A sort of winding rant.

“Black and white thinking” is said to be a symptom of autism, but honestly in my observations, allistics tend more towards black and white thinking than we auties and aspies do. I also find those on the autism spectrum tend to be more open-minded than allistics.

Yeah, anyone who knows me knows I’m pretty close-minded about some things but that’s not for the same reasons as allistics. For me, if I’m close-minded about something it’s because I spent years being open-minded about it, heard every argument under the sun, made up my mind, and all I keep hearing from the opposition is more of the same BS recycled arguments I’ve heard a million times already. Also, the things I tend to be close-minded about are things where my reasons for believing something are based on my sense of morality/ethics and no argument is likely going to be good enough to bypass that. Take abortion for instance; fetuses are not even intelligent, let alone sentient, so no argument is ever going to convince me that the rights of some non-sentient clump of cells overrules the rights of the sentient human being in whom those cells are growing. Especially when counter-arguments are always based on an incredibly ignorant misunderstanding of science by people who believe that a being that committed multiple genocides against his own creations has somehow changed from a narcissistic evil sociopath into a good loving guy who thinks abortion is murder now, when the bible’s sole reference to abortion was that same god teaching Moses how to perform an abortion, and there are several scenes where this same god tells his followers to gut pregnant women amongst their enemies.(1)

Also, inability to pick up on people’s tone of voice is said to be another autism spectrum symptom. I can’t speak for everyone on the autism spectrum, but for myself, I find that tends to be BS as well. I can pick up on people’s tones just fine. Better, in fact, than allistic people do. I think where the confusion comes in is I pick up on what others are actually feeling as opposed to what they’re trying to convince others and/or themselves they’re feeling, and their hypocrisy is what bugs me. So few people say what they mean or mean what they say, and when I call them on it, they’ve convinced themselves that I’m the stupid one for seeing through their ruse.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are so many autistic trans people and autistic bi/pan people, and autistic people on the asexual spectrum. I think people on the autism spectrum tend to be better at finding the edges, the overlaps, the areas that aren’t (just) one thing or another. It’s just that the autistic black/white thinking stems, I think, from a mix of old BS allistic thinking patterns from trying to fit in with the allistics, and our literalistic approach to things (which I think is basically just us expecting people to say what they mean and then getting confused and/or annoyed when they don’t, IE we’re upset that allistics aren’t as honest as we are, which makes sarcasm a concept that takes a lot of work to puzzle out).

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1 = Or another example: I think people’s right to live and be safe from horrifying deaths by guns overrules the “right” of others to own dangerous tools designed solely for murdering people. So from my POV, banning guns and repealing the 2nd amendment is more moral than letting a bunch of yahoos run around killing people just because that’s their fetish.

RE: Racism

A post on Tumblr had some racist jackass on it arguing that "not all white vegans are racist," completely missing the points others were making. Repeating my response to them here because I was overcome by an uncharacteristicly benign attitude for it, and it explains some things I have had trouble explaining in the past. With some slight modifications that I don't have the energy to make right now, it would be a good all-purpose anti-racist thing. Here you are:

I’m white and I’m telling you you’re wrong. White vegans have proved to me time and again that they care more about animals than they do about the lives of people of color. Maybe not every single individual white vegan is racist, but the majority of them are. It’s just that it’s a damn sight easier talking about white vegans in general than it is to constantly be saying “most white vegans.” Also, if people were to make that distinction all the time, white vegans could comfortably go “Ah, but not me” and carry on without being ruffled. Being ruffled is good, which is why the generalization; it makes you decide to either look deep inside yourself to see if you harbor any racist ideas you may have picked up by being raised in a racist society, or you can decide to double down on your racism.

Arguing “not all white vegans are racist” puts you into the “doubled down on your racism” category, by the way, because racism only goes one direction: from the oppressors down to the oppressed. The only thing going the other direction is Prejudice, which is based on it being safer for people of color to assume that white people are going to be nasty and even dangerous than it would be to assume that they won’t. IE, the worst that can happen by POC being prejudiced against white people is some white person’s feelings get hurt, whereas the worst that can happen to POC by not being prejudiced against white people is they might get murdered by the white person. So no, saying “white vegans are racist” is not racist, and will never be racist unless someone invents a time machine and leads African people to invade Europe and enslave and murder its people and exterminate entire cultures.

If you were really not racist, you wouldn’t have a problem with people generalizing white vegans as racist because you would know it was true, and you would know that you were already working on counteracting the racism that had infected your brain, and you would know that people making this generalization know that some white vegans are fighting their racism, so you wouldn’t be bothered by the generalization. I know because I’m white (though not a vegan) and everything in this paragraph is true for me. I know white people are racist, I see evidence of it all the time. I’m not bothered by people saying what I know is the truth, even though I’m personally fighting my own racism, because I know I used to have all kinds of unaddressed racism in my brain, and probably still do (CONSTANT VIGILANCE!); I know that such a generalization is faster and better than constantly adding provisos.

And anyway, in a racist society like ours, being Not Racist isn’t good enough. You have to be Anti-Racist. Merely being Not Racist is being silent in the face of oppression, which is basically agreeing with the oppression. You have to be vocally against oppression and racism for it to really count.