I'm in a crowd, listening as three speakers in a row rant that after centuries of white male privilege, people like me have no business even speaking. We should just shut up.

And I feel I can't challenge them--this crowd's hostile.

Later in a workplace-kitchen I grumble to an older woman "That group called me a racist for being white, called me sexist and right-wing for being male. Those are SLURS based on my ancestry & looks, not my speech or actions. They're no better than the racists & sexists who slur Obama & Clinton!"

Free speech, reverse racism/sexism... but a third issue gnaws at me till it comes clear. These speakers defined 'minority' selectively. I belong to multiple minorities--autistic (bashed for it) and a child prodigy (bashed for it) and chemosensitive (Genetic vulnerability to solvents; both my sister and I nearly died of it.) I'd add a fourth, psychic (again it runs in the family; aura-sensing, predictive and telepathic dreams; but also vulnerability to other's foul moods) except of course most American and European readers will sneer at the very idea--though it runs in families just as strongly as autism, prodigism or chemosensitivity... or skin color.

My differences are all realer than skin-deep ideas like race; every one of them makes my world sharply different from normal people. Senses, thinking, what's poison what's not... vital stuff. Treatment by others? The Nazis killed autistics like me and I've personally heard teachers say we're so disruptive we ought to die--or at least be locked up. The Catholic Church apologized for its silence in the Holocaust but not for its own holocaust of witches. Child prodigies get bashed even more often than gays or trannies.

So I'm not gonna shut up about MY issues. No matter who tells me to. Left or right.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• "These are slurs": direct quote from a PBS interview I saw a few days ago--a professor said "My students say 'You're a white male, you don't get to talk about that!' It's gotten so extreme I've started hearing white, male and man as ethnic slurs. As bad as Trump's trolls."
• Why now?: it was days ago that a professor at Middlebury College invited conservative Charles Murray to defend his recent book Coming Apart--and students rioted to prevent a debate. That PBS interview was days ago too. So why dream of it now, days later?
  1. I just read Atlantic Magazine--it had a letter from a white guy upset that essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote he can't trust ANYONE white these days. Coates did say it and deserved to be called on it. "I can't trust ANY whatevers" is clearly bigotry (unless of course you fill in the blank with lawyers, in which case it is simply true); racism learned through ugly experience is still racism, and I too felt Coates should have copped to it. Yet the letter-writer apologized for objecting, as if he only has the right to inoffensive speech. That is, he sounds like a woman, surrounded by men who she expects, from ugly experience, will shame her for even speaking.
  2. I just heard the Bernal Jazz Quintet. They were competent but their style just just wasn't my thing. Rather than admit that, when asked, what I said was... "Old white guys playing safe & respectable." I used age, gender, race as slurs myself!
• ACTION 1: Don't whine about others using slurs till I quit using 'em. They're ground-in deep.
• Why resent being lumped in with my gender or race? Because the purpose is to silence me, or dismiss whatever I say; but also because I'm profoundly different from normal people of any race, gender, orientation, or culture. At least three rarities interact to flood me with information; overwhelm is common.
  1. I was a prodigy (IQ in the 170-200 range); it's hard for me to communicate with normal people and even gifteds are no picnic. I live in a cognitive isolation just as genetic as Down's syndrome--and as profound. Racists fuss over a few IQ points, as if they weren't caused by poverty, miseducation, cultural bias, malnutrition and higher levels of toxins. I know first-hand that both right-wing racism AND left-wing egalitarianism are false.
  2. Second sight runs in my family. My sensory world isn't what normal people describe at all--I sense people's moods directly, and get advisory dreams full of information I can't possibly know. For decades I didn't really get that others didn't see as I do--nor that if I shared my real experience it freaked them out. It still did.
  3. But the reason I'm having such dreams now is that in 2017 I learned how severe my autism is. I'd known for years I was on the spectrum--geeky, socially fragile. But even a quick run through the DSM-IV criteria made it clear I'm clinically autistic--I partly mask the severity by using my brains and second sight as crutches to get by socially, when autistic me can't. Examples: I can't recognize faces, but know people by their energy/auras--a sense I rely on that the authors of the DSM would presumably define as delusional. Or... we autistics are naive, but my math gift detects con games--even if I do mistake them for innocent errors. Work-arounds!
  This year I've been facing how my differences interact--facing just how deep the cognitive & sensory gulf is between me & all of you. This dream, I think, is a rare moment of concord from all three of my inner freaks: genius, witch, and autistic. So...
• ACTION 2: Let normal humans squabble over race and gender. Ignore them. I'm a Three-Headed Freak, and through my six eyes y'all look near-identical. You have no idea what true otherness is.

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