How do we talk about repair, and who’s capable, in 500 characters?
“All autistic people can learn to be accountable for their actions, and to say otherwise is infantalizing and ableist.”
Many variations on this theme are making their way through the platforms currently. While on the surface it appears well-meaning and affirming, it’s worth stepping back and considering the claim at face value, and how it might not land well for a significant number of people.
A universal claim about an enormously heterogeneous population is itself a kind of erasure. It quietly writes out people with high support needs, co-occurring intellectual disability, or profound communication differences. “High support needs” is itself not a coherent category, since even the scientific community often can’t tell you where one co-occurring condition begins and another ends. Blanket statements about what “autistic people” are capable of can sound like shaming, continued misunderstanding, and victim-blaming when caregivers are accused of doing a poor job, or autistic people are accused of “using their autism as an excuse.”
Accountability gets treated as one simple operation, but it’s a complex system with many moving parts: perceiving impact, linking cause to self, holding that awareness across time, regulating enough to respond, and repairing in a legible way. Each of those can be intact, partial, or absent, and each can vary with load and context. An observer might not be present for the whole process, or might be misrecognizing a piece of it. Being misperceived is one of the more heartbreaking aspects of being an autistic person.
A meltdown isn’t a choice, so asking for accountability during a meltdown is a failure on the observer’s part. For many, but not all autistic people, accountability after the fact is very possible when it’s scaffolded — but it may not happen according to someone else’s timeline, and people making judgements from only seeing one part of the process are often jumping to conclusions without seeing a longer arc.
One HSN autistic person will master accountability as a child. The person next to them will struggle throughout their lives, even if they appear outwardly to experience higher competence in other areas. This last part can’t be emphasized enough. Part of ableism is projecting an expectation of competence on a person who is unable to meet that expectation. And there’s a big difference between infantilization and recognition of profound disability. Infantilization is a mischaracterization — failure to recognize the extent of a disability is erasure.
If one does not have experience as a parent or caregiver of a HSN autistic person with this particular challenge, or working in a group environment with a wide variety of presentations, and doesn’t have language to talk about the whole arc of the accountability process over time, it’s good to consider the effects of sending shame into the life of a an autistic person or a caregiver with a few key-taps and a click. If it’s a topic of special interest, and your justice sensitivity demands that you speak up, you can still contribute to the conversation in deeply meaningful ways.
One way would be to articulate your own accountability journey, if that is something you have struggled with and overcome. The more detail that verbal autistics who have experienced this struggle can bring to light, the more tools the public will have to understand the interiority of a person who has experienced it, and the more valuable feedback advocates will be able to provide. And hopefully, the less likely others will rush to judgement when they see someone else’s imperfect performance of accountability, without an understanding of where that person is on their journey.
It can be a big challenge to communicate nuance in a 500-character text box, but the effort should be considered admirable, not annoying. What’s your accountability story?