Category: Health and Safety

How To Recognize and Handle Abnormal People
A Manual for the Police Officer
Matthews and Rowland
1978

Submitter: Another dated police manual we weeded. My colleague left this on my desk with a sticky note, “Who you calling abnormal?” and an arrow pointing the the person of color on the cover. Sigh. We don’t even say “abnormal” anymore, much less “mentally retarded.” Oy. There’s a whole section on “Abnormal Group Behavior,” which includes Civil Protest. The advice is fine; basically keep your cool, but “men in police work” need training, of course!

The Autism Ambassadors Handbook
Kukoff
2013

Submitter: This terribly ableist book is in the library of the university I graduated from. When I discovered it as an autistic student, I was livid. The author, an 18-year-old boy who is being treated as an expert despite his lack of qualifications, describes autistic people in the most alienating way possible (he actually says we sound as if we just stepped off a spaceship). He doesn’t consider that if a child screams or covers her ears, maybe she is hurt or scared by a loud noise. To him, this behavior is just evidence that she is socially oblivious. The author clearly hasn’t talked to many autistic adults. If he had, he’d know that we do NOT want to be “indistinguishable from our peers”, that stimming has an important purpose, and that autistic people want real friends, not assigned “friends” for whom we are a special school project.