wonder how he can cause change

In the last few years, I’ve often become frustrated trying to answer a simple question: What can I do to achieve greater change in the world? I’ve read that true change is achieved in groups, through collaboration, and not on one’s own, and at the same time, I worry that maybe I don’t work well in groups without taking a leadership position because I have Asperger’s, and thus, I can never truly follow the direction of other, more seasoned activists.

I don’t think of myself as an activist. Some others do. I’ve written articles on particularly race and sexuality and sometimes studied and talked a lot about these issues, but I worry that I don’t really do anything in terms of a greater political struggle. Then again, I don’t know if anyone can do anything productive individually, but then I come back to the idea of having trouble working in groups and I just feel lost.

I’ve thought about going through anti-racist training; that costs money. I’ve thought about joining various political struggles, and the people sometimes disgust me with their hypocrisy. I’d rather not join them and be a fellow hypocrite, even if I might be one already.

I’m a big fan of the idea of intersections between issues: how something like racism doesn’t exist in isolation, and how one form of privilege can intersect with another form of oppression. This is a very useful framework for analysis, but knowledge of it can be stifling as well—in some way or another, I am an oppressor, so how can I ever resist the privilege I cannot change? This truth can make me think that there’s nothing I can do to cause change.

At the same time, there’s a lot I can do in my personal life: consume less, continue working on issues from my past to move forward, and focus on greater independence. But what can I do to cause greater change outside in the world?

Examine the intersections of race and disability in listening to music

Because of Asperger's, I'm literal--I don't know how else to put it. I have trouble understanding figures of speech and sometimes detecting sarcasm and reading social cues generally. So when I listen to a piece of music that I love, it takes a while to understand what it "means"--I have written about how I used to not pay attention to lyrics, which could prove problematic when enjoying some music with heavily violent and sexist language (like some gangsta rap, for example).

Still, to this day when I first hear a piece of music, I listen to it passively, taking in the overall "sound": the arrangement, the way a singer or instrumentalist phrases words, sometimes words that I don't "get." A great example of how I listen to music is seen in my favorite record, Otis Redding's 1966 soul classic, "Try a Little Tenderness." It's not exactly the subtlest or most nuanced rendering of a song ever made, but certainly an incredible arrangement that augments Otis's intensity (think of the "Got-ta, got-ta" phrases) and underscores what I remember a guest years ago on VH1 calling the "orgasmic" tendencies of Otis's phrasing.

So perhaps my idea of greatness in music has little to do with subtlety, though Otis could affect me with minor breaks in his voice (in "These Arms of Mine," for example). I must confess, it took me a while to connect my reaction to Otis's music with Asperger's--I recently read a small part of music historian Brian Ward's book Just My Soul Responding, which points out that Otis was not the most nuanced of singers or interpreters, which fed into 1960s-era whites' love of his music--they sometimes romanticized what they viewed as black musicians' hyper-sexuality, glorifying particularly Otis's music for perhaps fitting the stereotypical images they projected onto blacks in general.

Now, I think the way I listen to music has more to do with having Asperger's than being white, but perhaps they overlap here: I wonder how blacks, for example, with Asperger's hear the music they love, if they also have trouble with subtlety. I sometimes need the analysis of critics or historians to help me understand what a song is "about." Hopefully, over time I'll be able to figure out on my own to not respond to a figurative lyric like Michael Jackson's "Beat It" with a literal interpretation like, "Beat what?"