#fancy classism

[cardassiangoodreads]

Some of the fixation on D.C. crime is because Trump himself is a dumb racist, but it also shows just how white and rural the Republican Party is (even as they made gains with urban minority voters in 2024, the white rurals still drive the party's priorities) because the only way you can still see those cities as so terrifying even as urban crime is at historic lows, is if you're the kind of person who evaluates "danger" in a city as "visible homeless people" or "there are more minorities than white people around me." If you've ever been in a fandom community that discusses going to a convention and you have some small-town people / people who never leave the house who are considering going to that city for the first time, they are the fucking scourge of that discussion, needing constant reassurance for what they claim is something like "being a woman" but it becomes super fucking clear that actually what causes them to decide what is a marker of "unsafe" is racism and classism (and primarily racism).

Anyway, proud to have been an urbanite even when I was growing up in the suburbs, my parents knew it was in my best interest to make a point of taking me to downtown Detroit for as many activities as possible as early in life as possible so I didn't grow up like some of my classmates panicking the second the bus got to a neighborhood where most of the people outside were black. I've lived in large cities my whole adult life, including one of the "dangerous" cities Trump called out, and I wouldn't have it any other way! Baltimore is dangerous to you Donald Drumpf because we don't want you here!!!

[cardassiangoodreads]

I also think something worth talking about when talking about accommodations for ADHD and other disabilities that often require stuff like extra time, leniency with deadlines, and so on is how quickly it can become a class issue. My mom teaches at a private school that both has a lot of rich students and a lot of poorer students on scholarship, and she says that she regularly sees cases where a rich kid who is probably neurotypical is able to get a doctor's note for an "extra time" accommodation just by psychiatrist-shopping, but where she just as regularly notices genuine issues with focus and time management (and that they fit patterns she's seen in me as someone with ADHD-PI) in middle/lower-income kids who don't have access to expensive testing, and encourages the school to do something about it and is ignored. In general, there's a class issue that I think a lot of the disability rights internet doesn't want to talk about in terms of the inaccessibility of diagnosis - or at least, exclusively talk about it in terms of "why you need to respect self-diagnosis" in terms of Internet discourse (and often in terms of laundering people who are clearly lying, lbh, and removing a way for actual disabled people to call them out for furthering harmful stereotypes about the diagnoses they actually have and this person doesn't. I'm not totally against self-dx but this is a real issue with it!) But I think precisely because a lot of the discoursers themselves are people who benefited from class privilege in this way and related other ways like educational privilege, they're reluctant to discuss it or even just aren't aware of it as a dynamic.

Anyway, I think there's a way we can push back against the RFK Jrs of the world who are themselves extremely privileged people who just want to hurt everyone with ADHD and are using "it's overdiagnosed" as an excuse for that - and also admit that overdiagnosis is a real problem but so is underdiagnosis. It's that we're misidentifying people because of the role that money has in acquiring a diagnosis. It's undeniable that a lot of rich parents see "get your kid tested for an extra time exception" as a thing anyone can and should do to give their kid a leg up (and as a person with ADHD who doesn't need that particular accommodation, I can verify from personal experience that some psychiatrists tend to give it out pretty automatically) and also, that a lot of kids who genuinely need these accomodations are getting double-whammied because they aren't able to afford testing and not enough schools are willing or able to bridge that gap. Double whammied because it's not just that they aren't getting the help they need to succeed - but that kids who don't need it and are already ahead of them as a result, are getting it instead. That's a problem! We've got to figure out what to do about it if we actually care about educational equity.

[cardassiangoodreads]

There are so many posts on here that are really clearly about neurodivergence or just failing to live up to sky-high parental expectations or the stuff you were told about what your adult life would be like if you did X, Y and Z not panning out, that people instead frame as being about “former gifted kid syndrome.” And I know it’s basically a meme at this point and I shouldn’t take it too seriously but FYI, the fact that you were labeled “gifted” has very little to do with any of that and has much more to do with stuff like race and class and parental education level. If you’re white (or in a school district like mine, East or South Asian or MENA, though they still had to out-compete us of course) and upper middle class, that has way more to do with why you were G&T than your autism or ADHD. After all a ton of kids with those are NOT labeled gifted and are often instead labeled what is typically treated as its opposite, “special ed.” And I really think it’s important that we push back against the way this narrative suggests the “gifted” label really is indicative of some inherent special status or ability and not just segregation by another name, anti-busing for Millennials.