As my neurodivergent and disabled family navigates healthcare, school, and life, I wish over and over that the professionals we interact with knew something about neurodiversity, the social model of disability, intersectionality, and equity literacy. We spend so much time educating folks in hopes they’ll gain the framing needed to see our family.
These are essential frameworks that every professional should be conversant in. In my experience, corporate harassment and discrimination training doesn’t really go into any of these. Wishing it did. Let’s bake them into our annual training and our company cultures. Let’s bake them into the curriculum for everyone. Those wanting to do ethical, inclusive, and informed work need to do the work of obtaining these tools.
Here’s my attempt at an introductory primer that got some good feedback on Twitter this week:
Further, we need MESH in our schools, our companies, and our professional development:
We all need these lenses and tools. Start baking them in so that the most marginalized and vulnerable people don’t have to provide free emotional labor and education over and over and over. It’s exhausting.
For “All means all” to actually apply to neurodivergent and disabled and marginalized kids, public educators need these tools.
To avoid building behaviorism and bias into our systems, tech workers need these tools.
Everyone working with other people need these tools.
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