Violet, there's never a guarantee against backfires, but it seems she'd need trust for her daughter to go along with what she says about friends, otherwise it would just trigger stubbornness and a conviction her mother is trying to sabotage her friendships, which is a recipe for the “not talking to her parents 30 years later” scenario, and won't stop her getting the 'wrong' friends either (she'd do it behind her mother's back). On the other hand, surely it's possible to teach her to spot false friends (once she has more trust)? The trick is to get her asking about possible motives for unusual requests, and about whether she's treated the same way as others in the group and if not, is it some kind of protectiveness or is it exploitation. Anyway, we don't know they're up to anything illegal. At the moment all we know is they swear and spit on the floor, neither of which are particularly unusual for teenagers among themselves, and both fall into the category of conventional objections I can never quite understand why NT's care about so much. Most of my friends would fit an authoritarian's definition of 'bad' (unusual lifestyles and so on) but probably not what you're thinking of, i.e. manipulative and a bit sociopathic. We're always going to be in the out-crowd rather than the in-crowd in terms of friends. This is for the very good reason that someone whose ethics are unconventional is usually more open to difference than someone who's straight-laced and judgemental (after all, we're often the ones about whom other children's parents will be saying, “stay away from him, he acts weird, he's got no manners and he gets angry”). The trick is to learn to tell someone who really, underneath, doesn't have respect from a person who just seems, on the surface, to do things conventionally defined as disrespectful. Also, in NT's, seeking any kind of social approval however problematic, and being very dependent on the regard of others, is usually a sign of problems in childhood focused on the question of unconditional love (parents were felt to be either harsh and unloving, or neglectful and “never there”, or both). I'm not sure if it's the same with aspies showing a similar desire for approval, but I'd guess so. The underlying feeling of being unloved would need to be addressed before a person could be more selective in their choice of friends.
Racism in the subset of NT's who are racist is all about status: putting the other person in their place so the self can feel secure in her/his place. It has to do with fear of the breakdown of the ego or the decomposition of the body, and warding-off this fear by breaking down someone else's ego or body instead. Usually it has a subtext that “they” (whichever group is targeted) are responsible for one's own lack of enjoyment or its equivalent on a social level (e.g. responsible for national collapse, the decay of social morals, crime, etc). Hence why racism is most common in 'authoritarian personalities', and in people who are insecure about their own origins or belonging. I think it's this conventional account of racism which leads to the view that aspies are incapable of it, because this kind of racism is using exactly those forms of social functioning we don't have (though I doubt it's entirely impossible). I'd speculate that with aspies it would be closer to a phobic reaction. Some of the previous comments made me think of HP Lovecraft, who's one of those speculated maybe-aspies from before the label was invented. He was reportedly stricken with terror at the sight of a black person. We don't have a record of exactly why, but it's pretty clear in his stories: he associates black people with the uncontrolled far reaches of human life, with chaos and misery and incomprehensible activities, and he maps into this unknown zone the thought that they might be up to all kinds of terrifying things. In other words, he makes a quasi-rational transition from lack of understanding to fear. Of course this will have been fuelled by the prejudices of his day, but he's put a specific slant on it: he doesn't hate black people, he's frightened of them. My own experience of phobias is that they're a response to difficulties interpreting the action/behaviour or who/whatever we're phobic of, especially if combined with a risk of sensory overload (cliff edges because they affect one's sense of balance and it's hard to tell whether one is safe or not, dogs because they're running around and one might not be able to tell if they're about to bark or bite or jump on you, fire because one doesn't know if it's going to spread, etc). In principle this could expand easily enough to groups of people based on their communication patterns, dress, social reactions, food, perfume etc being perceived as collectively unfamiliar. This is not only different to standard racism, but different to standard phobia as well, and the usual therapies aren't all that effective if this is the root: they're based on the assumption that a phobia is an irrationally reinforced reflex or projection, rather than a rational deduction from incomplete information and an unusual sensory frame. The two things I think might help are exposure in a controlled setting and better information.
Something else that comes to mind is that an aspie might take literally something for which there is no evidence, which racists believe (or pretend to believe) for motivated reasons, but which the aspie takes absolutely seriously based on limited evidence (someone's told them that Asians eat dogs or whatever, and they've taken this, not as an expression of prejudice, but as a literal truth-claim). Whereas rebutting such claims will have little effect on a standard racist (the claim is a cover for the projective mechanisms involved), it would have a lot of effect on someone who literally believed the claim: it might be as simple as providing counter-evidence (though anyone who's argued with an aspie will know it will take a lot of good-quality counter-evidence to make a dint in a strongly held belief).
11 Mar 2011, 4:55 pm
Good luck and I hope all turns out well.
Only adding to my confusion.
