it is NOT an insult. Just like neurotypical is not an insult.) At least, I usually am at times when I'm in shape to be interacting with anyone. I very rarely get angry with allistics as a group. Individual allistics do seem to be more likely to anger me than individual autistics, but I think that's more because communication between people with different neurologies and experiences gets hairy and we mutually misunderstand each other than anything else. The allistics I deal with regularly are decent people. If they weren't, I wouldn't deal with them regularly. As an adult, I do have that much control over my own life.
But sometimes? Sometimes, allistics as a group drive me nuts. Like when they talk about how vaccines cause autism, or when Autism Speaks reacts more strongly to the loss of frozen autistic brains than to the murders of autistic people, and practically everyone calling them out on this is autistic. Or when the jury found the couple who kept their autistic boys in a cage to be not guilty on all charges. When people try to silence autistic adults for disagreeing with them, ignoring the fact that the next generation will do the same to their kids. The list goes on. So, when I say that I am mad at allistics as a group right now, I have plenty of reason to be mad. Oppressed groups are allowed to be mad at their oppressors and all. Since I can pass for merely weird, usually, (well enough that I could run around a foreign country as a minor and not have people asking where my parents were, actually,) I have not personally faced all that much stupidity about being autistic. But I can still be mad at the people who do the oppressing. And sometimes, I am.

College NOS

Over at The Thinking Persons Guide To Autism, they had a guest post called Business-NOS: A Standard of Professionalism. It got me thinking about what things I do differently (and will probably always do differently) because I am autistic. PDD-NOS isn't actually my diagnostic label, but the incidents I'm referring to are with people who don't know I'm autistic, so I guess it's part of Weird Smart Kid-NOS now. Because I'm pretty sure that's what they think is going on. Once I've gotten myself into an environment where my sensory weirdnesses aren't a problem, that's pretty much how I present, anyways.
So:
College-NOS is going to class in a cotton T-shirt, an (often cotton knit) loose, ground length skirt, and no shoes.
College-NOS is bringing a stim toy to class. Sometimes it's graph paper and a pen, since those geometric designs are a form of stimming for me. Sometimes it's a piece of fabric with an awesome texture (aka it's SILKY.)
College-NOS is getting banned from handwriting math homework because my handwriting is THAT BAD, and the professors know I know LaTeX.
College-NOS is sitting cross-legged on chairs, or on the floor when possible.
College-NOS is talking the departments that are closest related to my obsession into letting me ignore some pre-requisites.
College-NOS is possibly breaking the computer system that keeps track of what degree program(s) you're in.
Research-NOS is dressing completely differently in the computing lab/at research meetings and in the chem lab. In the chem lab, it's dressing the way I have to in a chem lab, though my lab coat is tie-die. In the computing lab and at meetings? Welcome to the College-NOS dress code.
Research-NOS is FLAPPING in research meetings, because this is really awesome and flapping is how I express that. Hi Obsessive Joy Of Autism. I totally know what you're talking about.
Life-NOS is realizing that I really am good enough at what I do that people can work with the weird to keep me around, and not being ashamed of it.