When I think of it, it's kind of genius

When I was coming up in Ohio with my grandparents, they lived an upper middle class existence. I remember being forbidden to go the the skating rink or to the fair because those 'weren't the kind' of kids my grandma approved of. 

Some females talk about having a thing for bad boys. Wanting the guys on the wrong side of the tracks. I was the opposite. Swooning over the smartest guys, or the ones who were the best at sports. Chasing after hood dudes seemed backward. It wasn't anything I would ever participate in.

You find yourself listening carefully to people's stories about themselves. How they speak, the words they choose, and how they paint themselves. A mentality is the most important thing. You can be from the hood but know you don't have to stay there forever. You can like some things about the hood but not be defined by it. You can be a part of the hood but not allow it to shape your relationship to right and wrong.

The asbergers guy stated once 'I'm like Georgie Porgie.' The song. 'Kiss the girls and make them cry.' I rolled my eyes. Mainly because I am not a girl, I am a grown assed woman.

But I would know the frustration he could create. However I am educated and believe in therapy and psychology. Most black people do not. Most lower income black people would rather drink or drug themselves to death rather than get therapy and help for their issues. I could bet dollars to doughnuts he has never been officially diagnosed. Just told he has a 'learning disability.' It's left at that.

The thing that occurred to me is that this disorder in men and boys of color can easily masquerade itself as toxic masculinity; therefore normalizing it. Since men and boys of color are ignored in therapeutic circles, the behavior is never questioned. Being emotionally unavailable, and unable to express empathy becomes normal. Being stuck in a perpetual state of childhood and having no interest in other people other than themselves becomes a signature rather than a syndrome. 

I started to wonder how much trauma either while a child is in the womb or in infancy has to do with a childs ability to develop in a normal fashion. Can asbergers go undetected in small children if no one is paying attention anyway? If no one is trying to communicate and grow a child does it take longer to know that a child has the syndrome? Since therapy isn't an option then labels get hung. "That retarded kid" or "That slow kid". Being absorbed by a ghetto landscape makes it next to impossible to know a syndrome is happening.  People continually try to deal with the subject in normal settings and get frustrated or heartbroken because the person with the syndrome cannot function like everyone else. The male becomes that 'cad that breaks hearts left and right,' when in actuality he can't process emotion. He can't express it or react to it in an empathetic way. Women think he's carved out of stone. Nope, it's just asbergers.

Kinda genius.