What do you expect to see?

Stereotypes are difficult things to deal with – suppose they have a grain of truth in them? Suppose an actual real life example (something true) in the wrong context can come across as a stereotype? It’s not long since I read a story in the media about a photograph illustrating the British prison system causing problems. It was a real-life photo of a real-life prisoner and prison officer interacting normally. The prisoner was black and the prison officer was white – they were real people, and those were their real appearances. But using that photo as a representative of the prison system carried an unintentional racist message – that prisoners tended to be black and prison officers tended to be white. Which was not what was meant at all, but intent doesn’t help when harm has been done.

On a much smaller scale, I was helping some trainers develop management training material not so long ago. They had provided a list of examples of types of poor managers and the idea was that in the training course people would put their hands up if they’d encountered poor management. It was a light-hearted exercise based on the assumption that everyone was going to have encountered poor managers at some point in their life. Part of the fun of management training (not a phrase I thought I’d write but bear with) is having a grouch about how appalling your own managers are/have been. [Important disclaimer: my current manager is lovely.] So what was the problem?

One of the descriptions of a poor manager was also (sadly) an autistic stereotype. This person:

“focuses on facts, evidence and logic without considering the emotions and personal experiences”.

You do not want to work to this person; they sound like an unkind manager. But they also sound like a classic autistic of the Sheldon Cooper-type.

There are managers who focus on facts, evidence and logic and ignore emotions and experiences. Some of these people will be autistic and some of them won’t be. Not caring about people’s emotions is not acceptable. You can’t just ignore the problem (unfeeling managers) for fear of the autism stereotype. But nor is it OK to use something that looks to me like a caricature of my disability as a symbol of poor practice. So what to do?

In the end, as I was asked for my opinion, I rationalised it like this: What matters is the poor behaviour (failing to consider feelings) rather than a tendency to focus on facts and logic, which can be a feature of autism and not inherently a bad thing. I, as an autistic leader, can be happy with facts, evidence and logic, but I also have a choice whether to focus on them to the exclusion of other things. I may or may not be particularly gifted at considering emotions and personal experiences, but I can make an effort to try (including using help from others). So I reframed the description of the poor manager as being one who doesn’t try to do the right thing, rather than as one whose brain might be inherently wired to make the desired behaviour difficult.

You can see how this got me thinking about stereotypes, because I had to explain why the original phrasing bothered me. It was a statement of fact – unfeeling managers exist, and they cause problems. What was wrong with saying so? That brought me back to the prisoner/prison officer photo – black prisoners and white prison officers exist – what was wrong with showing a photo of them? What was wrong was context which showed black and white in a particular hierarchical relationship, and which showed a common perception of autism as an encapsulation of what’s bad.

Sometimes it not only matters what’s said (or seen) but the context and how it’s framed. Today is the Sunday between Ascension (when Jesus went up into heaven) and Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven to the disciples). I’m crow-barring in here the idea that where things and people are makes a huge difference. Since Jesus and the Holy Spirit are both parts of the three-part God (doctrine of the Trinity here if you’re feeling strong enough) it shouldn’t make much difference which was on earth, should it? This time of the Christian year says that it really did. Jesus the Son of God ascended into heaven, but the Holy Spirit came down and inspired a group of people who had been Jesus’ followers to form the world-wide Church.

This post has been brought to you by the Collect for the Seventh Sunday of Easter:

O God the King of glory,

you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ

with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:

we beseech you, leave us not comfortless,

but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us

and exalt us to the place where our Saviour Christ is gone before,

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.