Understanding and Protecting Amanda Seales

If you haven’t watched the interview with Amanda Seales on Club Shay Shay, I highly highly recommend it. Especially if you are someone who is interested in looking at how things like white supremacist delusion, race, gender, and disability are at play in our institutions and how they factor into a person’s experiences and ability to navigate life, relationships, jobs, etc.

From a disability perspective, Seales talks about receiving a later in life Autism diagnosis which helps her make sense of a lot of her experiences in life of being misunderstood, unliked, and ostracized. And she does such a brilliant and unapologetic job of showing how “unlikeability” can be an ableist response to someone whose brain is simply wired differently than what is considered “normal.” She then goes on to further illustrate how, while it never feels good to be invalidated or disliked for no tangible reason, the real harm is when that perception gets weaponized in spaces that can do actual, tangible (often violent) damage to a person’s body, psyche, education, career, relationships, and therefore life trajectory. She also connects the dots as to how similar nefariousness is at play within the constructs of race and gender. 

As a 40 year old queer woman/mother who is just starting to perceive my chronic mental and physical limitations through the lens of disability (after working in the disability/higher ed field for several years and experiencing too many a-ha moments to list), witnessing this interview was like taking a college-level course on self-advocacy, a survival skill that Seales has razor-sharpened on the tragic need for itself. Finding herself constantly in the crosshairs of misunderstood and unprotected, she didn’t buckle and offer herself up on some platitude platter to be devoured in the court of public opinion; rather, she grabbed a mic and shouted “THAT’S A YOU PROBLEM BECAUSE I’M THE SHIT.”

If you don’t grasp what a huge deal it is for someone with a disability to not only frame but explain their differences and unique traits as assets in a world that is hellbent on misrepresenting them as justifications for dehumanization, exclusion, harm, etc., then you might be someone who is subconsciously doing harm to disabled people. And that is why this interview is such a chef’s kiss. As much as I felt affirmed in my own neurodivergence, I felt challenged in my biases and was able to reflect back on times I may have misunderstood and unintentionally harmed folks whose experiences and brains were different than mine. (This is the restorative justice work we all need to be doing all the time so we don’t keep bombing the world to shit).

In the interview itself, you can bear witness to Seales doing the uncomfortable but necessary labor of self-advocacy and education through direct communication in real time, challenging Shannon Sharpe at nearly every turn, not with malice but with an unrelenting commitment to honesty and to herself as both storyteller and scholar. And if you find that discomfort and directness hard to sit with, you might pass it off as “she’s exhausting” or “she’s doing too much.” But as you start to understand the energy it takes to survive in a society such as this with a brain such as hers, that knee jerk criticism quickly alchemizes into heartfelt compassion. She’s not exhausting, she's exhausted from a world that won’t allow her to safely exist as her full self.

Anyway I don’t know why I felt the need to write a Thursday morning thesis on this, I really just came here to say my broke ass just joined her Patreon and your broke ass should too because the AIPACs and status-quo-ers of the world will continue to come for someone so powerful in her truth-telling, so we need to come together to not only understand but protect the treasure that is Amanda Seales. Thank you, good day.