I like that guy’s Ted Talk, very helpful to distinguish cognitive vs affective empathy. And his story about being called “the serial killer” feels just a little too relatable, ouch!
My older sister was diagnosed with autism when she was around 30 years old. My wife was diagnosed with autism in her adulthood also. I almost certainly have it but have never sought clinical diagnosis. So I and several people very close to me have all experienced that same type of prejudice.
On the popular belief that autistic people “lack empathy,” the sad irony is that autistic people not only
do feel empathy, but we often feel it far more deeply than your average neurotypical person. It’s actually more of an emotional language barrier, so to speak. Imagine traveling to an African country where you don’t speak the language, then publishing an article saying the natives “lack human speech!”
How insulting …
Here’s another Ted Talk about autism that I think has some important merit:
Of course, the paradigm shift that she’s talking about is not one we can totally complete yet. There sometimes are aspects of autism, for some people, that seem like genuine inherent disabilities, not just environmental prejudices like she says. We as a society have not yet fully cracked the code. But I think it’s extremely important to realize it’s possible for things we see as disabilities in a person to result from environmental prejudice instead, and to get us in the habit of at least considering that rather than assuming.
But setting aside for a moment the question of “disability, or natural diversity?” … Regarding prejudice, I have a maxim I like to use:
Another term for this is
accommodation. This goes for all types of human diversity, both “normal” (like skin color or nationality) and “abnormal” (like genuine medical disabilities).
It’s based on the reality that when people are different (in any way, for any reason), sometimes they have different needs. So if we try to “solve” the problem of prejudice by just ignoring it and treating everyone as if they’re identical, we actually end up making it worse.
An extremely obvious example is offering help to a blind person … How cruel it would be if society ignored their disability and treated them as identical to a seeing person, offering no accommodation at all! But it also applies to “normal” diversity. Having different skin color often means you are raised with a different culture and different life experience, which also means you have different sensibilities and sensitivities that need to be respected by those around you. There are ways I talk to my 10 year old nephews that I would not talk to my mother, and vice versa. So too there might be ways I talk to white friends that I would not talk to black friends. Not that I’m two-faced, but I simply recognize that everyone is different.
The uncomfortable reality is, treating people with kindness requires effort to learn and understand what “kindness” looks like to each person. Trying to just be “colorblind” and apply the same definition of “kindness” to everyone is a misguided shortcut.
Well, the same goes for autism—but unfortunately there are large portions of society who are still so comfortable in their majority status, and the blissful ignorance that affords them, that they have not gotten the memo yet. If you suggest to them that they treat an autistic person differently, sometimes they actually find it insulting.
So yeah … those are my thought on it I guess