The fundamental basis for acceptance should be each other’s humanity.

You know that experience when you go to a party, a meet up of some kind, well, any kind of gathering really. It’s that moment when you meet someone new and the questions begin. So, what do you do for a living, where you from, what do you drive. Seemingly innocuous questions, and yet in reality they are far from it.

What they always seem to me is an assessment of whether you are an acceptable person to know, whether you are worth taking the effort to get to know better. As though the answers to these basic questions sum up in a couple of minutes whether or not I am worthy of acceptance.

Humans it seems, at least it seems the humans of the western world seem to hone this skill from a very early age. By the time we enter the school yard we have already got this skill pretty much down.

The last few days I have been reminded of an event that happened to me in primary school, which, I think, demonstrates this quite well. My school life was quite transient, by the time I was in the 4th grade of school I was at my 4th school. I felt like I was the perpetual new kid in the class. Of course, teachers did their best to see me included, but as a child that had by the time they began school already endured significant trauma, couldn’t work out why it was they felt different to everyone else and had been a target of bullying in every social situation I found myself in, it seemed no matter what the teacher tried acceptance was simply not an option.

One thing I know for sure is that bullies have a radar for victims. It’s as though we have a big V for victim painted on our foreheads that only the bullies can see, but see it they do.

I tried everything to be accepted during school. Nine times out of ten I failed. I tried starting fights, stealing, trying to be good, trying to be bad, giving away my lunch. But none of it worked, for anything more than fleeting moments. It was never enough to be enduring.

There was one thing that happened in Grade 4. I received from my grandparents a new cricket bat for my birthday. It was a wonderful cricket bat. I loved it, I took it to bed with me on the night I received it. During that year of school our teacher used to take us out to the school oval for a modified game of cricket a couple of times a week. There was this one time, when for some reason there was only one cricket bat in the kit and so we were short of a bat to use for the game.

At this time, I lived in a home that adjoined the school property, we even had a little gate in our back fence to give us access into the school. Well, anyway, I said to my teacher I could run home and get my cricket bat. I think somewhere in my mind was this would make me the saviour of the game and thus avoiding returning to the classroom to do dreaded school work. I was kind of correct, my teacher gave permission and I ran like the wind across the school yard through the gate down to our garage and grabbed my bat and sprinted back to school with it.

I felt triumphant. I smiled deeply on my face and deeply within myself as the class cheered as I returned with the bat. After that day, I never attended school without that bat with me. That bat had a magical power of providing me acceptance. Of course, that acceptance was somewhat fleeting. It only applied when cricket games were on. It certainly wasn’t enduring.

How is it that we have allowed ourselves to get to this place? A place where we rate as acceptable those we inhabit this earth with on the basis of their possessions, their income potential. Essentially, we consider a person acceptable not on the basis of humanity but on the basis of their potential to provide something to us.

It’s a terrible indictment on what we have become.

How is it we have allowed the humanity of each other to not be the defining factor of our acceptance of each other. That we decide on the basis of a person’s possessions, health, and career rather than on the fact that they are human that they are or are not worth accepting as fellow travellers of life.

I believe it is this that has allowed us to descend into a situation where we make judgments on people’s value on the basis of their ability. At times this judgment is so sharp it determines if we allow a fellow human to even exist or begin their life on this earth.

For some, on the basis, not of their humanity, but on their neurology, we judge them deficient, broken, diseased etc. We refuse to accept people for who they are as human persons because of difference. We other them, to the point they are isolated, bullied and abused; that they question their worth constantly, and often struggle with mental health issues for the bulk of their lives.

Surely this must stop. Surely this is a road to ruin. A ruin of the very humanity each of us possess. A road that leads to the breakdown of society as we know it. Maybe not today, maybe not next year or even next decade, but certainly we are on that trajectory. We must stop this. We must start looking to the humanity of the people we inhabit this world with and value it.

A person’s disability, sexuality, gender identity does not make them worthy or unworthy of acceptance. It is a person’s humanity that makes them inherently worthy of acceptance. The rest, well that just adds to the wondrous diversity of what it is to be human and share this planet with other humans.

What a completely inferior place this earth would be if we were all the same, if we were all moulded from our own self-image.

Wouldn’t it be grand if acceptance of each other on the basis of our shared humanity went viral?

There are no ends, it’s not a lovely colourful rainbow with one label at one end and another label…

There are no ends, it’s not a lovely colourful rainbow with one label at one end and another label at the other.

There’s another round of an article going around the social media channels where an attempt is made by a non autistic parent to effectively place autistics in conflict with one another. It’s completely unhelpful and is woven through a fabric of tragedy and self pity.

Liberally salted with the language of deficit and lost dreams of parents for the child they wished they had, that never existed and a an absence of any condiment of the language of strengths or skills or genuine appreciation for the actual child they have.

It attempts to place what she calls severe or classic autistic people against the rest of the autistic community. Our very real struggles are dismissed as simple quirks, as though these struggles are virtually a figment of imagination.

They aren’t, that’s the reality of it.

Tiresome is the language of despair, loss, and deficit of non autistic parents about their autistic children. Just plain wrong is the application of the so-called autism spectrum as if it is a line with those fitting one criteria at one end and those fitting another at the other.

When challenged about the fact that the spectrum is not a simple line with two ends, a parent said well it’s a colourful rainbow then. This kind of language is so unhelpful and it makes attempts to place autistic people at a particular point on an imaginary line and imagines that is where they are forever and will never change.

Humans change and develop, this is no less true for autistic humans than non autistic human. What exactly the spectrum is and how to define it is always problematic, it’s difficult, it is hard to conceptualise a visual concept for it. I’ve seen and heard a range of explanations, some quite good but none really conceptualise it in a way that is really clear and really able to be grasped and visualised.

What is true, absolutely for me, an autistic woman, and for many fellow autistics I know, is that, the idea that we occupy a space at one end or the other, indeed any one point along some arbitrary line is a complete fiction. The space on the spectrum we occupy fluctuates and changes from moment to moment, day to day and year to year. It just does.

Functioning labels always seem to be the culprit in positioning us arbitrarily on this imaginary line, but just like every human ever to exist, autistic humans have fluctuating functioning in different areas of life, and they change all the time. Sometimes we are able to function extremely well, negotiate much, navigate sensory input and apply social and executive functions to such a level of prowess that we have levelled at us the statement – ‘but you don’t look very autistic’

And then there are the days we lose our words.

The days we can’t manage to work the washing machine.

The days where answering a phone is like an act of impending doom.

And that’s the thing, functioning for anyone is always transient and never constant. For autistics perhaps the variance or fluctuations are just more severe but, they fluctuate just like everyone else’s functioning.

Please stop, pitting us against each other, characterising us as occupying some imaginary point on a line, and please, for the love of all that is good, please stop imagining that your autistic child is destined to always be at the place they are now, they will grow up, they will learn things, they will find strengths. Please, I implore you to be their best advocate by standing with them, discovering with them, journeying with them to grow and mature and learn and become the best, most authentic, most wonderful human persons they can be.

Just don’t place anyone on an imaginary line. The line doesn’t exist, there is no ends of the spectrum, there’s just humans, with a somewhat different neurological wiring than the non autistic humans have. And you know what, that’s Ok, we’re just different not less, just different.

Support us. Learn with us, from us, and support us. We want to be the best we can be, we don’t want to be a list of deficits or the ghost of some imaginary person you dreamed would be your child.

In the end, we want what all humans want, love and acceptance for who we are. The potential of what we can become is impacted greatly by this.

Acceptance, not awareness, not deficits. Just acceptance.

Just Imagine

Just Imagine.

The month of April is in full swing and both negative and positive stories of autism abound. Unfortunately, the major ones and the ones that seem to get the most oxygen are the negative ones.

Stories of punctuated with words like suffering, epidemic, terrible, horrible, destruction and so forth abound in these negative stories and narrative.

This is not the story of Autism. In reality, the story of Autism is the story of humanity. It’s always been there with us. It will always be there with us. In short, it’s a part of the human condition. Not that I am saying everyone is a little bit autistic, heaven forbid I would utter such words. But it is part of the human condition because, in truth, we are always coming into contact with autistic people. This is true today, it was true in the past and it will be true in the future.

So the burning question is why is it we are so bent out of shape about it. Films are made, false research is done, lies are told all to try and demonise autism and autistic people.

But why, it’s always been there and always will be.

Whatever happened to treat all humans as humans. If that was the case then it would be possible then that all humans could find their unique place in the world, minus the labels of dysfunction and disorder.

Wouldn’t that be grand?

But no we are so ingrained in a pathologised model of human existence that, an unattainable for any single person, an ideal of normal exists. It really is unattainable because humans are human and all have their own foibles and idiosyncrasies. Or perhaps more simply we all are just individuals.

Just imagine though if we redrafted our world, our societies expectations, our educational philosophies our political landscape so that neurology just wasn’t that important.

Just imagine if we just treated each other as the unique and individual humans we are.

Just imagine, that person that needed the extra quiet in the workplace would be able to have it. That person that needed the ramp to get in and out would get it, that person in need of more back support would get that ergonomics assessment. And so it would go on.

Imagine that, a world that accommodated each other.

Imagine that, a world that accepted difference as difference and not something wrong.

Imagine a world where a true neurodiversity paradigm could exist.

We have a long way to go to ever get there, but I remain ever hopeful.

Stuck in a single focus — I think not.

Persistently there is a belief that autistic people are stuck in a rut, they have a singular special interest, they are only interested in that interest and often that they are incapable of multi-tasking. This belief is wrong. For some autistics it is partly true, for some, it is quite true and for many, it is patently false.

This is a pervasive stereotype, it’s as pervasive as the use of the dreaded functioning labels, I have written about the shortcomings of that particular issue here. Just as it is wrong to assume a person’s ability to function in one situation is likely to be the same in all situations so it is wrong to assume that autistics can’t and don’t multi-task.

So persistent is this stereotype that we autistic people even fall prey to it and are known to ask each other what our “special interest” is. This is a question that I have never ever found easy to answer, I believe this is partly due to never having a singular focus interest, and baulking somewhat at the idea that my interests are somehow special and non-autistic people’s interests are hobbies.

The truth is that we autistics can and do multi-task. Just as the rest of the world’s population the difficulty we have with it varies as widely as there are people on the planet. Luna Lindsey has provided some insight into how this difficulty has particular outworkings here.

It’s absolutely dumbfounding that people don’t actually understand this.

We humans seem to thrive on routine. But even more potent than routine is predictability. I’ve heard teachers talking about how if the autistic child in the class is going to have a change in a routine then a meltdown is imminent. I think in many cases what is closer to the truth is that predictability has been derailed, that the autistic child suddenly has not a change of things to be done but that an imposition into the predictability of their day, environment etc is suddenly in a state of flux. Sensory issues that were in check are suddenly more potent, anxiety is raised and so forth.

The destruction of predictability is far more of a barrier to successful multitasking for some autistic people than a lack of routine.

But of course, a routine can also be super important to some of us too.

As the saying goes. “If you’ve met an autistic person, then you’ve met one autistic person” We are myriad, just as non-autistic people are myriad.

Personally, I can and do multi-task. At different times in life, this has been more or less successful. In my last long-term employment situation, I did this a lot of the time very successfully. I worked in an office environment where I managed to successfully complete and manage a bunch of tasks and responsibilities. This position was eventually derailed. The reason was most definitely in reflection, not the inability to have a routine but the absolute lack of predictability. My boss would regularly ring in and blast the predictability of things out of the water.

In the end, I had a kind of meltdown response and walked out. In the aftermath of this, I think I have been in a kind of burnout experience for the last few years since. I managed to work with that constant derailment for a bit over two years. It would, in fact, happen every single day, multiple times a day. In the end, it took its toll.

Currently, I manage a range of competing for important things in my life. I manage my faith life, my interest in web development, my interest in writing, my interest in running and of course my interest in online autism advocacy and offline autism advocacy.

There are times where I find this difficult, but I manage it. I have many running friends who are not autistic or neurodivergent and they have just as much difficulty in maintaining interest in the areas of their life that are outside of the running community.

Having difficulty managing multi-tasking is not an issue of autism, it is, though, an issue of being human.

In recent times, I have managed to uphold my autism advocacy interest, involvement in an autism research organisation, membership with my local running group, and completing an online course. I have to juggle all these things, I have to make decisions on a day to day basis about which of these interests will be of most importance and which will have lesser importance than other days. I have managed to do all this in an environment where I have lost my marriage relationship and begun a journey of transitioning to my true gender.

So please tell me again how autistics are too single-minded, too focused on their special interests and unable to multi-task and manage competing demands.

It’s almost here but what’s to be afraid of…

As I write these words on March 30, I have been inundated with messages of autism awareness, of messages to be aware of autism. But what, dare I ask is there to be afraid of. After a decade of light it up blue and world autism awareness day it is certainly time we realised there is just nothing to be scared of.

What is autism to be scared of? It’s not a threat, or a virus or anything like that. It’s a different way of being wired, of seeing the world in a different way. Nothing to be afraid of.

There are absolute challenges to both living as an autistic and parenting autistic children. But it’s not something to be afraid of. Not one little bit.

It’s not autism that we should be afraid of, and it’s pretty much time we realised that everyone is actually aware that this thing called autism exists.

But there a different operating system is nothing to be afraid of now is it. You know you can do it, you’ve probably already done it before, Nokia to iOS, Android to iOs or Windows to Mac. Certainly, there is a learning curve to consider, absolutely some of the things have to be done a little bit differently. It is no question that challenges will come, and overcome.

Let’s face it that is what at its core autism is. A different operating system.

It’s not something to be afraid of. It’s something to simply accept and embrace as part of our human and social ecosystem. Just as workplaces adapt with different digital devices so humanity can adapt to divergent neurologies.

April 2 is coming, and there will be many who continue to fruitlessly turn on blue lights to make people aware. But that is not what we need to be aware of. What we need to be aware of is a far more insidious thing, sometimes overt and sometimes covert, even at times hiding under the guise of trying to help.

We should be aware of things like The President of the USA giving credence to a lie about vaccines and autism.

We should be aware of discredited, fraudulent, deregistered doctors running around promoting works of fiction as documentaries.

We should be aware of organisations that talk of cure

We should be aware of organisations that promote interventions that aim to convert the autistic into a neurotypical

We should be aware of any organisation that has the word aware or awareness in its name.

We should be aware of movie stars that try to lecture us on the causes of a neurological divergence

We should be aware of anyone who talks of epidemic

We should be aware of anyone who talks of lost generations

We should most certainly be aware of anyone who uses phrases like hating autism.

Yes, there are many things we should be aware of. But not one of them is autism.

What should we be then? We should be accepting, embracing, celebrating and accommodating.

We should be presuming competence. Harnessing the gifts and abilities of neurodivergent people.

Forget autism awareness. Please. Embrace Autism acceptance and celebration.

Is it so much to ask?

Is it?

Really?

It seems so. Just a chance, just an opportunity. Just a level playing field. It seems that that is too much to ask.

I managed to self-sabotage my last real time of employment at around the time I was coming to terms with the reality of being autistic.

That was March 2013. It’s now March 2017, and I haven’t really had a job since. Oh, I have had the odd thing here and there that has provided little bits of income, but never an actual real job. A contract here and a contract there.

It’s almost as though the realisation of being autistic, the accepting it, the believing it all snowballed into some kind of cataclysmic employment event. That certainly rings true to the final moments of that job I had.

Moments where I essentially told my then-boss to stick her job where the sun don’t shine.

But it seems like ever since I have been destined to failure. Destined to miss out on the interview, or to fail the interview or for somehow the employer to see through me and realise I was just not up to scratch.

And so I yell and scream about it not being fair. Because it damn well isn’t fair. I am just as capable as the next person of holding down a job. Sure I will find aspects more challenging, but conversely, I will also find aspects easier than others.

It’s not so much to ask for someone to help me out, is it?

I mean this whole executive function thing just seems to debilitate me. It just seems I am unable to manage the processes of going through the looking for the job and the applying for the job. It has taken me several months recently just to manage to re-do my resume or CV or whatever it is you like to call it.

I’m not even fussy. It’s like I am at the point where I couldn’t give a flying fuck if the job had anything to do with my qualifications and experience. That seems totally irrelevant. I want to be able to be a useful member of this society. Instead of feeling so useless, poverty-stricken and isolated.

One of the things that really rubs salt into the wound is where you see that there are people in jobs who clearly have lower skills than you, lower intelligence you and somehow they can have a job but you can’t.

It really feels at times like the world is against me. Even when there are times that opportunities rise I manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, there was an employment project to work at piggeries, I never put myself forward. I chose not to do so because of family commitments. But then a short time later my partner asked me to leave and the whole reasoning for never applying seemed to have flown out the window, but of course, for me, it was too late.

I just don’t understand. I’m willing to work, I’m able to work. I am an intelligent, capable woman, I am ready and able to start work whenever a chance comes my way. But they don’t. They seem to come by everyone else’s way but not mine. It just seems so incredibly and totally unfair.

I know this is something of a sob post, but it is also reality.

And the reality is that as yet another April month of so-called feel good stories about Autism and opportunities, and changing attitudes, still I sit, unable to gainfully participate in the world.

Is it so much to ask? Really?

Just a job, nothing special, just a job that pays some money to pay the bills and feed and clothe me and so on and so forth. It’s not like I am asking to be a CEO or anything.

What is really the problem here, though, is, not me pouring out my heart about it, but that I am not alone, I am not a minority of autistic people. I am in fact the majority. We autistics are passed over again and again and again. More so than every other disability group. And yet, the government, well at least the Australian Government, doesn’t consider us disabled enough to qualify for the Disability Pension.

It’s just so fucking unfair.

What’s in a name/The Masquerade of acceptance

A woman sits minding their own business, well just going about their business. Just doing what they do. One word suddenly brings everything undone. Takes a day that looks bright and full of possibility into a steaming pile of pointlessness.

That woman, a transwoman, in the midst of transition. That word, well that word was their deadname. For the uninitiated the deadname is the name a person used to go by before they transitioned to their real gender. For this woman a name they always heard with disgust and pain as it was. No matter who actually spoke that word.

But yes that one word has brought this woman undone today. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is that way. It is the reality of what it is like to live as a transgender person on a day to day basis.

I think the deadnaming thing, along with deliberate misgendering, ties into a range of fears and issues of self-confidence and resilience. Most potently it ties into fear, a fear of being safe, a fear of being able to walk down the street in safety, a fear of attending your local cafe in safety. A very real and present fear that every single time you go out you do in fact lay it on the line.

So obviously that trans woman is me. And this situation just happened and it instantly reduced me to a state of blubberring mess. It’s about an hour later and I have managed to pull myself back to some level of reasonable functioning. In that process I found that I was bombarded by the time my ex-father-in-law deadnamed me with such ferocity that I ended up unable to move from my chair and unable to speak. Even though this man was an 80 year old man I was reduced to effectively existing in that moment in time as full grown adult tucked into the fetal position.

One thing in that situation that was particularly pertinent was how much over the years the family have educated this man about autism and especially the issues of speach and communication. And yet he stood their yelling my deadname and demanding I answer him.

It was a somewhat traumatic experience. As I write that line I wonder if there is something of a bit of melodrama in it. Possibly, but that’s how it felt, that’s how it was experienced for me.

In the aftermarthof today I think of acceptance, and tolerance and so forth. I don’t imagine I am alone in wanting real acceptance. Real acceptance would have stepped in on my behalf and advocated.

But largely it seems to me is what we have is a base level tolerance that likes to masquerade as actual acceptance. When asked those in the masquerade will dutifully declare gender, sexuality etc or of no importance and that they just accept everyone, or a more benign, well whatever makes them happy.

But this, masquerade, it doesn’t mitigate the risk, the danger, the actual murders, the anti-LGBTIQ+ legislation enacted. It is as though it almost perpetuates it, it certainly seems to give it permission.

I think this because if there really was the wide spread acceptance we keep hearing about, if there really was there, it would be more than a tick in the box on a survey or opinion poll.

I think if it was really there the innoccent bystander situation would be broken away in these situations.

No longer would a transperson be openly mocked, humiliated, verbally abused and even physically abused because the response of real acceptance, that response would jump in and put a stop to it. It would stop those bigots in their tracks and honour the person being victimised.

The person being victimised would be so honoured and so protected that they wouldn’t be giving in to fear yet again, they wouldn’t be scared to go down the street to the shop, or even answer their phone.

What they would be is empowered, strengthened and raised up to be exactly who they are, to stand tall in the freedom they have fought so hard for and finally found.

Fake allies, fake acceptance, psuedo tolerance that is masquerading as acceptance is never going to cut it. We need real acceptance, real acceptance of allowing every human person to live their true self.

It’s Coming…

Yes it’s coming. Every year it comes, like an avalanche it comes.

Awareness day, awareness month.

It comes it erases the voices of the actual autistic.

It parades blue light bulbs and people spending days in bubbles.

It comes, it claims to be for us, but it isn’t.

It never was.

It was always about the organisations.

It was always about the parents.

It was always about the siblings.

It was always about the teachers.

Yes it’s coming. April 2 is only a few short weeks away. And here it comes.

Time to become aware again, once again.

That those you thought really were allies are actually anti-vaxers after all

That those you really thought got it start buying blue light bulbs.

That those you thought were down with it start talking up cures and the latest and greatest recovery fad.

Yes it’s coming.

Fellow autistics, this too will pass.

All we can do is:

Never Surrender.

Talk our talk.

Promote the neurodiversity paradigm.

Refuse to be silenced.

Speak our truth.

Be different and not less.

To loudly proclaim nothing about us without us.

Yes it is coming.

It is coming and there isn’t anything we can do about it.

It will come, we can’t stop it.

But.

We can change our response and not take it lying down.

We can change our response and tell all the good stories, of valuable wonderful autistic life.

Yes it is coming.

And we can stand and face it and fight it like it never saw us coming.

We can’t stop it, but maybe, just maybe we can change it.

Autism Awareness, is so last century, Autism Acceptance and Celebration is where it is at now.

Lets stand together and make it happen.

Acceptance is not just for autism

Many autistic people talk a lot about acceptance. I do, I have many autistic friends and acquaintances that do too. You see it seems to me that acceptance is kind of like what we do. We do it with each other, we do it with neurotypicals, we do it with allistics, we do it with minority groups and on it goes.

Often I and others are told we go on about it too much, too loudly and too often. But, I think, the biggest thing here is we feel we need to keep going on about. You see justice, fairness is important to us. What’s right is important to us. People being treated and accepted as human persons is bloody well important to us.

So whether it comes to full acceptance it’s really not just about autism. It’s about so much more than that, so much more! It’s about standing up and calling out the hateful anti-transgender laws enacted in the Carolinas. It’s about standing up and calling for governments to get their heads out of the sand and legislate for marriage equality for all.

These, of course, are just the start. There are so many issues that confront us as humans every day. Scroll a newsfeed on facebook and you can be confronted by the lack of acceptance as groups of people as fully human with so many different faces. Whether it be the equal rights of Native Americans, Indigenous Australians — or any indigenous group for that matter. Whether it be the harsh reality of the racial profiling and evident overuse of force against people of colour in the United States. The silencing and sidelining of disabled people, whether that be a visible or invisible disability. The disregard for the quality of life of the mentally ill.

It just goes on and on. The list never seems to end. Disabled drivers abused parking in their designated parking spots because a bystander takes it upon themselves to decide they are not really disabled. The downs syndrome people excluded from employment because others decide they don’t have the capacity. Autistics blamed for mass shootings by the media with no evidence of that being the case. Ableist slurs levelled about minority groups by mainstream media outlets.

As I grow into the autistic identity and the autistic community one thing I notice is that in general, we seem to have a real heart for acceptance. It doesn’t seem to matter what the disability, difference, race etc we want to accept. Perhaps this is a generalisation, and I get that, but I see time and again, autistic people, neurodivergent people, calling for justice in the face of injustice. Calling for acceptance of difference, calling for an end of silencing and de-voicing of the vulnerable.

What I think is that we get it. We get what it’s like to be excluded, silenced, treated unfairly, discriminated against and so on. Yes, we get it. We have had to search and yearn and fight for our own acceptance as full members of this humanity thing. We have often wandered for years in thick fogs of isolation and pain after being othered, and called broken and wrong. Bullying has been for many of us a day to day experience of childhood into adulthood. So yes we get it.

Because we get it. Because we can empathise with it — Yes we really can do empathy — we don’t want others to experience it. We don’t want anyone else to experience the pain and distress we did. We want acceptance and inclusion. We want all people to be treated and accepted as actual full human persons.

A lot of us don’t really give a flying fuck what another person sexual orientation is, or, what their gender is and we don’t need to determine it on whether they have a penis or a vagina. So when we see people excluded from basic rights, like the basic rights that the majority enjoy we call it out.

We may not always do this in a conventional way. For many of us, the idea of turning up at an actual protest rally sears us to the core with horror. That’s not the only valid way, though. We write about it. We change our profile pictures to reflect it. We tweet about it. We comment on forums, social media, we send emails. We even youtube about it.

Because at heart, when we talk about acceptance we mean it. We mean acceptance for all humans as humans. We mean all humans to be equal. We mean all humans to be treated with respect and dignity.

We talk a lot abut autism/autistic acceptance, but, it’s not just about autism.

#Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter

I’m not sure where it started, but the #blacklivesmatter has grown into a force in its own right. And it’s a very important issue to be sure.

I confess my first response when I read that hashtag was to think to myself but surely All Lives Matter. Yes that was my first response, it was simplistic and thankfully I have thought more about this to realise why it is so important that this campaign continues to gain momentum and strength.

I live in Australia, a country that is now very multicultural. A walk down suburban streets will testify to this with the vast array of food from a vast array of cultures. But it has not always been so. I grew up in a very white dominated culture, where to that white dominance was so strong that to question it was an almost alien idea.

It was in fact so strong that it was invisible to anyone within it.

Australia has its own, disgusting shameful history, of violence, discrimination, and genocide of indigenous and immigrant culture. We even had an official racist policy that was known as The White Australia policy.

We have made many gains forward in the years I have been alive, but, we have many more forward gains to make. The racism of this land is still present and bubbling under the surface. We see it bubble up in places at times, sometimes in political realms and sometimes in acts of violence.

In a shameful display of racism masked as patriotism we had a Prime Minister of our country allow refugees to languish on a boat as he used their plight for political gain leading into an election as he declared “We will decide who comes to our country and we will decide the manner in which they come”. In a devastating display of violent racism in 2005 we say The Cronulla Riots. And in the last couple of weeks voters have elected to our parliament a racist woman declaring war on Muslim people.

So yes all lives do matter. All lives are important, valuable and to be treated with dignity, humanity and respect. Sometimes though we need to make a point of declaring that importance to particular sections of humanity. At this time it is important to focus our attention and energy on declaring that yes Black Lives Matter.

White Privilege is real…

Many scoff at the idea of white privilege, as if it is just a political correct statement. But it is real. I as a white person am a beneficiary of it:

I will never experience an instance of wondering if I didn’t get the job because I am white

I may experience situations where as the only white person in a group I am afforded leadership simply due to being white.

These are just two simple examples of how white privilege is real. There are many more, and many will be specific to the different cultural situation they exist in.

Why highlight #BlackLivesMatter now?

It amazes me how quickly my social media feeds became cluttered with people declaring #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter after the situation in Texas over the last few days.

Scratching the surface of these showed the white dominance and control very clearly. Quickly espoused were justifications of black deaths. Excuses or reasonings as to why these were deserved.

I ask where was the outcry at the 100’s of black deaths over months and years?

It was missing in action.

Yet, 5 white deaths and sudden outrage.

In a world where 100’s of black human people can be killed by violence and hardly a whimper is heard, but 5 white deaths create a frenzy of outrage, white privilege is clearly at issue.

Yes, we do need to highlight that black lives matter, because western society as a whole seems to be acting as if they don’t matter.

Yes, we need to highlight that black lives matter, because the disparity of life between white and black is so massive it needs to be addressed.

Do black lives matter more than white lives? Of course not.

But here’s the thing.

We already act like white lives matter!

We need to highlight that black lives matter, because society as a whole, are acting as if they don’t!

#BlackLivesMatter.