2018-03-07

An accidental trilogy of posts about intelligence, IQ, and oppression:

David M. Perry on how IQ test results are affected by racial bias – and how, paradoxically, prosecutors in the US are using knowledge of this bias to push for more executions of people of color

Rachel Darnall on a couple who lost custody of their children because of their low IQs

Other posts about disability and oppression:

Annie Segarra and Jonathan Hume on why disabled people don’t have marriage equality

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Alabama still keeps hundreds of mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement despite a direct court order to stop doing so

Maxfield Sparrow on the extremely high unemployment rate among college-educated autistic adults (CN: This article might be super depressing if you are preparing to seek employment soon. :-\ )

Washington State was considering creating forms for the process of sterilizing disabled people under guardianship; after protest from disability rights groups, including ASAN, they have decided against it.

Elizabeth Bartmess on good autistic representation in fiction: a three-part series

Movie and television reviews:

Posts about bad parents and their memoirs of their bad parenting:

Lydia Z.X. Brown on how frequently bad parents get the spotlight while autistic people’s rights are ignored

Shannon des Roches Rosa on how autism parent memoirs could be helpful – and how they usually do harm instead

Other media and reviews:

Sarah Kurchak on how autistic headcanons fill the gaps in official autistic representation. (I have a small problem with this article, which is that Kurchak inadvertently gives the impression that there’s less official representation than there is – many of the forms of representation she describes can also be found in books and stories I’ve reviewed! – but many of those books and stories aren’t very well known, especially among non-SFF-geeks, so, eh. Anyway, that’s a minor point, and the main points of the article are very good.)

On the Parkland shooting:

On intersections within autism:

Sometimes people say that neurodiversity advocates have “nothing to offer” to severely disabled autistic people (even though there is plenty of overlap between those groups). Emily Paige Ballou explains what people might mean by that, and what we do offer.

Misc:

Shira Rubin on autism therapy robots (There is more pathologizing language in this article than I would like, especially at first, but it also has some interesting information, especially where it lists potential problems with the robots.)

For Black History Month, Finn Gardiner tells the story of “Blind Tom” Wiggins, who may have been an autistic savant

Amy Sequenzia on the difference between “independent living” and real independence