Multifarious Threads

Activism and Advocacy

This article on the Southern Poverty Law Center is everything that’s wrong with class-reductionist leftism

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A screenshot of the Southern Poverty Law Center's website
A screenshot of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website

In 2019, Nathan J Robinson of Current Affairs published an article titled “The Southern Poverty Law Center is Everything That’s Wrong with Liberalism.” While the first part of the article is excellent—it’s a well-sourced exposé that highlights the flaws of the SPLC under its former head, Morris Dees—the second part left me wanting, to say the least. Robinson’s reporting of the endemic racism, sexual harassment, venality, and hypocrisy of the SPLC’s management are legitimate criticisms of a deeply flawed organisation that has often failed to fulfil its ostensible mission. I even agree that the use of the Hate Map as a fundraising tool is deeply cynical. That said, however, Robinson’s critique of the SPLC’s hate map exemplifies an insidious form of class-reductionist leftism and unexamined privilege that diminishes the threat some of these profiled groups present.

First, Robinson’s criticism of the SPLC’s hate-group designations omits a key part of the definition they list on the website. He says:

One problem here is that the definition of “hate” is very unclear. It supposedly means having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,” but in that case I’m a member of a hate group myself, since I despise bourgeois liberals.

That’s not the full definition. From the 4 October 2017 SPLC FAQ about hate groups, archived on 21 February 2019:

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.

That’s a pretty glaring omission. He doesn’t even have the excuse that the FAQ was updated, because the line about immutable characteristics was there over a year before Robinson published this piece. He also failed to mention that the SPLC uses similar guidelines to the federal government’s definition of a hate crime:

Traditionally, FBI investigations of hate crimes were limited to crimes in which the perpetrators acted based on a bias against the victim’s race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, investigations were restricted to those wherein the victim was engaged in a federally protected activity. With the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, the Bureau became authorized to also investigate crimes committed against those based on biases of actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or gender.

This is disingenuous. “Bourgeois liberal” isn’t an immutable characteristic. Race is. Sexual orientation and gender identity often are.

Second, Robinson also claims that most of the groups listed on the SPLC’s well-known Hate Map don’t belong there, mostly because they’re skeleton crews of working-class racists with a small following and minimal influence. He writes,

If you trawl through the Hate Map for a little while like I did, you may also feel uncomfortable for another reason. Most of the people they’re listing as threats seem as if they are poor and unschooled. I bet if you compared the average annual salary of the SPLC staff to the average salary of the people in these hate groups, you’d find a massive class divide. Whether it’s poor Black people joining weird sects like the United Nuwaupians, or poor white people getting together and calling themselves things like the “Folkgard of Holda & Odin,” these are people on society’s margins. A lot of this seems to be educated liberals having contempt for and fear of angry rednecks.

Although Robinson’s claim applies to many of the groups he highlighted in his article—a tiny cadre of neo-Nazis going on canoeing trips, an old Confederate-memorabilia seller—it doesn’t apply to all of them. Robinson’s characterisation is ill-fitting for the very first group he mentions: the Family Research Council, which he describes as a “mainstream conservative” organisation that has disputed its inclusion on the SPLC’s hate map. What he fails to acknowledge is that mainstream American conservatism would be considered far-right or outright fascist in other countries. The FRC is far from being a gaggle of harmless old yokels who haven’t updated their websites since 1995; they’re a well-funded Christian Right organisation that is hellbent on stripping LGBTQ people of our equal rights. They promote conversion therapy and conflate homosexuality with child molestation. The FRC’s head, Tony Perkins, has been an adviser to Donald Trump since his election, and he was named chair of the US Council for International Religious Freedom in 2019. A group with access to the White House is not a bunch of angry rednecks. Robinson is also aware that American political views tend to skew to the right compared to those espoused in other countries, making his characterisation of the FRC as “mainstream conservatives” especially inappropriate. An organisation that dedicates itself to limiting others’ rights based on immutable characteristics based on outright falsehoods is the very definition of a hate group.

The Family Research Council isn’t the only group that gets off scot-free in Robinson’s article: Robinson describes Daryush “Roosh V” Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, labelled a male supremacist group by the SPLC, as the work of a small-time pick-up artist and his friends, but that grossly minimises his reach. David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth has catalogued Valizadeh’s abhorrent behaviour for years. The man peddled manuals on how to rape women for years before his conversion to conservative Orthodox Christianity. In 2015, Valizadeh sicced his followers on Aurelie Nix, a feminist activist who successfully campaigned to cancel a demonstration he was planning to hold in Montreal. Roosh is not harmless. Roosh has shed his old pick-up-artist ways, but he’s still a snake-oil-peddling misogynist, homophobe, and antisemite. I don’t give a shit that Roosh is “just one guy.” He built a following selling books that glorified sexual abuse. He’s encouraged rape and death threats against women and their allies who stand against him. By describing Roosh as a “pick-up artist and his friends,” Robinson is telling Roosh’s victims, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a man who encourages rape and death threats.”

Third, Robinson’s accusation that the SPLC is a group of educated liberals targeting angry rednecks exemplifies the class reductionism prevalent among some progressives and leftists. There are plenty of working-class white people who abhor racism. Their class does not absolve them of their responsibility to their fellow human beings. This claim is the classic “Trump voters voted for him because of their economic anxiety” canard. Robinson’s claim that uneducated white nationalists are on the margins of society, and the insinuation that they are sympathetic figures, makes him look as though he’s making excuses for racists. Some of these people may be poor, but it doesn’t matter how much money they have if they’re going to kill me.

(Also, Robinson can’t speak for the working class: he seems to have grown up upper-middle-class and attended elite private universities like Brandeis, Yale Law School, and Harvard, all of which are in the US News and World Report Top 50. It would be one thing if he’d grown up working class, but that’s not his experience. This dude is a lifelong member of the fucking bourgeoisie himself! I myself have a lot of educational privilege, but I grew up working class—my father was an enlisted airman and my mother did random clerical and retail jobs. Neither has a college degree. My parents had lower-middle-class aspirations, but I think they were still working class. My grandparents were unambiguously working class.)

Fourth, Robinson has posted excellent long-form take-downs of the odious conservative talking head Ben Shapiro and the now-disgraced Jordan Peterson. Shapiro is a bog-standard Republican who spouts the same nonsense as Ted Cruz or any other rank-and-file GOP functionary. He espouses similar views to those of the “mainstream conservative” Family Research Council, though he’s Orthodox Jewish rather than evangelical Christian. Jordan Peterson isn’t a large organisation; he’s a Canadian psychology professor with an online cult following. Why are Shapiro and Peterson a threat, whereas Roosh is just an insignificant nutjob with a blog?

It’s clear that Robinson neither knew nor cared about the real-life harm that the FRC and Roosh V have caused. If he had, he would have found out that Roosh sold rape manuals, or that the FRC has worked assiduously to impose theocratic norms on a pluralistic society by restricting LGBTQ people’s civil rights. He would have known that Roosh used Gamergate-like tactics to silence his opponents, too.

Finally, Robinson claims he knows the biggest threat to people of colour:

This is not to say that neo-Nazis aren’t fucking terrifying, or that they don’t pose any threat. The Daily Stormer is a real thing, and there is a lot of dangerous white supremacist nonsense believed by a lot of people. But the “hate” focus is all wrong: The biggest threats to people of color do not come from those who “hate” them, but from those (like the contemporary Republican Party) who are totally indifferent to whether they live or die. This is the frightening thing about contemporary racism: It does not come waving the Confederate flag, it comes waving the American flag.

As far as I know, Robinson is white or white-passing. He cannot speak for those of us who encounter racism day in and day out. This is the kind of rank paternalism he’d happily attribute to “bourgeois liberals.” You are not our voice. Robinson wrote this not long after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the Christchurch shooting, and other incidents in which “lone-wolf” far-right domestic terrorists gave vent to their hate by murdering people in broad daylight. Indifferent Republicans may pose a systemic threat through their promotion of deregulation, robber-baron tactics, healthcare rationing and other capitalistic evils, but domestic terror attacks are designed to make us afraid to go out of the house, lest we be gunned down by hatemongers with far-too-accessible guns. Hate crimes are intimidation tactics that are designed to whip us into submission, as lynchings were in the post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights era. Subprime lenders are a threat. So are neo-Nazis. It’s not an either–or proposition. (And in many cases, the plutocrats and hatemongers are one and the same: Steve Bannon was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs; the father-daughter duo of conservative billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer bankroll Breitbart; Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth; Richard Spencer comes from a rich family). Furthermore, he highlights the Republicans’ racism even as he pooh-poohs the threat of the “mainstream conservative” Family Research Council. If the Republicans are a threat, so are their think tanks, especially when their operatives have the ear of the President of the United States. The Family Research Council is the very epitome of suit-and-tie bigotry. Contemporary racism comes waving the American flag, but it also comes waving Confederate flags and swastikas.

It’s one thing to criticise the SPLC for its objectively abhorrent actions; it’s another to cover for bad-faith actors like Roosh and the Family Research Council. While Robinson has performed a valuable public service through his enumeration of the Dees-era SPLC’s faults, his attempts to speak for people of colour; co-optation of working-class narratives; and minimisation of the threats posed by the Family Research Council, Roosh V, and other far-right agitators, are ill-advised. This is irresponsible journalism that plays down the threat of far-right groups and online “thought leaders.”

Youth Rights and Wrongs

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As a teenager and young adult, I used to be active in online youth rights advocacy. I wanted to see young people be treated like human beings, not their parents’ property. I was involved with the National Youth Rights Association from the ages of 17 to 21, but I left in frustration after growing tired of unchecked racism, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia amongst some of the membership. I felt as though I was constantly on the defensive, as though I had to prove I was equally deserving of civil rights. One of the only people who actually managed to get banned from the NYRA forums for an extended period of time was an outright Nazi who adulated Hitler and ranted about the “Zionist-owned government.” If you managed not to be a Nazi, the erstwhile executive director would let you stay around in the interest of protecting the Open Marketplace of Ideas. In particular, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia went almost entirely unchecked. News flash: people defending behaviour-modification programmes, spewing vitriol about queer people, or claiming that women are inferior aren’t acting in good faith. They want to be monopolists in the market of ideas. In retrospect, the proliferation of unchecked bigotry on the NYRA forums feels rather like Twitter and Facebook nowadays. Free-speech absolutism can result in Nazis, alt-righters, and MRAs pushing everyone else away. It’s a textbook demonstration of Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox.

The youth rights movement didn’t just have a problem with proto-alt-righters and MRAs. There were plenty of people who hung out in youth rights spaces who made excuses for child molestation, calling it “youth liberation.” There are a few radical youth rights activists who repeatedly advocate for the “right” for adults to have sex with children and underage teenagers. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out there’s a clear reason why society frowns upon so-called intergenerational sex, and it’s not because opponents of child molestation are a bunch of uptight prudes. When I was involved with NYRA, I remember seeing a fair number of adults in their 20s making sexual advances to younger teenagers. People routinely defended teachers who slept with their students. These people weren’t part of NYRA’s leadership and the forum moderators—including me—tried their best to shut down discussion of adult-child sex, but it was still a recurring problem.

Why do people make these arguments?

I suspect that many of these radical youth rights advocates were labelled precocious, gifted, or prodigies as children. Their atypical development unconsciously influences their attitudes toward children in general, even if typically developing children have radically different experiences. If you learned how to read at 3 years old, you may very well think that it’s reasonable to encourage 4-year-olds to sue their abusers; after all, since they knew how to do it, so should other children. If you followed politics intently at 10 years old, you may think that all 10-year-olds can understand political discourse geared toward typical adult audiences. If you had the same reading comprehension as an adult at 8 years old, you might think, “Hey, if I can understand this stuff, so can every other child.” This kind of reasoning leads them to think that allowing 7-year-olds to file lawsuits against adults who have molested them is a viable option for protecting them from harm. This is the same kind of justification that child abusers make to themselves: “She’s so mature for her age.” “He’s intelligent enough to get it.” Even if these advocates may not intend to sound like child molesters trying to rationalise their harmful acts, they end up using the same self-centred arguments. It’s the old “mental age” concept lurking underneath: if precocious children can consent to sexual acts, does that mean that adults with intellectual disabilities with more life experience cannot because of their lower “mental age”?

Of course, some of these molestation defenders could just be wannabe child abusers themselves. In any case, if you think Roy Moore, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, and Jimmy Savile did nothing wrong, there’s probably something deeply flawed with your argument. On top of that, there are also organisations that actively lobby to discredit the narratives of child abuse survivors by labelling efforts to protect children from predators as “moral panics” or “hysteria.” One can oppose Perverted-Justice-style vigilantism and still advocate for children’s safety.

Child sexual abuse is an unambiguous moral ill. Couching the right of adults to molest children and adolescents with impunity in the cloak of youth rights is not youth liberation. Civil rights encompass both positive and negative freedoms—freedoms to and freedoms from—and children and adolescents have the right to avoid exploitation by self-serving adults.

Too Much Space

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Content warning: bullying, emotional abuse, food/weight talk

I am constantly beset by the worry that I take too much space. That my entire existence is a nuisance. Because of this, I often find myself consigned to the margins, either by my own reticence or through others’ behaviour. Ironically, I feel profoundly marginalised in communities that are supposed to address and dismantle the systemic marginalisation of those of us who have been pushed to the periphery of society. I am on the periphery of a periphery. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because I don’t sound right, or that I’m not ‘woke’ enough to fit in, even though I’m no Clarence Thomas. I often feel as though I’m in middle school again, being accused of acting white or failing to perform the correct kind of blackness for my peers’ benefit. I feel like an intruder in spaces in which people look like me, but don’t see me as one of them. I worry that I’m not pure enough. Not radical enough. Not loud enough. Not cool enough. I am terminally uncool. Square, nerdy, congenitally awkward. I feel constantly overlooked in discussions about disability and race, even though I have not shied away from discussing the relationships between them. I feel, despite my isolation, that I am somehow taking too much space simply by being there and having inconvenient opinions. I see ‘cooler’ voices amplified before mine. This is not limited to my work in advocacy; as a master’s student, I avoided applying for fellowships and other opportunities within my programme. After all, weren’t so many of the others younger than I was, and therefore more deserving of opportunities? Better for me to withdraw, to focus on my advocacy outside campus instead of intruding. It didn’t help that some people thought I talked too much in class during my first semester. I grew comparatively quieter. I didn’t shut up entirely – it’s not in my nature to do so – but I did feel some pressure to hold back. While I was able to build cordial relationships, there was always the knife-edge fear: I take up too much space. I’m not cool enough. I should just back off and let real people get involved.

I’m 32 years old. I finished junior high eighteen years ago, but I still feel I’m there sometimes, though the consequences are severer.

These feelings have deep roots that extend much further than my involvement in public activism or advocacy. As I previously intimated, it goes back to childhood, back when I grew up feeling as though I were an inconvenience for being neurodivergent. When I was bullied at school, my parents routinely took the side of the bullies unless they were actually inflicting physical pain on me. When I cried out in emotional distress, I was met with ridicule, stonewalling or punishment if they didn’t blame it on Satan. If I felt excluded, I was not to question it; for my parents, it seemed self-evident that I should be excluded, and that my protesting against my exclusion was tantamount to wanting to be the centre of attention for no good reason. Disputing this exclusion was clearly a sign of my being vain and self-centred. My being good necessitated my being a marginal figure. I was not to question, not to feel, not to exist in any substantive way that required that they address my humanity. I take up too much space.

I’m also fat. Very fat. I’ve been fat since I was ten years old, back when I literally Ate My Feelings, pace Mean Girls, because I didn’t know what else to do when I was depressed and dealing with my parents’ emotional abuse and neglect. Ironically, my being mistreated for taking up too much space led to habits that would cause people to believe I took up too much space in other ways. While I no longer binge-eat in the same way, I spent about twenty years dealing with disordered eating as a form of self-treatment when all the pills, prayer, therapy and meditation couldn’t banish the self-destructive demons dominating my thoughts. Doctors berate me about my weight, treating the effects of my self-medication as an individual moral failing. I take up too much space.

I have a hard time initiating conversations, even with friends I’ve known for over a decade. Even though they’ve managed to put up with me for that long and somehow don’t find me repulsive, I feel my initiating contact is an intrusive act. That I am intrinsically repellent and should wait to be approached first. I feel the same way about job applications. I take up too much space.

Even now, nearly twelve years after I have had any direct dealings with the people who inculcated this into me in the first place, I feel compelled to fold myself small and to be marginal for others’ benefit. If others approach me with opportunities, I’ll accept, but I am less forthcoming about seizing them for myself. For doing so requires that I place myself at the centre, rather than consigning myself to the margins and allowing others, who are always more important than I am, to take up space in my stead. For I take up too much space, and always will. The current political climate doesn’t help, either; far-right politicians and their acolytes actively say that those of us who do not fit the mould of an ideal citizen should be eliminated, whether by actively killing us or by persecuting us out of existence through the continual curtailment of our civil and human rights.

I’m trying to convince myself that I deserve to be here, too, but there’s a lot I have to work through before I get there.

On autism, early diagnosis and identity

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I suppose this is an unorthodox Autism Acceptance Month post, but so was my previous one. This is an expansion of a Facebook status I wrote about two weeks ago.

I have a difficult time relating to the accounts of late-diagnosed autistic adults who did not grow up with this label being used to marginalise, segregate and discredit them. I see so many accounts of unalloyed joy at being diagnosed with autism and having the diagnosis explain most or all of the difficulties they’d encountered throughout their lives. That’s not to say that late- and self-diagnosed adults don’t encounter oppression or stereotyping, especially after they receive a formal diagnosis and encounter stereotyping from misinformed practitioners, but that it’s of a different nature from what early-diagnosed people can experience. For me, though, it was a mark of Cain until I discovered the neurodiversity movement back in 2005 or so.

I was diagnosed before I started school and had my differences placed squarely within a pathologising framework. Deficits in social interactions. Lack of eye contact. Restricted interests. Deficits in personal organisation. I was wrongly thought to be intellectually disabled – to the point that a doctor declared that I would ‘never learn’ – because I was late to start talking, though this impression of me was mercifully very short. People like my parents and teachers would emphasise my weaknesses, either real or perceived, over my strengths. While I had two concurrent labels when I was at school – autistic (officially PDD-NOS and Asperger Syndrome) and gifted (I am not a fan of the word ‘giftedness’, by the way. I use it reluctantly to refer to an educational label and a neurotype, or a set of neurotypes, but the current language around it is not that great)- much of what I dealt with was pigeonholing, pathologisation and exclusion from opportunities that would have benefited me socially and intellectually. I felt like a ‘fake intelligent person’ because of my diagnosis. In fact, my methods of internalising and interpreting information were frequently treated as autism symptoms. I was forced to sit through boring classes that didn’t challenge me intellectually because ‘quiet hands’ and extinguishing ‘behaviours’ came first. While I did skip a grade and participate in gifted programming for the majority of my elementary- and middle-school years, I was still under-stimulated intellectually and often found myself disengaged from the general-education curriculum. There were also a lot of neurodivergent traits I had that couldn’t be explained by my being autistic, but made sense given my learning style, but people tended to subsume all of these traits under the label of ‘autism’ just because they weren’t neurotypical. My parents and teachers would often treat me as though I were a list of diagnostic traits instead of a person, and would ascribe stereotypes based on those diagnostic traits that didn’t actually match my own experiences or my internal self-perceptions. Most gallingly, my parents actually told me they understood me more than I did! I was wary of that statement then and I think it was utter nonsense now. If they’d truly understood me, I wouldn’t have severed contact with them nearly twelve years ago. 

I realised that I couldn’t attribute everything different about me to autism after going through something of a quarter-life crisis at the age of seventeen. I started rebuilding my self-concept to incorporate a more holistic interpretation of my cognition, though admittedly I was still struggling with internalised disablism and wondered over the course of two years whether I was Properly Autistic because I didn’t match the Asperger Syndrome stereotype. Some of this was because most of the literature I’d encountered on autism characterised it as a disability that primarily affected social interactions, even though social interactions were and are not what I find the most disabling, especially after the age of 14 or so. My social skills difficulties were contextual, not global. Compared to many of the accounts I read in books and on blogs online, I got off pretty easily socially. I’m not saying that social interaction was necessarily easy for me – it wasn’t – but it was easier if I was talking to people who understood what I was trying to tell them, which my parents frequently didn’t. They’d shut down if I tried to explain my reasoning for my behaviour and preferred superficial explanations that didn’t address the root problem. Somehow *I* was the one who was impaired for having complex interpretations of my behaviour, though, since they liked to pin anything they didn’t understand about me on the autism diagnosis. I remember arguing with my mother when I was 18 and trying to explain myself and having her tell me ‘You have Asperger Syndrome!’ as though it invalidated the content of my argument. My executive functioning issues are vastly more disabling; in fact, I find them the most disabling (and expensive) part of being autistic. I have a reasonably active social life and have an easier time making friends.

For a period in my mid- to late twenties after I became more involved in public disability advocacy, I moved back towards attributing all my atypical perceptions to my being autistic, even if I knew multiple autistic people who saw the world very differently from me. Much of this was from indirect peer pressure from late-diagnosed and self-diagnosed autistic people. I was using it as a crude, brute-force method to identify and categorise anything that seemed to separate me from the general public, even if *there was no direct evidence* that the experiences in question could actually be explained using an autism-centric framework. I also felt that I had to do this to be the Right Kind of disability advocate, even though I knew plenty of other autistic people who didn’t have the same Weird Brain Things as me; it didn’t help that I had internalised the idea that using other interpretations for it might suggest that I was somehow expressing some form of disablism for not using a framework that centred on disability. I just felt crazy and isolated during that period. It is painful to read back from blog posts and private journal entries from between 2011 and 2016 in which I explain aspects of my thinking as being part of being autistic when they’re not necessarily autistic traits in and of themselves.

I still think I’m autistic, of course, but I no longer feel comfortable treating it as though it is the sole explanation for my divergent thinking. More specifically, I think the diagnostic label is useful for me to identify specific supports for the issues that I find disabling, and it is politically useful as a framework to advocate for the rights of a group of people with somewhat related experiences who experience systemic marginalisation for their disability. This is different from internalised disablism or claiming that I don’t have a disability at all; it’s just that when I was growing up, I had a disability-centric narrative and identity imposed on me against my will. People who were diagnosed as teenagers and adults and encountered less pathologising narratives about autism when they found out about it are more likely to see a politicised disabled identity as something of a revelation. I won’t deny being disabled. I’m not a Shiny Aspie. There’s a difference, though, between denial and recognition of the complexity of one’s experiences.

Moving towards a more holistic way of interpreting my neurodivergence seems to be healthier for me. I can’t do to myself what people did to me when I was growing up.

Troubling disability activism patterns.

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A colourful mural depicting stylised people, with the text EQUAL.

(Photo by Oliver Cole @ Unsplash)

I’ve noticed some troubling patterns amongst disability activists that have caused me to feel frustrated and alienated. Even though I may agree with these people conceptually—we all agree, for example, that disabled people deserve human rights and respect precisely because we are people—the approaches some people use feel needlessly reductionistic for me. I don’t mean to say that their approaches don’t have merit or that there hasn’t been significant thought put into their efforts, but that I find that they obscure the complexity of people’s individual and collective experiences. I’ll focus on two phenomena I’ve noticed: the fixation on lists of words as a way to combat disablism, and the idea that even discussing the ways in which people learn is a disablist concept.

The language fixation
I’m uncomfortable with the fixation on reforming language to the exclusion of other methods of activism as an effort to help dismantle disablist mindsets. Of course, I’m not saying that people should use cruel names to refer to disabled people. What I am saying, though, is that some people who tend not to think verbally or who have language-related disabilities may not be able to memorise the long lists of Words Not To Use that circulate on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. What I care about is people’s underlying attitudes towards disabled people, more so than I do the specific words they use. When people use metaphorical language, their brains may not process it in the same way they may an overtly cruel word directed at a disabled person. For example, There are also different historical contexts attached to words, but I don’t see that context discussed very often; everything is treated as equally offensive. For example, ‘r*tard’, ‘idiot’, ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’ were formerly used as diagnostic categories, often connected with the institutionalisation and social exclusion of people with intellectual disability diagnoses. ‘Stupid’, on the other hand, was never a diagnostic category. Of course, it’s insulting to call someone stupid, but it doesn’t come with the same cultural baggage that the aforementioned ‘r*tard’, ‘idiot’, ‘moron’ and ‘imbecile’ have. The same goes for the -phobia ending; while phobia is now a diagnostic term, it’s also had a less specific, non-clinical meaning for years to refer to extreme fear or hatred. I have had disabled friends ostracised from groups that ostensibly exist to support people, but zero in on language to the exclusion of actually offering support.

I understand, on the other hand, that many autistic people and people with similar disabilities tend to use and interpret language literally: what they hear is what they see, and it is difficult for them to associate a meaning with multiple contexts. I am not one of those people; while I can often have a literal visualisation of a word in my head, I tend to see words in a holistic way that combines literal and figurative meanings, translations, shades of meaning, subtleties and historical contexts. I actually have a hard time with overly simplistic, decontextualised explanations and will start tuning out or growing frustrated if people do that with me. That’s been the case since I was very young. I don’t just see a thing; I see the processes, ideas, concepts, history and relationships connected with that thing. I have a hard time understanding overly concrete thinking. I think this issue is complex and can’t be collapsed into a list of dos and don’ts. If you have a hard time juggling multiple meanings of words and have an easy time with rote memorisation, then those ‘ableist word profiles’ may work on you. For me, things intrinsically have multiple meanings. I’m also very poor at directed rote memorisation, even though my long-term memory is excellent. This isn’t a universal approach, though, and people should recognise that when constructing these profiles.

Learning ability: throwing the baby out with the bathwater
I’ve seen some disability activists claim that the concept of intelligence – meant here to refer to differences in the ability to learn, recognise patterns and interact with with information, and the neurological differences that are associated with these differences – is disablist in and of itself. I disagree with this idea, but I understand why people may say things like this: they may know about the sordid history of IQ testing to determine people’s right to live within the community and to raise a family, or racist interpretations of the achievement gap that insinuate or claim baldly that black and brown people are inherently less intelligent than white people, or other ways in which hateful people have misused the concept of learning differences to marginalise, abuse and punish. Some advocates for gifted education have expressed disablist or elitist attitudes towards people with more typical learning ability or people with intellectual disabilities, too. I’ve also seen non-disabled people use the intelligence of some disabled people as a bludgeon: ‘if you’re so smart, you should be able to manage a bank account / work a 9-5 job / clean your house every Saturday / make meals’. Sometimes this is even an institutional requirement; some developmental disability organisations and government agencies will only serve people with an IQ below 70, even though developmental disability encompasses other conditions besides intellectual disability. The assumption is that disabled people of average or above-average intelligence can fend for ourselves without help. Of course, things aren’t so simple; there are many disabled people who learn with great facility but have a hard time with certain activities of daily living. These things are not mutually exclusive and can coexist in the same person. I get why people say things like ‘intelligence is a disablist concept’, even if I think that that conclusion is too reductionistic and flattens the complexity of people’s internal experiences and the outward expression of those experiences.

Unfortunately, I’ve noticed some patterns amongst the people who make ‘intelligence doesn’t exist at all’ or ‘the concept of intelligence is intrinsically disablist’ claims that make me uncomfortable. Nearly all the people making these claims would be considered reasonably intelligent themselves. More specifically, it’s a kind of intelligence that allows them to do well in school and doesn’t isolate them from other people because of their divergent thinking. Things come to them easily and they are easily understood. They may be intelligent, but they’re not monsters. Some of the emotional abuse I endured growing up was for my kind of intelligence. I was treated like a monster when I wasn’t being treated like an invalid for being autistic. I generally passed most of my classes as a kid, but didn’t feel fully invested in most of them because I didn’t have the opportunity to really challenge myself intellectually in most of them. I scared my parents, who tried to suppress my curiosity by restricting what I was allowed to read. They also dismissed me when I tried to communicate with them in a more conceptual or abstract way; they’d often look at me as though I’d grown two heads or accuse me of being evasive or using ‘psychobabble’ or ‘woe-is-me stuff’ if I tried to give them nuanced explanations of my behaviour. They tended to perceive things very concretely and literally, at least relative to me. I know the common stereotype is that non-autistic people are conceptual, while autistic people are literal and concrete, but I don’t think that’s true.

I thought I was crazy for years until I read more about how different kinds of learning ability can affect people’s cognition and perception. I thought it was an autistic trait until I encountered autistic people, both in person and online, who thought more concretely and focussed primarily on immediately observable phenomena rather than their underlying complexity. For a few years, though, I actually internalised the idea that intelligence was a disablist concept and started wondering what the hell was wrong with me again. I attributed everything to my being autistic again even though I knew autistic people who didn’t see things the same way I did. To claim that these things don’t exist, or that they can be subsumed under another label that doesn’t necessarily come with those traits (for example, autism), feels like a form of gaslighting. I certainly felt different for being autistic, too, but these phenomena were separate from my being autistic. If intelligence is an unalloyed good in your life, it’s easy to see it as a privilege. If it’s something that isolates you from your own family, makes you grow bored and disenchanted with formal education until you start using it instrumentally as an adult, see things that other people can’t, and makes you doubt your perceptions because you confuse people, it is not the same thing. The idea of intelligence as an absolute privilege is wholly alien to me.

I’ve also noticed that the vast majority of these people are also white or East Asian. Neither white people nor East Asians are routinely associated with low intelligence in the same way that black, Latino or various indigenous groups of people are. This isn’t to say that East Asians don’t experience discrimination or oppression. They certainly do experience racism, but this is not a stereotype typically applied to them. As a black person, I’ve definitely seen people of my race routinely treated as stupid or incompetent just because of the colour of our skin. Entire books like The Bell Curve have been published to disparage us and our abilities. There’s a cottage industry of ‘researchers’ receiving money from the Pioneer Fund to ‘prove’ that we’re less intelligent than white people.

Of course, these anecdotal observations aren’t a universal statement; I’m uncomfortable saying that an attribute applies to the totality of a population for a number of reasons. It’s just a pattern that I’ve repeatedly noticed and that I find frustrating and deeply alienating.

If differences in learning ability did not exist, then we would not recognise the existence of intellectual disability and offer support for people who struggle with learning. I think that it’s possible to recognise that people’s ability to learn and interact with their environment can vary without attaching value judgements to people, institutionalising people, bringing down racist or misogynistic pronouncements, or treating IQ test scores as perfect reflections of people’s intellectual ability. We can use a more nuanced interpretation of intelligence and what it is without engaging in IQ fundamentalism or other forms of intellectual disablism.