Institutionalized racism against autistic paople

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In the July 2009 autism conference near Chicago there was a presentation by a forensic psychologist who worked for law enforcement which claimed that many computer mal-functions are caused by high functioning autistic mad scientists who are taking revenge against society for a lifetime of abuse. At first I dismissed it as a crackpot conspiracy theory. But I became worried about forensic psychiatry and forensic psychology and their profiling practices when the news reported two cases of people being convicted of crimes solely by the testimony of forensic psychiatrists. One adolescent was convicted of a rape murder because he liked to draw pictures of sword battles for a hobby. His defense was not allowed to show that he was not the only possible suspect in the rape murder. A better known case made use of "expert" testimony by a forensic psychiatrist to convict and execute Todd Willingham in Texas for an arson and murder that some fire experts concluded that he did not set. I think this puts us all in danger if we are ever a suspect in a crime.
I went for a psychological evaluation and got disgnosed as having a personality disorder solely because I am autistic. I got into trouble for explaining something that apparently accidentally offended the evaluator when I answered a question on Goethe's Faust during the IQ test. I compared the bed of sloth in the prologue to the baseball song's words "I don't care if I ever get back" to "Let this moment last forever for it is so fair" and thus insulted baseball which so many people love so passionately. Even the fountain pens in my pocket were considered a pathological symptom. Here are some quotes from the written report. "Autistic persons are noted to be cognitively rigid and overly judgemental and insensitive in peer interactions. These individuals view the world, strictly through their own point of view." "Their tendency for rigidity, obscession and rationalization, makes them overly focused on themselves (narcissistic) at the expense of others." These statements that apply to all of us are representative of the report and probably many others like it that establish a negative stereotype.
In defense of my good name, I had two additional evaluations performed, one by a psychologist who specializes in autism and a psychiatrist researcher from the Kennedy Krieger Autism Research Institute who works as an autism a consultant for medical schools and a former psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Both did long investigations of me, prople in my family, and places where I work and assured me that I meet none of the DSM characteristics for any Axis 2 personaluty disorders that most if not all autistic people are supposed to have.
When the wrong psychologist finds out that you are autistic everything you say, think, or do is automatically wrong. If you conscientiously object to taking a job where you are required to sell tobacco products you are rationalizing your expectation to get special treatment that excuses you from doing something you don't feel like doing. If you are prosecuted for a crime you didn't commit your claim of innocense or evidence that you are being framed is a paranoid characteristic of the profile for autism. It is like having the wrong color of skin in the early Twentieth Century America. You can't get a fair trial because right and wrong are irrelevant.

You can't be racist towards an autistic person just based on the fact that they have autism.

You can't be racist against a group that isn't a race.

That said, there are very good reasons that rules are in place that could be seen as institutionalized discrimination. Any person with a known mental disability is considered a liability because their disability causes their behavior to be unpredictable and out of the ordinary.

A person whose behavior is unpredictable and out of the ordinary could easily react in an inappropriate way to a stressful event while on the job, and this well includes autistic meltdowns.

While the term "race" might or might not be exactly the same as some other term, the discrimination is the effect of defining someone as a race by nothing more than a difference of brain. I think the concept of defining humans as a set of different races is invalid because the differences in facial features, hair, eye, and/or skin shade are not significant enough to define someone as other than a member of the human race. Thus, I think the concept of defining any group of humans as belonging to some different race is wrong regardless of whether the criteria is the continent of one's immediate ancestors or whether one has a brain difference that interferes with those natural proficiencies in performing arbitrairly valued social intercourses. Many of the deficites of many forms of autism are inability to render to society certain behaviours to which society might not necessairly be legitiately entitled.
But the discrimination against autistic people has all the characteristics of what we traditionally think of as racism. Many of us are deemed so inferior that it is considered acceptable to diminish our civil rights, human rights and human dignity to something far less than those of the general population solely because some of us seem a little different. We cannot conform perfectly enough to customs that have no logic to them and can be hated for it. Would mathematicians and physicists dare to define those who have difficulty with algebra as suffering from a pathology? It is the same thing when you can get into trouble for wearing green socks on your day off or some other trivial and patently harmless eccentricity. You are medicalized because you could not guess who might find green socks offensive.
I think it needs to be made as dangerous for any forensic psychiatrist or psychologist to make the statement, "Autistic people are narcissistic, and incapable of empathy," as it is to say "Jewish people cheat others out of money," or "Africans are lazy." These kinds of junk science prejudices are the first step in things like the KKK or Jim Crow laws that deny autistic people employments or even licenses for which they are perfectly well qualified. This is where psychiatry has some house cleaning to do.

I would rephrase as it being bigotry not racism. That said, that institutional nut probably isn't playing with a full deck.

You're talking about ableism, not racism. Autistic people are not a race.

Yup, I'm just here to say racism is the wrong word.

Shameless Neuroticism go!

I think the word the original poster and most of the other posters are trying to say is "prejudice".

What the forensic psychologist you spoke about engaged in was not really appropriate to be labelled as racism. It was the poor expression of an ill thought out personal opinion with no evidence base to back up his claim simply a contraversal statement in order to garner this individual attention in media outlets. Amongist his profession it will not carry any weight unless he has credible peer reviewed evidence base to back up his claims. Without that he is simply pandering to a media and the media have no quarm in engaging in disability hate crimes when it is convenient for them.

Forensic psychology and profiling has little credible evidence base and this has been known about for years that it paints a very obtuse and vague imagine of a personality that they are trying to seek and they have been proven wrong time and again. The most recent UK case was of a pediatrician who falsley accussed a mother of having Münchausen syndrome and thus was responsible for feeding her baby an overdose of salt that lead to his death. When the cornors evidence actually indicated a type of Diabeties that involved an inability of the body to reculate salt levels, not too disimilair from the more popular known condition Type 1 Diabeties Milliteus

That doctor I believe was struck off for his lack of credibility and evidence base. Yet at the time his convicition was taken seriously enough to have this mother convicted for infanticide and spend 2 years in prison.

But such cases actually increase the scrutiny and regulation surrounding such professions so the more they loose credibility the more they are kept an eye on and the more they are scrutinised and thus the less power they are able to exhibit in a court of law

Ah, yes, autism and rigidity. We aren't all rigid, and some neurotypicals can be just as "rigid" and narcissistic as people say we are.

I wish to add that - contrairy to the junk science of the likes of the KKK and the Nazis - Jews, people of an arbitrarly specified skin shads, and the like are not a separate race any more than those whose brains are slightly different from the norm.

an aversion exists. not every NT has it, but it's only those with a smattering of psychology (or a degree) who try to organize their aversion into a derogatory ideology.