There’s a story I’ve told before mostly as an illustration of how certain meltdown situations in which I’ve found myself are kind of due to what I’ve termed the trauma of “undifferentiated emotional time” in my brain.
To wit: a trigger in the current moment can summon forth how I felt every other time I confronted that same trigger. The story I tell is about one day I found myself screaming at a high school student who outside my old nonprofit was feeding the goats through the fence.
When I verbally tore into that high school student, I was not responding to that individual person and that discrete instance of this happening.
Instead, I was responding to the entire four years of having to deal with people feeding the goats through the fence when they weren’t supposed to. The sheer force, the violence really, of my voice perhaps was proportional to the entire history of the potential threat to my animals, but it was not at all proportional to the specific instance before me. I called this “undifferentiated emotional time” because that’s what it feels like in retrospect: like four years of past incidents were happening again, all at once, along with the present moment.
Over my six years at the nonprofit, I’d yelled at all kinds of people for feeding the goats. I’d yelled at children, adults, and seniors. I’d yelled at individuals and groups. I’d yelled at English-speaking people and people who spoke other languages. I’d yelled at white people, Asian people, and black people.
That last is why I bring this up now, having just written about Nick Starr-Street–who, in addition to being autistic actually is just a pretty hateful man–and his targeting of black women hanging out at an apartment complex pool but not the white people also hanging out at the same pool.
It’s true, as I said, that I’ve yelled any anyone and everyone who ignored both common sense and our posted signs about not feeding the goats.
It’s also true that a middle-aged white guy yelling at what was a black high school girl lands in the real world in a unique and specific way. One worth calling out here.
The very fact of the racial dynamics in play actually is what led me to notice the nature of these particular meltdowns. I’d felt so ugly after the fact at having partaken, regardless of intent or realization at the time and in the moment, in the white supremacist dynamics of the wider culture of which I am a part, that it delivered a kind of shock treatment.
Prior to this incident, I hadn’t recognized the “undifferentiated emotional time” aspect of certain of my meltdowns. It was the ugliness of the specifics that made me see it.
There’s a real and actual thing happening in my brain in these “undifferentiated emotional time” moments, to be sure. I’m not disputing that and I wouldn’t dispute that. However, neurobiology isn’t an excuse for not being aware of how one’s behavior impacts the people around you, and that includes accounting for things like: to what degree does this behavior, no matter how often I might exhibit it without bias, happen in the specifics to punch down rather than up?
That matters, even if the specific person to whom I’m responding in fact is in the wrong with their own behavior. My trauma isn’t an excuse to contribute to that of another.
Nick Starr-Street not only tried to excuse his behavior by pointing to his autism, he outright claimed, “I don’t see race. I don’t see gender. I don’t see color. I don’t see any of that.”
This is implicitly nonsense, of course, but what’s more, those of us privileged by society due to our whiteness simply aren’t allowed to “not see color”. How we as white people behave, even when it isn’t why we are having that way, can effect people of color in ways for which we must accept responsibility.
(The lie is put to Starr-Street’s claim to “just see right and wrong” by the very fact that he doesn’t see the wrong in a ranting white man filing complaints about a group of black women.)
That doesn’t mean, in the story here, that the high school student shouldn’t have been approached and corrected. It doesn’t mean they should get a free pass, any more than any of the illicit goat-feeders. It just means that, autistic or not, it’s my responsibility to know that a middle-aged white man yelling at a black high school girl isn’t a thing that should happen.
It shouldn’t have taken that incident for me to be able to step outside this particular form of meltdown and thereby, hopefully, be better at recognizing them in the moment. It did, and I hope it keeps me aware in the future.
My point, really, is that being autistic (and so, in some ways, othered by society) isn’t an excuse for not doing the work you should be doing if other parts of your identity happen to be privileged by society. In fact, there might actually be aspects of your own atypicality that make it necessary for you to be even more mindful of how you inflict your privileges on others.
That’s on Nick Starr-Street.
That’s on me.