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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.
Here ya go, babe. And that's just three seconds on Google. First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.
This was my experience as well. The term "Progressive Stack" became popular IIRC during the Occupy Wall Street protests, being pushed* as the correct way to create a hierarchy in whose voices got heard first in these intentionally structure-less organizations. I had never heard the notion that this was actually a term of denigration by critics, but perhaps it's not too surprising, since that criticism tends to get leveled at many terms that some progressives choose to label themselves when other people start associating those labels with the underlying characteristics of the actual thing that the label is pointing at (obvious examples being "woke" and "social justice warrior").
* There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class. The fact that some seem to believe that the very term "Progressive Stack" is a term of denigration that critics imposed on the people pushing it makes this conspiracy theory funnier to me.
I've heard a somewhat different version of this, in that it was deliberate, it was done to "gatekeep" out portions of the working class, and that it was done knowing it could prevent the movement from attaining its goals, but that such "sabotage" was not the intended goal, merely a possible — and acceptable — price to attain the actual goal: to keep out Fascists. Because anyone whose position on the economic political axis would put them on board with Occupy Wall Street's goals, but whose position on the social/cultural political axis would cause them to oppose things like the "Progressive Stack" enough to be "turned away" (as opposed to at least holding their nose and putting up with it) is thus in the Fascist Quadrant of said political plane.
It was 2008, not 2016, no one was hyperventilating about "fascists" back then.
I left the united states for years, plural, because I believed Bush was going to declare himself dictator for life. I acquired that belief from a steady diet of blue-tribe media.
Neutral question: Has it occurred to you that, with the sides changed, you are still overreacting now as you were back then?
The thought does occur. On the other hand, I can go back and read my posts back to 2015, when I was quite the reasonable moderate, and observe a process, not simply a straight swing from one extreme to the other.
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