Privilege, Prejudice and My Life

Since I was a child, I’ve been keenly aware of injustice and inequalities. While I’m sure that a big reason for that is being autistic, I think another part is that I’m different from ‘The Normal Human’ of the Western world - the white, middle-class, cishetero, able-bodied, neurotypical male, against which everyone else is seen as lacking or inferior or just unworthy even of notice. I just don’t fit into that ‘normal’ in so many ways, and I’ve always known it, even before I could label it. The list of ‘othering’ factors I experience is long.

Some would assume woman is on that list, but although I was born with a female body, and certainly have experienced sexism, I’ve never identified as a girl or woman or even female. It just wasn’t me, but it took me a long time to define that I’m not actually either gender in my inner self/identity. There are different labels for this, but I feel non-binary best describes me. But of course it marks me out as different from Normal Man too, in a different and even more marginalising way.

Despite this, or maybe even because of it, I am definitely a feminist. Even as a child, I remember protesting the privileges that the males in my family had, though everyone looked at me like I had lost my mind. When I eventually discovered feminism, it felt tailor-made for me. I threw myself into trying to be a ‘right-on’ feminist, to fit in to the required appearance, behaviour, image. It was a long while before I realised so much of it was just another set of expectations to trap me in. Now, though I still agree with the central tenets of feminism, I have found my own way to be ‘liberated’.

Along with feminism I discovered, or rather re-discovered, my sexuality. I called myself lesbian for years, but truthfully, I’ve never liked the word. These days I call myself gay, it doesn’t feel totally right either, but I’ve yet to find a better one. But whatever I call myself, I never felt accepted by the lesbian community any more than I had been anywhere else. I just didn’t, and don’t, fit the mold here either. Being ignored, snubbed, overlooked, excluded etc, got tiresome. So eventually I quietly dropped out of the lesbian community. I doubt I was missed.

Through feminism and attending university, I also came to a consciousness of class. By associating with middle-class people, I realised that I’m not. If you think I should have realised that before, you’re probably right. But it truthfully never occurred to me. I thought class was something that only happened in the UK, us New Zealanders tend to believe ‘we’re all equal’. I soon learnt otherwise, and for a long time I blamed the struggles I was having on classism.

Meanwhile of course I developed physical disabilities. The first of course was CFS, or ME as some call it. I’ve had this for forty years now, and it’s been devastating in its effect on my life. More recently, I’ve developed arthritis, diabetes, low thyroid, a crapped-out ankle, acid reflux and probable IBS. Other problems come and go. There are so many things I can’t do, can’t participate in, together they all thrust me to the margins of the able-bodied world.

And while I was acquiring these physical disabilities, I realised that I’m autistic too. And that I have sensory processing disorder, executive dysfunction, alexithymia and auditory processing disorder with it. The list of ‘conditions’ I have just grew and grew, and the sense of being a ‘marginal person’ just grew and grew with it…

There are of course a few areas in which I could be said to be privileged or ‘Normal’ of course. I grew up in and live in a Western country. I got to university, even if it wasn’t till I was 26 and a ruined health meant I never completed it and likely never will.

Religion? Well I suppose I was nominally Christian in my younger years, but religious differences between my parents meant that it wasn’t exactly pushed on us, and I grew out of it eventually. Since then I’ve gone through the women’s spirituality movement, the New Age movement, a semi-demi-cult and now… nothing. Agnostic probably describes me the best, if I must use a word. Perhaps it’s a privilege in itself, to be able to openly describe myself this way, and reject religion, a prerogative that many in other countries don’t have.

But here’s a funny thing – the one area in which I don’t experience oppression or being ‘different’/in the minority is the one that has often concerned me the most, and which I have probably done the most activism in. And by this I mean race.

I’ve had an awareness of racism since I was a child, possibly even before I was aware of sexism. It’s important to note that I was a post-war child, yes (I sigh), a boomer. But what this meant was that World War Two and the Holocaust were recent collective memory. I didn’t actually meet any Jewish people till later, but I remember becoming aware of how if someone was mean or tight-fisted, people would say ‘don’t be Jewish!’ I made a conscious decision not to use that term ever again. Yes, as a child. Call me precocious.

At some point after that, when us kids were playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’, I found myself wondering why the Indians were always The Bad Guys. I can’t remember if I tried to change the rules or suggested a different game, or maybe we just grew out of it, but at some point we did stop playing it. I don’t know if any of the younger generation still do.

It must have been somewhere in my teens that I first heard of South Africa’s apartheid regime, and was instantly opposed to it. I just knew in my bones it was wrong, and the more I learnt, the more that feeling was confirmed. About ten years later came the Springbok Tour of 1981, which of course was seen by many as the NZ Rugby Union supporting the apartheid regime. Like many Kiwis, to me rugby is The Game, but that made the shock of the Tour only worse. I could not believe that anyone would invite those oppressors to my country, and willingly joined the protests against it.

It was during these protests I became aware of racism here, thanks to Māori activists. That’s not to say it had totally escaped my awareness, but it hadn’t been thrust in my face before that. Along with many other white people, I joined the anti-racism movement, spending more time and energy in it than feminist activities. This lasted several years until health issues meant I dropped out of all political activism. But I’ve continued to see my own racism as something to work on, root out of my subconscious, and I do my best to challenge other white people’s racism too, when I can. It’s an ongoing thing.

I’m conscious of my racial privilege. I know that I can walk around a department store without having staff follow me in the assumption that I’m going to shoplift. I can walk down a street in Remuera (Auckland’s swankiest suburb) and not have people assume that I’m there either to clean a house or rob it. And that’s just the surface stuff – my culture, language or ancestral lands are not under threat of being wiped out, destroyed, suppressed or stolen. I’m not likely to be harassed or beaten up by cops or ‘profiled’ on account of my race. And so on.

The thing that puzzles me though is why for so much of my life, I have so often been more concerned with racial issues than the areas in which I am one of the underdogs? Is it because I have so little privilege in other areas I am more aware of the things I don’t have to experience?

I’m really not sure.

Anyhow, I just wonder if anyone else has a similar story to tell. What are YOUR privileges? What are the issues that have concerned you the most, through the course of your life? Are they the ones you suffer from, or the very ones you don’t? We autistics usually have a keen sense of justice, but where has your focus been?