In middle school, late 90s, I knew an Asian girl who was in commercials. I remember her talking about it later on in high school that she was explicitly there to add diversity to the commercial and she knew it.
I bring this up because we’ve artificially made things look more equal as a society even when they were not. Always push back for actual numbers, be it diversity in schools or anything else.
When I was a kid I noticed this sort of tokenizing happening in commercials, only I didn’t know that there was a word for it (if ‘tokenizing’ had even been coined yet).
So I pointed it out cause I thought it was odd, and people thought I was being racist. I think that deep down, in my innocent mind of a child, I simply had an intuition that there was something dishonest and reductive about the way people of color were being used in the marketing industry. I just didn’t know how to phrase that in a way that people could understand.
A lot of things I’ve said that have rubbed people the wrong way have been like that. Things that are based on an accurate intuition and simply communicated poorly, which then get lumped into the box with the ignorant and hateful people of the world. Probably because I grew up surrounded by those sorts of people, so my vocabulary reflected that until I started learning new ways to communicate. And even then people thought I was being disingenuous or mocking because the new vocabulary felt awkward on my tongue for a while.
Even now I put my foot in my mouth from time to time. I do tend to see things from a different perspective and people tend to be uncomfortable with anything but blindly conforming campism. But it’s less about lack of vocabulary at this point at least.
Talking like you’re talking is what got me my peer-reviewed autism diagnosis.
I am keely interested in understanding the world and sharing my understanding of that world; I assume everyone is the same and that’s when I get into trouble.
For me, it’s just good to know that there are other people who think like me and that it’s a perfectly valid (if maybe unpopular) to navigate the world. I don’t have a diagnosis, either, and I don’t know what “having” it would mean since it’s such a wide range of characteristics and traits. The important thing is to know who I am.
Wait I thought you said you did get a diagnosis? Or does a “peer-reviewed autism diagnosis” mean you got your autism card from other autistic people? Cause I think I have that already, at least…
And yeah, learning that there are other people like me who understand me and what it’s like to live as a person like me is a really helpful thing. It’s like solidarity in a way. It makes it easier to accept myself for who I am
In middle school, late 90s, I knew an Asian girl who was in commercials. I remember her talking about it later on in high school that she was explicitly there to add diversity to the commercial and she knew it.
I bring this up because we’ve artificially made things look more equal as a society even when they were not. Always push back for actual numbers, be it diversity in schools or anything else.
When I was a kid I noticed this sort of tokenizing happening in commercials, only I didn’t know that there was a word for it (if ‘tokenizing’ had even been coined yet).
So I pointed it out cause I thought it was odd, and people thought I was being racist. I think that deep down, in my innocent mind of a child, I simply had an intuition that there was something dishonest and reductive about the way people of color were being used in the marketing industry. I just didn’t know how to phrase that in a way that people could understand.
A lot of things I’ve said that have rubbed people the wrong way have been like that. Things that are based on an accurate intuition and simply communicated poorly, which then get lumped into the box with the ignorant and hateful people of the world. Probably because I grew up surrounded by those sorts of people, so my vocabulary reflected that until I started learning new ways to communicate. And even then people thought I was being disingenuous or mocking because the new vocabulary felt awkward on my tongue for a while.
Even now I put my foot in my mouth from time to time. I do tend to see things from a different perspective and people tend to be uncomfortable with anything but blindly conforming campism. But it’s less about lack of vocabulary at this point at least.
Talking like you’re talking is what got me my peer-reviewed autism diagnosis.
I am keely interested in understanding the world and sharing my understanding of that world; I assume everyone is the same and that’s when I get into trouble.
Apparently this is an atypical trait.
Yes, that sounds familiar. I’m probably on the spectrum but I’ve never been screened for it
For me, it’s just good to know that there are other people who think like me and that it’s a perfectly valid (if maybe unpopular) to navigate the world. I don’t have a diagnosis, either, and I don’t know what “having” it would mean since it’s such a wide range of characteristics and traits. The important thing is to know who I am.
Wait I thought you said you did get a diagnosis? Or does a “peer-reviewed autism diagnosis” mean you got your autism card from other autistic people? Cause I think I have that already, at least…
And yeah, learning that there are other people like me who understand me and what it’s like to live as a person like me is a really helpful thing. It’s like solidarity in a way. It makes it easier to accept myself for who I am
As a woman in tech, I had companies happily using me this exact way just a few years ago.