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Notes -
AUTISTS: THE LAST OPPRESSED CLASS
(For the purposes of this post, I am defining an autistic person as someone who has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum condition, or could qualify for an autism spectrum condition diagnosis should they given access to the correct services. The disaster spiral trainwreck that is the self diagnosis movement and the widening of the definition of autism to be completely meaningless, I might write about at another time.)
The modern anglospheric society operates off the belief that there are oppressed groups and oppressor groups. It is stated that oppressor groups have high rates of economic and social success, while the reverse is true for oppressed groups. This is often referred to as the progressive stack, with some oppressed groups being more oppressed than others. To alleviate this disparity, oppressed groups are allowed to seek reparations from their oppressor and demean their oppressor in public spheres, while the reverse is not tolerated. There are many examples of these groups: Women are oppressed by Men, Non-white People are oppressed by White People, Gay people are oppressed by Straight people, Non-english speakers are oppressed by English speakers, and so on. However, there is one group to whom this opressed definition might apply, but receive no recognition, appreciation or restitution from society bottom text.
Autistic people have utterly awful life outcomes. They have very poor employment rates, with many being unemployed or undermployed, even if they are level 1 autists in possession of college degrees. The suicide rate is abysmal, with rates being 9 times in excess of neurotypicals and over half of autistic people having considered suicide throughout their lives. Autistic people also experience heightened rates of social and even sexual abuse.
Despite this very strong case for a place on the progressive stack autists have no place whatsoever on it, or indeed recognition that they even exist in wider society. I do not recall the last time there was a front page article on my country's news outlet about anyone with my condition. I do not recall there being any support or preferential treatment for autists in regards to accquiring economic and social capital during the time when I was seeking employment, in comparison to programs that fast track and support women and ethnic minorities, for example. Support for autistic people is very limited, and only meaningfully exists in the early stages of childhood. This support is not provided to allow the child to feel comfortable in their skin, but to minimise friction both with neurotypicals and with the school and work systems. Even behaviours that are not directly harmful to the autistic person themselves or to neurotypicals, such as stimming, are heavily discouraged.
For most opressed groups, the responsibility for the easing the disparity is put upon the oppressor group. For example, men are expected to validate the fear that women feel due to the difference in physical strength in situations such as being in an elevator, or walking alone at night, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It may depress an individual man to feel that he is and can only ever be a threat, but this feeling is not validated and he is told to Get Over It. In comparison, the autist is expected to adapt to social norms and behaviours that they do not innately pick up and instead learn manually, in the same way that Sideshow Bob learned that there was a rake there by walking into it except this time the rakes are invisible. It is the autist that has to mask, the autist that has to conceal their interests, the autist that has to pretend to be someone other than who they are.
Obviously, this is terrible. How then, are autists to get onto the progressive stack and get the sweet government funding necessary to improve these awful outcomes? The first task is to create an original sin for neurotypicals that devalues their accomplishments whilst providing avenues to redistribute their social and economic capital to autistic people. White privilege, male privilege and so on are all forms of this and it would not be difficult to create a similar privilege checklist for neurotypicals, but to get into a position to enforce this belief on the rest of society would be far more difficult. Autists, estimated, make up roughly only 2% of the global population against a neurotypical 98%, compared to the 13% of African Americans vs White Americans and the roughly 50%/50% sex split among men and women. Moreover, autists are not naturally grouped or forcibly segregated into one place in a way that men, women and ethnic groups are, so they cannot easily band together and overcome oppression they face.
If we were able to overcome both of these issues, there is another large problem: NTs innately do not like autists, finding them to be offputting and thus wishing to interact with them less based on thin slice judgements. You can argue that there are similar innate dislikes against other oppressed groups, however these groups usually have something that endears them to their perceived oppressor in some form, whether these are biological urges or moral spooks about kindness and human unity, or contributions to society in the form of food or entertainment and so on. There are no moral spooks that encourage being nice to the weird asshole in the corner, even if they haven't done you any real harm. Obligations to do the neurotypical social dance run much deeper than any other aspect a human being is othered by.
Lastly, autism is still seen as a male coded thing, and oppressor/oppressed heirarchy is the strongest where it relates to men and women. There are some autistic people who are able to hyperfocus on useful things, and thus can channel their abilities into a lucrative career. However, these careers are usually in something like software developement, research or other high value STEM careers due to their innate rigidity, which are currently the target for cooption by various diversity movements due to their high status and outsized influence on the world we live in. These positions are likely the only place that a neurotypical will not only encounter an autistic person, but an autistic person in their element who may not be masking (and I suspect this lack of masking is one of the reasons that autists in these roles are being targeted.)
Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic. Hence autists are either invisible or irritating to the oppressed/oppressor sensibility and general notions of social status, and must be removed. Where NTs have not met neurotypicals, their perception of the condition is usually influenced by piece of shit media like Rain Main or the Big Bang Theory, where most depictions in the vein of "Guy who punches himself in the head" or Sheldon Cooper."
We live in a neurotypical society.
By whom? The people I’ve seen insist on this term are not progressives, but critics interested in scoring rhetorical points.
Say I argued that Christians rely on a “religious stack.” I could probably come up with a half-decent ordering. Surely Christians tend to prefer Judaism to Islam, or insular Amish sects to rival missionaries, or spirituality to atheism. But it would be foolish to use a placement on this list—which I had just created—as an argument for Christians to do something differently. The model might be descriptive, but it is very much not prescriptive.
If progressives don’t pick their causes according to a stack, your strategy is dead on arrival. You will never gain mainstream support by fitting yourself into a model which the mainstream doesn’t use.
The original term comes from the activist playbook deployed at Occupy protests and designed by intersectional academics. The idea being that the more oppressed someone is (the more oppressed group markers they possess), the earlier their voices should be heard. There's plenty of video and articles that describe the process and show it operating at the time.
The second life of the term is as a description of the underlying philosophy of intersectionality by its opponents, who critique it for essentially creating a privilege hierarchy in the name of abolishing privilege hierarchies.
Like "woke" and basically any other descriptor for the ideological cluster intersectional feminism belongs to, it originated as a self descriptor and was discarded as soon at the opposition freezed it as a label (to borrow Alinsky's phrasing). This is of course a typical post-structuralist tactic, much like the redefinition of racism and other forms of linguistical warfare that attempt to manipulate the enemy's frame of understanding of the world by manipulating the language the enemy uses to describe the world.
Now if we turn to this term as analysis and descriptor of progressive ideology, I think it's fairly accurate. It predicted the formation of such internal interest groups as "BIPOC" and, ostracism of gay men and Jews as well as the underlying justification for all these. When you see Black feminists say that black men are the white people of black people, they are appealing to intersectional ideology and enacting the behavior described by this label.
But it predicted justification, not what would have to be justified.
So long as progressives truly believe in intersectionality, the progressive stack model will be accurate. Because the process it is named after was specifically created to manifest intersectional ideology into the world.
The question is then whether they actually believe in intersectionality and are moved by its ideological precepts, or are merely political agents using the ideology to organize and justify preexisting political interest regardless of contradiction. And it is my strong belief that almost every single political movement that has ever existed is the latter, and not the former.
If alliance with autists is politically advantageous, they are oppressed neurodivergents. If war with autists is preferable, they are incel nerdbro oppressors.
Well, I guess I learn something every day. I'll concede that actual protestors were using this actual term to describe their procedure.
I don't think we disagree that it was useless, even then, for an outsider. There was a post a while back about--I think it was "the cool kids don't have to ask." They've read the room and have a feel for the consensus. Then and only then can they refer to the stack.
Why? It's a very good descriptor of what their philsophy is about, especially for an outsider following more classical ideas of equality, and wondering why certain demands are being made of him.
We've been through this dance of pretending a term applied to this ideology is somehow not useful so many times, from Cultural Marxism, through Political Correctness, SJW, Woke, CRT, and now apparently Progressive Stack, regardless of whether the term was an ingroup, or outgroup designation, or how many citations you can pull to support it, that the only conclusion can be that the actual objection is there being a term at all. If you disagree Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.
An outsider can not and could not have walked up and said “here, I am higher on this stack than you, so let me speak.” Progressives settled on a consensus for that stack before ever showing up to a protest. The OP’s approach wants to change that consensus, and it’s not going to work.
Well, I'm not sure about it being "useless", I did hear of a few successful attempts at fending off entryism by utilizing the stack, though you're probably right that adding new entries to it as an outsider is going to be too obvious, and won't work.
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