Privilege and bigotry

A conversation fragment on FB that would be useful to copy here:

Me, to a friend of a friend: The fact that you think you shouldn’t use violence toward someone as horrible as a Nazi tells me you’re white, cisgender, straight, possibly rich, and therefore you have no idea at all what it’s like to be afraid for your life from people who want to kill you for nothing you can control while nobody pays attention to your terror except to gaslight it. It also tells me you lack enough compassion and empathy to listen to oppressed people and try to imagine things from their perspective. In which case you’re probably right that nothing is going to get through to you until you suddenly find yourself some sort of persecuted minority in terror for your life, because you’re the kind of person who is so self-centered that you think everyone’s experience is like your own, which makes you think others with opinions that differ from yours are just being difficult on purpose.

Friend: pretty wrong except the white bit (I think, I never checked his belly button for racial purity marks)

Me: Well he still looks white and male, and that gives him more than enough privilege to be a dick about a lot of things, whatever else he may be.

Friend: so successfully passing as a normal person provides privilege?

Me: It can. Doesn’t always, but it can. You’d be surprised how many gay men are transphobic, sexist, and/or racist and/or other kinds of bigot. And trans men, in my experience and the experience of a great many trans women and genderfluid people I know, tend to be almost as bad as cis men in the sexism and other bigotry department, and while everyone is a little bit racist in a racist society, white people tend more towards racism than other people just by virtue of the fact that just being white gives one privileges that can make a person horrible in many ways via sheer ignorance.(1) Hell, I used to say a lot of things that got a lot of people angry at me because they were racist things. I didn’t do it intentionally, I just had privilege that made me ignorant, despite the fact I was even then genderfluid and pansexual and compassionate.(2) It took years and a lot of reading on Tumblr to work out what I was saying wrong and why it was wrong, because very few people who got upset at me would explain things, which I understand fully now; it’s hard to keep putting up with the kind of ignorance that breeds racism, especially since it’s damn near impossible to differentiate between people who are merely ignorant and confused from those who are willfully racist.

For those reasons, I would like to be more forgiving and more patient with people who are bigoted, but I’m not a patient person or a forgiving person, and I have chronic depression and other chronic illnesses that make me a spoonie (a kind of person who has to budget their energy because even simple things like arguing with bigots can drain my energy reserves), so it’s a lot easier for me to just assume that anyone who’s showing bigotry will either do as I did and do their own research, or wouldn’t listen to reason anyway. It’s not ideal, it’s not what I would like to do, but I don’t have the patience or the energy for anything else.

In fact, given that I didn’t insult him, call him names, cuss at him, or otherwise do the Internet version of scream at him, I was being remarkably patient with him in my comments to him so far, for someone I don’t know about or particularly care about one way or another. (I reserve most of my patience and energy and forgiveness for friends like you.)

1 = I like the description of privilege that says it’s like the difference between being a kid in a car, oblivious to most things outside the car, and riding in a car after you’ve learned how to drive and suddenly you’re aware of all the shitty things other drivers do. It’s an excellent metaphor.

2 = And yes, I am aware that this contradicts something I said in an earlier comment to the man. He could well be compassionate, I know, and just not done his research yet. One of the pitfalls of having a crappy memory is I tend to live in the moment and forget about a lot of important relevant things. Recognition of this personal failing of mine is why one of my two Discordian names is Bishop Sanctimonious the Hypocritical.

On the morality of punching Nazis

This is a pretty awesome post, funny but true, on the morality of punching Nazis: http://thoughtsonthedead.com/on-the-propriety-of-punching-nazis-an-faq/

ADD/ADHD/SCT

When I was a kid, my parents knew something was different about me, so they had me tested. AFAIK, the doctor only suggested ADD, and not autism/asperger's, probably because even back in the 80's it wasn't a well known diagnosis. My parents rejected the ADD diagnosis because of my ability to hyper-focus on things that interested me, and for a long time I agreed with their assessment once I was old enough to be told about this. I eventually figured that the doc hadn't a clue what he was doing, and worked out for myself that I was an aspie. And I know I am, I did get an official diagnosis for that eventually.

However, I recently found out from someone with ADHD that people with ADHD are capable, sometimes, of hyper-focus. And I figure if people with ADHD can hyper-focus, so can people with ADD, and it's possible I have both ADD and autism, and the two can thus comorbid with one another.

Further evidence: I know I'm somewhere on that spectrum. For a while I thought I might have Sluggish Cognitive Tempo (SCT), which could theoretically also be called Attention Deficit Hypo-activity Disorder, if that weren't the same letters as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I thought it because, among other things, I react to stimulants much like ADD/ADHD people do, in that stimulants often act as depressants for me. Well, caffeine does at least, up to a point. Past that point, I get jittery, a bit like a mild to moderate panic attack. I figured that out when I drank some Starbuck's coffee a couple times. So I usually drink decaf or herbal tea, now.

And that's still possible that I have SCT. But now I know ADD might be a possibility, too. And I don't offhand recall the details of SCT beyond the fact that my reflexes tend to be slow most of the time. (When I'm in the right frame of mind, they get faster.)

Possibly further complicating things, I also have anxiety.

I guess the reason I'm posting this here is I'm wondering if others have ADD in addition to autism, especially if you also have anxiety. And I'd also like to hear from anyone who has autism mixed with Sluggish Cognitive Tempoo. It would be helpful to compare myself to others if I can, to help sort out which of these things I'm most likely to have.