The Particles of Oppression

This post is in response to this post by ballastexistenz.

I don't remember the specific moment when I realized the pattern of what was going on. It's mostly consisting of a lot of little realizations, which have been incrementally coalescing into a broader understanding of discrimination, how it applies to me and to others.

One thing I remember real clearly, though, was when I was in grade 7, unsuccessfully pleading to the counselor to let me write an incident report or to discipline the bullies for yet another assault, after all this time of it being blamed on my "odd" appearance, resulting from everything from autism to seizures to lacking designer jeans. And as she started lecturing me on the importance of attending class, I saw in the adjacent room that a girl, one of the very social, non-disabled, girls, was entering the office and asking for an incident report, and handed one right away. Being given the not-so-subtle threat of institutionalization, I saw very clearly that I was fighting in the ring with my hands tied behind my back.

Also that year, around the same time, I was in the office while the counselor talked to a teacher about a student they suspected to be autistic. I had been shading the windows of a building on newsprint, and they talked about his main interest and how they were hesitant of how to approach the parents (they also used his name, though I don't remember and wouldn't breach confidence anyway, unlike the counselor), and I remember stopping what I was doing, and saying "Autistic - that's like what I am" and they continued talking, as if I weren't there or neither of us mattered. I suspected it was the latter.

That year I got the distinct impression, that to them I was naught but a test score, a number whose value had suddenly dropped. It shook me to realize, how they were concerned far more about the financial impact of my absence from school, yet were perfectly content to have me warehoused in offices, and when in class or outside, to be constantly attacked physically and emotionally, and then blamed me for my behavior, both what was naturally my behavior and that which was induced by the circumstances, and say that this was justification enough to exclude me not only from school, but potentially permanently from society.

My parents got calls, day in, day out, about my "bizarre" behavior - mostly autistic behavior and catatonic-type stuff, with sporadic seizures, and talk of medication and institutions pulling on my mind and leading me to pace the floor more vigorously and at later advancing hours with each passing day.

I don't think I told anybody yet about how often I was just sitting in this office or that room the whole school day, or most of it. It wasn't a place for me to "calm down" or anything, and basically had a consistently elevated level of stress, which would spike at particular points, such as pending assault or the talk of the counselor.

At that point, I had little insight as to what exactly about me constituted something "autistic", but I had a definite sense that I was being treated unfairly for these things, even if I couldn't pinpoint them with words, and thus couldn't communicate well about them.

That is something that has been highly deceptive about me - my use of large vocabulary, writing skills, and the fact that I didn't have significant speech delay, hides the fact that I do often have difficulty finding the words and being able to describe important things, even when these fall under the category of what is usually considered simple. "I need a pencil", for instance, at age 10 was a phrase I needed a lot of time to be able to get out, but at another moment I could recite a 10-minute rant about things that happened during the school day, because I had spent the time during the school day to come up with and memorize the words to make this rant.

This is what I think has to do with the decreased reliability of speech for me over the last 10 years, even though communication is much better for me now. When I was 7, or 9, for instance, I knew most of the academic material being taught in class, so for one thing I could afford to "zone out" while constructing scripts and mapping out potential replies and replies to replies and replies to replies to replies, but not only that, I could also come up with the words and then memorize them.

One thing very different between 10 years ago and now: then - rote memory was good, maybe even excellent; now - rote memory is very unreliable.

That, and being in high school and college classes, even for classes I considered relatively easy and familiar in terms of the material taught, rarely was I so familiar with the content that I could afford to not pay attention to four hours of instruction (really, in first grade I really couldn't afford it either, but at that time I didn't care about my grades).

In fact, the only time that I had the luxury to "zone out" to the degree that I did in elementary school, was in high school chemistry, which for me was a review, as 2 years earlier I had studied AP Chemistry books and learned the material for the whole year in 2 weeks - though unfortunately the chemistry class did not cover thermodynamics much at all, which was a topic that I hadn't studied on my own).

In that year I took chemistry, I had been absent a lot (as with most years of public school), and when I got back to school (after weeks, almost a month being absent), there was a chemistry test. We had a substitute that day, so as he handed out the tests, I used my alphasmart to type that I had been absent for the whole chapter (which, while all the material up to that point had been stuff I'd already covered, I didn't know that for sure as I hadn't been in class to know what the test was about).

The substitute said, "Take it anyway".

Now this was quite the predicament. While I could theoretically take it anyway, and had a fair chance of doing well on it, what if it was all stuff I'd never covered before? Then, the teacher would have to make up an entirely new test for me to make up. I started typing on the alphasmart, to clarify this point, and also the fact that I had been absent the whole duration that the chapter was being taught, and the other students (as well as my absence record on the attendance sheet) verified this.

He told took the test back and told me to  write an e-mail to the teacher. So I started writing it. He told me to stop typing, and I froze for a minute, then started typing an explanation of why I was typing.

After a couple minutes he called me to his desk (which I didn't notice he was talking to me until some students around me pointed it out, as he hadn't used my name).

I went up and showed him what I typed. He asked me to spell my name. I did. Then I did some typing, and asked why.

He said it was a detention slip for disrespecting a teacher. I typed "If I may ask, in what way did I disrespect you?" and he said "you didn't listen." I typed about how I am autistic and often don't respond when my name is called, much less when my name isn't used, and that sometimes I need to type things, or I can't get words out, and that when I typed after he told me not to that it was to type this explanation of why it's necessary for me to type.

(Also keep in mind that this was my first year having an alphasmart, so I was not used to defending my right to communicate, whereas most times before this I had had no choice but to remain silent.)

Then at lunch I started writing my frustration about this, and asked a friend in AP European History about the iternerary for the day, and she said that we had a unit test, and a substitute, but she named the substitute she'd had, who was a lady most agreed to be nice.

I walked into AP European History next and guess who was sitting at the desk with the pile of tests?

You guessed it. The same guy as from chemistry.

There are lots of forms that oppression can take, and to those who are so accustomed to it that it is sewed into the daily fabric of their lives it can, at its mildest forms, be taken as annoyance, at its serverer forms, be taken as a "bad day".

The most important lesson to be taken away from the observation of these particles of oppression, though, is that each of them, regardless of size or impact, constitutes an increment of oppression coalescing with the other particles of injustice, however major or minor.

Behaviorism on the Playground

If I were to write that parents were specifically instructing their children to be agents of social control to enforce social norms among their peers, I would have accusation after accusation leveled against my sanity.

They would call me paranoid. And I'd likely agree.

While perhaps a grand-scale conspiracy to purposefully train children to behave "typically" and suppress creativity or originality of expression would sound scarier, more Orwellian, I would argue that the system we are placed in does just that, but is more dangerous, as it is not specifically mandated. If it were specifically mandated, then people would recognize what it is.

Kids grow up with the ideas that some kinds of people are inferior. Some kinds of people just don't have a future. Some kinds, even if the individual doesn't have any specific problem with them, are "just begging" to get harassed, "just asking for" a theft. A beating. A rape. A murder.

Some have asked me why there is a need for an Autistic Rights organization, such as the one I have established at my school with the help and inspiration from my friends. It wasn't until the seventh grade that I started to catch on to the fact that this kind of abuse is inherent to the institution.

I started to understand why I had been refused the right to file a report for the attacks committed against me, and then a year later, when expressing my anger at having been refused, given the token privilege of writing a report which would have no real legitimacy, as it was filed approximately six months after the actual incident. "Too bad that you didn't file it last year, or we could've done something about it."

Ha. What a fucking crock. However hard it was for me, even though I had to spend day after day going into the office, being unable to summon words to speak (I had no means to type at the time), and then after a week of sitting and doing nothing, missing the classes which would only bore and torment me (the offenders were in nearly every class), I finally asked to file a report, when I realized this might be an option when seeing a girl come in to file a report after a boy said some nasty things to her, and being flatly refused, even though I told her that the offenses included assault and sexual harassment (in retrospect, sexual assault would also apply).

So how was the response? I told her a couple of the tame things that had been said to me. I told her there were some worse things, but I couldn't say them. She set her pen to one of the pink slips used to call students out of class, and once she had progressed to the fourth one, I asked what she was doing. She replied she was calling them in here, to let them speak for themselves, face to face with me. In utter horror, I fled. Ran out of her office, wandered for who knows how many hours around campus, unable to even find my way back anywhere at this point.

This same counselor was the one who told me that, because I rocked, because I had seizures, because I didn't dress in popular clothing (hand-me-downs, such as plain t-shirts and jeans that hardly fit, don't exactly count as popular among teenage girls, I suppose), because I was rumored to be lesbian, because I didn't talk much, because I was politically considered radically liberal (only because most of the population of the area is very conservative), because I had an odd gait, etc. etc. These were all reasons she told me I had to expect getting beaten up and insulted.

"I never asked to be popular. I just want to have what I am legally entitled to, and that is a safe educational environment." Ignored again. Not that it should have surprised me. She is, after all, the same counselor who told me, "There are three things you don't talk about: religion, politics, and space aliens." (UFOs were a special interest of mine.) To which the other, visiting counselor from the high school replied, "And abortion."

Such strange advice, considering that, outside of a close acquaintance or two, I did not in fact discuss any of these. Though, the first year of high school, I prided myself in engaging in intelligent conversations with my peers on these as well as a number of other subjects. But when it comes right down to it, when you rarely talk, and you never approach people you're not well acquainted with, you don't even get much opportunity to go at length on discussing interests. The only people I got to do that with, really, were my family.

If someone told a woman, "It's your fault you got raped because you're attractive - you have to expect that kind of treatment when you're attractive" wouldn't there be an outrage? Likewise, isn't telling someone that it's their fault they've been assaulted because they're autistic and look weird as much an outrage?

The problem here, is that the social control here implemented is implicit to the people and the institutions that run them. There needs to be watchdogs for this kind of discrimination. Every person should know that their rights in the school or in the workplace or out on the streets should be secured, regardless of neurological status. Such a thing should also cover people who don't have a diagnosis, but who have been made to feel that it is their fault for not conforming.

The main thing to get across here is that there is a difference between a person being unpopular and a person who is having crimes committed against them because of that unpopularity. Such a policy as I wrote isn't some attempt to make everybody feel like they're accepted by everybody else. Such is a noble goal, but it is not a goal that can be attained by passing a law. Attaining acceptance is the job of advocacy. The job of laws is legal protection.

If such a law were in place, I would not have been petrified night after night of what punishment the next day I might face for being who I cannot help but be - who I wouldn't want an alternative but to be. Such a law would mean that, while I know it is hard to be part of an "unwanted" class, a burden to the normal, "deserving" people, at least I will have assurance that it is really, truly not my fault.

The problem here is access. Students, particularly disabled students, need a clear route by which to access the safe education they are legally entitled to, and by consequence to the safe existence to which they are morally entitled. Just like we run tapes and distribute brochures to educate students about sexual harassment and their rights, we should actively reach out to students who are autistic or otherwise disabled, different, or considered damaged.

Until then, we will always have students providing a negative stimulus, and teachers and counselors reinforcing, and regardless of capacity or desire for change the students at the hands of such treatment will forever remain clinging to the chainlink fence in hopes of escaping to the other side.