|Sarah|

later one of my colleagues approached me in private and said, "hi. i know you've said that sometimes with your autism it can be difficult to read a room and know when it's appropriate to have certain discussions so i just wanted to tell you that the issue you brought up in class earlier, well, it wasn't the time. you could have waited to talk to the instructor after class or emailed him. it sorta caused a scene, and i know you don't mean to. : )"

i laughed and said, "yes i did. i confronted him about it in front of everyone because what he said needed to be challenged in front of everyone. it would've been dangerous for people to leave today believing what he said with no other points of view."

and my colleague looked SO shocked. he said, "oh! well, huh. okay!"

he really heard an autistic person calmly and succinctly articulate an argument about human rights and thought, "well that must be a mistake."

obviously there are people who need to do that for safety, but many people, like my colleague, do have the power and position to speak out, but they don't. so when they hear something they might even recognize is unacceptable, and someone says, "that's unacceptable," they see the person challenging the problem as the actual agitator.

my colleague was uncomfortable with conflict, and it was convenient for him that i'm autistic because he could assume it was simply a lapse in judgement that i said anything. not that it was responsible to say something, and i'm the person who did, and perhaps next time HE should.

Closed captioning was developed in 1979 (the National Captioning Institute was founded on January 30, 1979), and in 1982, they wanted a big event to debut live closed captioning. For the event they chose the 1982 Academy Awards—likely because of this acceptance speech. The company that did closed captioning was housed in Washington, D.C., so they sent someone to LA to oversee the live closed captioning. That employee was Marc Okrand. While working at the Oscars Okrand met someone who was working at Paramount on the new Star Trek movie. They needed help with the Vulcan, and Marc said he could help, as he had a Ph.D. in linguistics. They remembered him when they started working on the next Star Trek.