That made me smile, T. I read every volume of the Arthur Mees' Children's Encyclopedia cover to cover, and then I read them all again several times before I was eleven years old. What a pleasure that was! It taught me a great deal about art history, world history, it taught me elementary latin, and much else, it taught me more than elementary school, though I had some good teachers there.
Now in terms of this topic - that skills which are found in both normative populations and AS populations are framed differently (eg adversely, as if they were a fault) when AS people demonstrate them, we need to consider brilliance in a specific ability more closely. When NT people show an outstanding brilliance - in whatever field, music, art, maths or whatever, it is called brilliance, the person is called brilliant, and they are acclaimed for it as a person. When an AS person shows the same or greater brilliance, it is dismissively labelled as just "a splinter skill".
The starkness of this framing shows that even when we are winners, we have to be downgraded to abnormal "weird" freaks. That denigratory attitude is one of the best examples of how AS people are dehumanised.
Please (everyone) don't respond with the "but not all of us are geniuses". Not all NTs are geniuses either (very ample evidence of that) and it is irrelevant to the way that all AS people are dehumanised in the current world we live in, as a group. And the dehumanisation operates in a two step with negative framing.
If you are AS and don't think that the background process of dehumanisation has any effect on you, then maybe you need to look at the impacts and methods of AS dehumanisation directed at AS people as a whole to understand how it works not just in personal ways but as a downgrading of the human worth of all AS people.
25 May 2018, 5:17 pm
