Over the last couple of months, as my group members are becoming more confident and increasingly outspoken (they are far more political than I was at any of their ages), I have come up against a couple of instances of inappropriate language. Homophobic, sexist and racist comments – the kind that get classified as ‘casual’, not intended to cause any offence but definitely not on all the same.
This has posed a bit of a dilemma for me. Usually, I would instantly challenge anyone on that – adults and children – but I feel like this is somewhere else that autism sensitivity comes in to play. One of these incidents was where we were discussing what we did in our free time, and one of the guys (I’ll call him ‘T’) referred to one of the activities as being ‘a bit gay’. Another was the instance where one of the guys (‘M’), was talking about ‘the coloured boy’ in his class. I responded to both of these situations, making it clear that the language was inappropriate, but I’m not convinced I dealt with it in enough depth or touched on the underlying issues. To T, I said ‘That’s not a nice way to put it, can you think of a better way of saying why you don’t like it?’, and to M ‘People don’t like being called ‘coloured’, I think he would probably be happier if you said black’. (Not that I want to speak for that young man either, but he wasn’t there to ask.)
Now I know full well that M was just trying to describe one of his classmates so that I knew who he was talking about (I had visited their class a few months previously). Given where M lives, this is very possibly how he hears people from BME communities referred to on a regular basis. Similarly, I can imagine that at T’s college, homework is quite often seen as being ‘a bit gay’. But I know and you know that that’s not ok. And I’m sure we’ve all had conversations with people where we’ve tried to explain why it’s not ok, and utterly lost the battle. There are some people who just don’t see the problem. A large part of seeing that problem is understanding what is actually a very complicated socio-political historical and contemporary narrative of oppression and stigmatisation, which some people just don’t have access to in their day to day lives. Those of us who have been through a critical education system or see the blogs, the comics and the debates on these issues in our daily and virtual lives have contact with a conversation that is not being held everywhere.
It’s complicated enough to neuro-typical people, and when you throw learning disabilities, communication difficulties and autism into the mix, it’s not exactly something you can explain in thirty seconds in the middle of a conversation. If your brain is wired in a very rigid way, something that is not at all your fault, changing your understanding takes a great deal of time and careful support. If you lack the ability to critique and the intellectual capacity to understand the theoretical arguments, I can imagine these debates could just seem unintelligible. If you already have issues around social interactions and communication, it is familiar language that will be at the tip of your tongue. So in those cases, I think I chickened out, and brushed it off while making an attempt to acknowledge it. As with all my posts, any feedback or recommendations for dealing with these issues in the future is very welcome.
More recently, I was told that ‘women are only good at cooking and having babies’. Now, having thought about how I had dealt with the previous two scenarios, I thought I’d take this one a little more seriously. I made my disapproval clear, but not overly so, and asked the young man to think about the famous women he could name who had done important things. I didn’t see him again for the rest of the session, he got rather upset and sat outside the room, unwilling to talk to me.
So, as with so many other things in this sector, I don’t know what the right answer is, to be honest. Tips and hints welcome!
One Foot in the Door 