Autism and Racism: A Different Perspective

By Eric E. Cane

While I acknowledge there are outliers in every human variant, I’m going to write about my own internal processing through the lens of autism. I would like to know your thoughts on whether or not you have similarities in this?

While our autism carries with it some great challenges, it can bestow us benefits in other areas. We take in the data feed (our sometimes immense, all-at-once sensory inundation), process it with discernment, but not prejudice, then assess higher likely outcomes to balance our responses and future processing.

I think that we feel a greater need for justice helps impart a discernment that skims away the social flotsam many others cover themselves in.

Skin color has never held any importance to me. Skin color doesn’t function as an indicator of value or being tied to actions, intent, desire, or psychopathy of an individual. Not ever have I made any such relation of those qualities and bound them to skin color. Doing so is absurd.

We autistics assemble our personification of another human being greatly through action, small and subtle cues of movements singular and combined. These help give us an indicator of a person’s intent — beyond the words they use. Practice and experience have shown us that we can’t always trust a neurotypical’s use of language. Their sentences are frequently laced with subtext that only our analysis of their physical movements combined with our previous catalog of relational experiences help us to tirelessly parse out their true meaning and intent. How often I fail at this would probably shock a lot of people who don’t know me.

My getting the “gist” of things is so fraught with uncertainty and lack of precision, that my brain has to flare up to full processing power to make sure I don’t get something wrong (which can be exhausting). Add to this the fact that a lot of people don’t like repeating themselves or rephrasing their questions (more than once) makes for a lot of educated guesswork to get through some social situations.

Let me explain something about how some autistics discern action. I’m not referring to the overt limb, torso, head movements (though that is a part), but everything down to the small twitch of muscle of their eyelids, their lay and angle of their eyelash hair, how their forehead hairline is pulled back or drawn forward as they experience wonder, curiosity, anger, the angle, articulation, and tension of their eyebrows, the combination of smile, eye direction, body posture, the set of one’s shoulders and rise and fall of breathing evident in their upper torso, the amount of saliva at the corners of their mouth or on their teeth and tongue, how their mouth actions tie in with their eye movement and eyebrow action, how their skin flushes or not based on their words or reflection of present listeners, the different areas of discoloration on their skin that might indicate heat or worry, lack of hydration or illness, their hand gestures with head movements and breathing — which fingers open, close, or are held tense or loose…

These are a very small set of things some of us discern that are also combined with scent, quality and tone of voice, heat of their body and more. This is captured quickly and sometimes takes a little while to process it all (which is why we can have these “I got it!” moments well after the fact). What doesn’t usually take a lot of time is our sense of whether or not to trust the person.

You may have noticed that skin pigment had no place in my (and many of our) “data analysis” beyond the references listed above regarding health, illness, nervousness, etc.

Skin color doesn’t function as a mechanical influence on how their brain processes their own environment or in the projecting of their thoughts.

Culture does.

But skin color also doesn’t indicate culture. For any people who think otherwise, I can only surmise they simply haven’t met enough people beyond their insular social circles. Many haven’t been to other countries or have friends who challenge their social stereotypes.

Skin color has no meaning in relation to physical actions. None whatsoever. A dark-skinned or light-skinned person grasps a door handle using a very similar nerve impulse, muscle-innervation process that any other human capable of grasping a doorknob has. Skin color doesn’t make a body’s nervous system and muscular action act a different way than another individual’s, just like it doesn’t make a person’s actual brain-processing respond differently to biochemical-electrical stimulation of their sensory system.

The positive or negative reflection of the social environment can force people to group according to similar and obvious surface-level differences out of a need for protection. Basically, a fear response (and in some cases, warranted for a time). It is a reinforcing mechanism that produces inbred thinking, stimulates base animal emotional responses, and the continual same-self grouping that limits our ability to get beyond ourselves and toward a future where racism and cultural inbreeding is a thing of the past.

There are studies showing reduced implicit racial bias in autistics, and I have given an idea of why I think this is so in this essay. Again, there are always outliers and those inculcated in cultures that stimulate racism, prejudice and, quite simply injustices to our fellow human beings for something they have no control over for simple being born into their unique presence.

I would like your opinions on your own experiences on how closely my essay with my autistic perspective is similar to yours.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

If you like my writing, please share, clap, and/or comment, I do read them and value your shared experiences.