Facebook Publication Date: 1/28/2021 5:01
I see it.
And I see some of this Dynamic in Lace on Race even, the way people pop in and out. And also their first line method of Defense when they are called in for problematic or harmful behaviors.
I can affirm that it’s true for some people. But I also think it’s not as true for as many people as people like think it is, and I also think that it can be used, particularly with white women, as a crutch and as a flex. Particularly with black women and other women of color.
I’m neurodivergent *and* have attention disorder, and I’m not that person.
I feel it deeply when people leave and it does feel presumptuous of them when they pop in 6 weeks 6 months 6 years later and expect, and sometimes even demand, a level of intimacy and access they ceased to earn. I see it at lace on Race, absolutely, but I also encounter it in personal feed all the time. Particularly when white women, who have been called into accountability at least on race, abandon that work, but keep me on my friends list so that they can have the access and or the proximity or the adjacency to someone who is doing both racial equity and applied relational ethics work, but none of the accountability and responsibilities, and *almost all of them have used the flex of neurodivergence or trauma response as to why they did*.
That is violent AF, particularly to someone like me who also has a history of both of those things.
Read that again. And then let go of your activation and offended sensibilities, and read it yet again. Every word I’m saying is true.
I am all about learning about and even making a certain amount of accommodation for neurodivergence and ADHD, I have both. I also have significant complex trauma response.
But I’m here to tell you that these things can be at least somewhat mitigated.
What I have a big problem with is that people will just say this is one of my symptoms or this is how it plays out for me and then the conversation stops.
No conversation of what the other person is doing *with* that self-awareness in order to make it easier on the person they are confronting or engaging with.
No sense of self responsibility. No sense of even the idea that the other person in front of them may have similar needs that are being completely overridden and canceled out by their own needs and demands. And that happens on the daily.
And the onus is on the other person to make contortions and carve outs for them.
Most of the time when people tell me what they expect, or feel entitled to from me in this regard I tell them little about my own Affliction.
Because they won’t hear it. Because it’s not about me at all.
And there *is* (as always) a racialized aspect to this.
This accommodation that most white people, and most middle-class people, and particularly most white middle-class people feel entitled to, that never carries over to women of color, and working class and poor women is real and inequitable.
We are just punished and blamed. No one makes the slightest iota of accommodation for us.
People with neurodivergence and ADHD who are white lead with that quite often.
*Particularly with black people and other people of color*.
Because they Can. And again, it is all too often used at the shield, an excuse, and a strong Flex.
And they know that we will cut them a wide swath, because we will be severely punished both on a personal, social professional and sometimes even *legal*level if we don’t.
The absolute converse is not true for black people.
the very things that Garner empathy and compassion for white children and adults, gets us jail, it’s us labeled as Oppositional Defiant Disorder or antisocial disorder, gets us labeled troublemakers at work, makes it all that much harder to navigate an incredibly brutal white spaces that make absolutely no accommodations for us. And that needs to be spoken up and spoken to on the daily.
I almost never tell people about my neurodivergence or of my trauma history, except as part of a personal story that advances a general point.
I don’t lead with it in order to manage other people’s expectations of me.
Too long, didn’t read? Most of the time when people are talking about psychological and neurological issues, the accommodation that is expected and subsequently given is in direct inverse proportion to melanin level.
The accommodations, and understanding, and compassion that now is expected and even demanded, particularly demanded of people of color to account for funky Behavior by white people is real.
Usually that neurodivergence doesn’t come up until they’re called out for problematic Behavior toward a person of color.
Either on a professional, social, or professional or legal level.
There is no way black people can do this, and even if we could, on the aggregate, we wouldn’t.
We are punished to the same extent that white people are rewarded, comforted, and even celebrated for having the same issues and afflictions.
And again, before anyone even *thinks* about flexing on me, I have all of the afflictions and challenges I’ve spoken of above.
I even have a website dedicated to applied relational ethics with an original method I myself devised.
I am living proof that the very things that most white people want accomodation for can be worked with.
And this must also be said- one reason that developed this method was for myself, because *I knew I would never ever get to enjoy the same amount of accommodation from white people and white Society that I see white people give each other*
The applied relational ethics that we talk about are also very trenchant to white women in general and in how they relate to black women, because of the exact same way that they Flex, almost inevitably, when dealing with us.
In a way that we cannot when we deal with them.
It is important to look at disparities within the mental health and neurodivergent community, and also to look at the real gains that have been made by said Community, progress which has only come from the disability Community, again, of which I am a part, ripping wide swaths from the Black Liberation Playbook of the last 50 to 60 years.
But just like white women also have used that Playbook, and also like the queer Community has also use that Playbook (and, again, I speak as a queer woman), they have used the Playbook but they have appropriated and sometimes beaten us on the head with it.
That needs to stop.
It needs to be acknowledged confronted and dismantled.
I am all about affirming accommodation but it needs to be across the board and it is not currently.
I know this is counterintuitive, and I know most of the people on this who are reading this are white.
And I am more than willing to take any questions.
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