It's not about ABA. It's not a checklist. It's about the work of being anti-ableist.
I don't write about ABA stuff on my blog. Partly because other people have that covered. Partly because I find that the conversations tend to lean towards people wanting a checklist of how to not be ableist. And I'm interested in people wanting to explore how to live a disability justice framework, which is basically incompatible with checklists.
If I'm looking for a therapist for A-, I'm less interested in finding an "ND-affirming framework" and am more interested in finding a therapist who is dedicated to the work of dismantling their internal ableism, and who sees that as a lifelong practice.
It's like racism. Sure... there are some things that are just clearly racist - stay away from those things. But besides that, nobody can just follow a checklist and then not be racist. It's a lifetime of practice, listening, feeling, learning. It's not about a class being "not racist", it's about who is standing at the front teaching that class and what internal work are they doing, and are they willing to sit in their discomfort.
If you too - (like all of us!) - want a checklist, want to just be told what to say and what to do, how to not say ableist things, how to make sure you're inclusive, you aren't alone! It's a tenant of white supremacy to make folks with relative power be removed from their body. Be afraid of feeling discomfort. Be unable to sit with that horrible feeling when you realize "sh*t! I just said / thought / did something massively ableist!" To try to find surface level ways to not be oppressive. It keeps the system running when us masses continue along without truly, truly feeling how f*ed up things are.
And if we're conditioned not to feel anything, then we'll want an easy checklist - or framework - to follow. It's one more thing we can check off the checklist. "Neurodiversity affirming? Check!! I'm all great now!"
Like the time when I joined a local homeschool FB group and the admins were hella racist (not in like a super subtle way, but in a text book tone-policing the people of color who were being very kind and polite way). I DMd the admins to call them in about it. I even shared some easy to read documents about the trajectory of understanding one's whiteness (the context here was that a bunch of parents and at least one admin were taking a "color blind" approach to homeschooling community). AND I gave her a few very specific options to create safety in the group (mainly.... the admins should take some anti-racism class and they should diversify the all-white-women admin pool).
Ultimately these white women got defensive, and the one white woman who was trying harder than the others said, "Thanks for your feedback! We're going to make a policy against racism for the group!"
"We're going to make a policy!!!" Standard protocol in the book of systems-maintaining-white-supremacy-as-status-quo.
(Because liberation is messy and involves actually listening to other people, hearing their perspective, understanding the harm you've done, and seeing how it fits into a broader system than just the two of you to contribute to the continued, systemic oppression of marginalized folks. Sometimes that can make you feel bad. Sometimes you can hear many, many conflicting things from people and have to sit with the fact that everyone has different needs at different moments.)
And "We're going to make a policy!" is sort of the same thing as "Follow this very specific framework for working with autistic kids, and then you will be ND-affirming and won't have to do any internal work around ableism!" So if someone tells me they're trained in Floortime, or some other thing, I don't really care, I care about what they value and how willing they are to do the work.
Ok now I feel mean. I hope it's clear that I'm saying none of us are at fault for our inclinations around this stuff! It's the people with REAL power, the ones who benefit the most from us upholding the systems of white supremacy, that make this happen.
(Also, as I've said a few billion times, read My Grandmother's Hands!)
Back to ABA. If I were to ever say anything about ABA, it would be uplifting the voice of autistic folks with high support needs who were subjected to ABA, and what they feel about it. And I think this page from Chris Martin's May Tomorrow Be Awake captures it.
In this section, Chris Martin is reflecting on the poem Tall Ideas by Adam, a non-speaking autistic poet who was the youngest poet to have his poem in the Academy of American Poet's Poem-of-the-day selection, and then he also brings in the voice of another non-speaking autistic poet, Hannah.
"Adam cunningly verbs as if his life depends on it. And in a real sense, it does. For Adam to live authentically, he must embrace his role as the masterful ticcer in a world where the vast majority of funding for autism therapy still goes toward ABA and its negation of stimming behaviors. To return to "The Maker of Wanting Space," Adam writes: "Really way of touching the world is / the way I am wanting with / my tics." Movement and touch, called forth by the matrix of bodies and objects that surround him, comprise a large part of Adam's phenomenological expressivity, his being in relation to the world. He once described himself as "a form of pulsating paint." When I described the tall ideas behind this chapter to Hannah, who herself spent painful and fruitless years within the strictures of ABA, she wrote:
"It is hard to tell you how it flows for me today and every day yes yes. Love that you get it yes yes. That makes me begin to flow with what goes toward the freedom to go to the flow that is buzzing around the moment yes yes. Please try to go to the flow that I need to do to validate my life yes yes. Love that you try to get me yes yes. Please get that my movements are like the paint strokes on the canvas that is my life yes yes.
And here is Tall Ideas - https://poets.org/poem/tall-ideas
