whose "black and white thinking"?
Our existence as a messy, heterogenous group of people defies the linear categories that society attempts to impose on us.
"Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance... The disease itself becomes a metaphor." - Susan Sontag
Autistic people are often accused of rigidity. We're told that we're too concrete, too absolute in our conclusions; that we don't allow room for context and nuance. This is often called "black and white thinking".
PsychCentral defines "black and white thinking" as a phenomenon in which "your thought patterns assign people, things, and actions into one of two categories – 'good' or 'bad'."
There's a tangled knot in the centre of this logic, and it's one I've been trying to unpick in my thoughts for a while now. My grey-and-blue thinking goes something like this: we autistic people, apparently, are the ones who split things into "good" and "bad"; who create rigid categories, and see things in extremes. And yet, neuronormative culture creates stereotypes and simplistic ideas about what autism is. Neuronormative culture, in fact, created the category of autism itself.
Isn't the DSM-V – the manual of "mental disorders" that underpins the practise of psychiatry – the most explicit example of black-and-white thinking that there is?
Many theories of autism have looked for the defining feature of what it means to be autistic by looking for our deficit. Researchers have argued that we lack theory of mind, empathy, executive function, a social instinct, and various combinations of the above. In doing so, these researchers have attempted urgently to find a reason that we as a category of people are "disordered".
As I've come to accept my own diagnosis and learn more about my own identity, I've drifted further away from what Nick Walker calls the "pathology paradigm" of autism, towards the "neurodiversity paradigm". The former is the explanation of what it means to be autistic through a prism of medicalised symptoms. Picture a doctor in a white coat, intoning gravely: I'm afraid there is no cure.
But the latter is something much more expansive. The antithesis of black-and-white thinking, I imagine it as a gush of colours: people come in many different shades, with an array of traits and ways of thinking, all of which are valid, all of which are human.
When we think about autism as a "disorder", we're buying into a "good versus bad", "black and white" way of thinking. (It's worth noting, also, that the very notion of "good and bad" correlating with "black and white" is a tool of white supremacy. This binary mindset, reinforcing the myth of the "normal person" and a superior race, is so deeply coded in the language and aphorisms we hear every day. This is yet another example of the dominant culture’s overly simplified, rigid categories.)
Autism as a "disorder" is a metaphor: it's the spectre of loneliness, isolation, social rejection. It's a social illness. We are apparently diseased by our inability to connect. Thinking of us this way allows those who are not autistic to feel some relief: "Thank god, we are able to connect to each other". It reinforces the normality of the majority, by demonising and pathologising others.
That's why I'm leaning away from this very non-autistic rigidity. My autistic identity is fluid; it feels different on my skin every day. Every autistic person I meet is a new embodiment of what it means to be autistic. We are lavender, hazel, indigo, cyan. Our very existence as a messy, heterogenous group of people defies the linear categories that society attempts to impose on us.
Our multifaceted, extraordinarily varied lived experiences are a constant reinvention of what it means to be a person, to be in community, to build connections, to love. I don't believe we are the "black-and-white thinkers", after all.
Further reading -
Nick Walker - Autism & The Pathology Paradigm
Pete Sanders, Janet Tolan - People Not Pathology: Freeing Therapy From The Medical Model