In 2017, O, the Oprah Magazine, commissioned a famous white photographer, Chris Buck, to deliver a series of shocking photos on the reality of how racial inequality is socialized into the American psyche. The most striking photo is of a white child with long blonde hair standing in front of a shop window filled with Black dolls.
Had Oprah's team thought this through, they would have chosen a talented Black photographer to both present the topic and uplift Black photographers from obscurity. But the reality of what life was like for me and all my peers as a child was clearly displayed in that script flipped series of magazine photos.
Asking me why I want anything specifically African American for my Black autistic son is a highly painful personal question. The answer lies in the reality thrown into stark relief in the photos displayed in that magazine. We are taught through every channel of mass communication that our societal worth is less than whites. This system attempts to subliminally teach us that we are not humans who matter. It is meant to remind us that the world is not made for us.
Our country dictates the scope of our culture and societal value by how we make the dominant culture feel and react, and how we serve and entertain them. These views of speech, beauty, justice are subliminally infused in our daily lives. Our hair is "not right" because the standard of beauty is white hair, which is largely straight. Our speech is "not right" because our English has a lilt and flows like music. It is okay to have a foreign accent but not okay to have an Ebonic one. We were taught to eliminate the Blackness from our voices if we wanted to succeed and lift our race above poverty. It seems to be okay for white people to mimic and mock our speech, or to profit from our athleticism, creativity, and intelligence, but it has been taught to the white majority that to date, the African American Vernacular (AAVE or AAE) is a sign of a lesser command of English rather than a cultural variation. AAE has been used to diminish us and make us feel that we are not educated enough or assimilated enough to be acceptable to mainstream society. It has been used to excuse injustices like disparities in criminal justice, healthcare, and work-life benefits.
Asking me why would I want an Assistive Augmentative Communication (AAC) device made to serve my son to have the voice of my Black brother is like asking why I would want my son to have a Black prosthetic arm instead of a white one. The idea of having this option is long overdue. If my son could use verbal speech, his voice would not sound like any of the voices on his current AAC devices. It is a question that shouldn't have to be asked. It matters more than anything that a person has the equivalent of a speech device made for the entirety of who that individual is. And right now, in 2020, that option does not exist for my son and his AAC using Black autistic peers.
But this question is extremely painful for me. There was a brief part of our son's life when he could use verbal speech. Somewhere we have a video of him speaking Turkish to me. It happened when his father was asleep and I was recording. Our son asked if he could have some food. His voice was the African American toddler version of his father's. His Turkish was beautiful. I witnessed that he fully understood the Spanish other toddlers at the playground spoke too. He responded appropriately to all their requests he join them in play and on various pieces of playground equipment.
I am a heritage Spanish speaker. My husband is a heritage Turkish speaker and our daughter is an interpreter and educator. Realizing our son had a facility for being multilingual with the ability to smoothly code-switch from one language to another was one of the happiest days of my life.
Our son still has that talent for a receptive understanding of many languages. But the hope of verbal speech, impeccable AAE/Turkish /English/Spanish with that distinct AAE lilt is gone. The idea that he could have a voice that even slightly resembles the one he lost in his assistive technology is both exciting and heartbreaking.
It is heartbreaking that I must explain why this matters. It is heartbreaking because we are in the year 2020 and it should not have taken this long to realize this need. It is heartbreaking because asking me this question brings a great deal of pain to me. It forces me to remember that generations of our people have had to justify our right to the same quality of life as white American society. It reminds me that I was the little Black girl looking in the window at all the white dolls and not finding any who looked like me.
We have a right to the same quality of life white disabled people already enjoy. Asking me to give reasons why a nonspeaking autistic Black teen would need an African American voice on his AAC device shows how much further we need to travel to get there.
P.S. The need for a variety of African American voices on AAC devices is also a matter of hope. Hope that someday, AAC device access will not be blocked by affordability. A disabled Black nonspeaker's right to the assistive technology they need to communicate should not be something unaffordable to most of our people. AAC devices, like prosthetics for physical disabilities, should be available and affordable to all, regardless of race.
Image of a tall, multiracial Latinx presenting male with black cropped
hair, a thin mustache, wearing teal and blue striped polo shirt and
black slacks. He is holding an iPad AAC device in his hand. Image
posted with permission of the subject. Credit and Copyright Kerima
Cevik.
Our son is seventeen. He used to enter the month of December gravely ill every year, but we managed to overcome that for so long that this year when he became ill again, it was a shock. The shock reminded me that my nearly completely grown-up son, with his ancestors' looks and a mustache that is the envy of his teen peers, is still very much disabled.
My son was born in the nation's capital, during the worst snowstorm the DMV had seen in years. We had to try and reach the hospital in a taxi that volunteered to take us when the ambulance, trapped in the snow, could not go further. Everything about his life has been no less dramatic.
We first met an idealistic nutritionist on the grueling December when he was given the gift of diagnoses. Grueling because the diagnoses were so grim they required we get repeated followup appointments at the Kennedy Krieger Institute to confirm the fears of the pediatric neurologist. Gift, because to define one's disabilities means to understand them. Some can never put a label, prognosis, or plan to theirs.
Our idealistic nutritionist was in her first month on the job, and as she read our son's chart and smiled at him and us, she gently asked if we could afford organic food for him. She was positive, encouraging. Kind. So it was a shock to believe that when we followed up with her after she became the head of her team and our son was not quite twelve, years of working with nonspeaking autistic youth had turned her into another person. She was rude, short, bitter. "I'm a department head, you need to follow up with someone else." "He's entering puberty. I suggest you get a lock for your refrigerator and hide the kitchen knives." The look of anger and horror on our faces was so apparent, and my husband's sharp angry retort was so loud in the suddenly silent room that she seemed to wake from a jaded dream. She immediately apologized. "Of course I didn't mean to imply your son was violent." Our son was right there. She said these things and he was looking right at her! Why did my husband have to remind her of that? What had happened to this woman after a decade of supposedly providing nutritional services for nonspeaking autistic children?
Our son is seventeen. We have neither considered nor had the need to bolt the refrigerator. Our knives are not locked away. His absolute favorite thing is baking, and he loves cooking and food culture in general. He has grown into a happy, loving young man. The nutritionist, like so many other professionals who were supposed to be there to help our son but came with attitudes that prejudiced the quality of care he received, were wrong.
He progressed when they said he could not. He overcame when they refused him the AAC equipment he needed to communicate and the supports he needed to succeed in a traditional classroom. They failed him. And after years of trying to fight for him, I felt like a failure each time I saw other nonspeaking autistic children gaining resources I never knew existed. Until I realized that what made him different was me. All those children, all of them, were not the children of Black women.
It was an awful moment when this all hit me. My son was having a dermatitis followup and his father was able to take time out from work to come with me to his pediatric clinic. The doctor who had seen him when my daughter and I brought him initially had been rude, dismissive, victim-blaming. When he saw my husband and son he seemed not to recognize me. He was polite, kind, caring. He rechecked his initial findings. He checked our son's bloodwork and gave us a private exam room while doing so. My daughter and I were livid by the end of the visit. It turns out he believed my husband was embassy personnel. When I was just a Black woman with Hispanic looking offspring, my disabled son was a waste of his time and training. That made me realize that my son pays the Black tax for racism directed at me the way bartenders paid the health cost for second-hand smoke.
We realized that we could not overcome disparities in professional services biased by systemic racism. Our son's additional burden of having to overcome the obstacles placed in his path by systemic ableism because he is not an autistic who has verbal speech and he also carries and ID/DD label was so unfair it nearly crushed me. But I am very lucky. I have Mu for a son.
Mustafa is an incredibly kind, loving, sweet son. So much so that I cannot remain depressed about our chances of surviving in a world where so much disparity and hatred is directed at us. He hugs us and engages us and plays endless sweet, harmless pranks on me. He seems to know when I feel defeated and always comes and sits awhile with me, trying to cheer me up. He is the most hopeful person I've known. It makes me keep going.
We worried about his weight because we were lectured endlessly about the problems he would have. He was born heavier than his premie peers. But he has, for the most part, learned to control his own eating. We were told he just was incapable of so much. All untrue. It makes me wonder how many families were literally shoved into clinically depressive states by well-intentioned professionals trying to be "realistic" about other people's disabled children.
What I wish for as we enter this new decade is for someone to look at my son and say he will be alright. Not that he'll survive, but that he will thrive. He deserves to thrive as much as any other nonspeaking autistic transitioning teen. Further, he deserves the chance to thrive as much as anyone his age. I haven't given up hope that I will live to see that happen.
Darius McCollum image of an older African American Male
with a short full beard. A blurred rail car behind him.
He is wearing a black ski cap, black coat with a dark blue
zipped up inner lining. Image credit Adam Irving
“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Darius McCollum memorized the MTA map by age eight, spent his entire adult life volunteering for the MTA, and was criminalized and jailed for it. He was given a diagnosis of Asperger's by a prison doctor at age 40. He has all the characteristics of a prodigious savant. But we will never know, because, at age 53, he has been given the final blow to the crime of being autistic while black, damned to an institution where he, who is not violent, does not belong.
I would like to live in the dream that had Darius McCollum been born in say, 1992, he might have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome while still in grade school. Perhaps, if he hadn't lived years before people acknowledged or accepted that Black children could be autistic too he would have made the evening news for volunteering at the MTA while still a young autistic child. Perhaps he would have been rewarded for his intense interest in the transit system and earned a training internship with accommodation for his disability. Perhaps he might have transitioned into a job as a disabled adult. Perhaps when the MTA rejected his repeated applications for work, he might have found legal representation and sued for discrimination based on disability. Maybe, in a parallel universe, Darius McCollum is living a happy life doing the only thing he has ever wanted to do, work as an MTA employee.
Perhaps he would not have felt the urge to drive a bus six stops on its route, flawlessly picking up and dropping off passengers as any driver would do, at age 15.
But I know that Ta-Nehisi Coates is right. I always wake up from these reveries feeling gut- punched in the truth that everything lands with great violence upon the black body.
Darius has the world's thirst for entertainment and the media's lust for ratings against him. News stories about Darius are less like human interest reporting and more like circus creations at a world's fair where he's the oddity du jour and his suffering saga is a marriage of stereotypes, Jim Crow minstrel shows of a disabled black body. How can we expect justice when the structural racism of government overreaction to any nonconforming Black male body stands like a mountain in every Neili, Arnaldo, and Darius' path?
At age 53, the doom of this verdict is the final hammer blow to this singular mind. It is too much like the way the widow of Blind Tom Wiggins' slaveholder tricked his mother into signing over custody of him with the promise of freeing him then used of the courts to declare him mentally incompetent simply to enrich herself. Tom Wiggins is known as the last slave in America because of this abuse.
I haven't studied all the publicly available charges piled up against him. But from what I have read, they are marked by McCollum following proper procedure as he did while volunteering. He gets "caught" because this is not behavior he has the impulse control to eradicate on his own. When he was in another state, I wondered why it was not okay to give him a small bus, a supervised rural bus route, and allow him to spend the remainder of his days driving it. He has been labeled a thief and given a devastating punishment for compulsive behavior. Meanwhile, he has become the subject of a movie, and others will profit from his suffering.
What do I mean when I claim that Darius is caught in the sinkhole of racist ableism?
Sometimes it is easier to see the reality of this when side by side comparisons happen. So let's look at turning points in the lives of two teenagers with the same diagnosis of Aspergers.
Blogger Brobrubel summarizes criminal justice and government overreach by reminding us of what justice looked like for Jack Robison, and Neili Latson both were teens with a diagnosis of Asperger's Despite the use of an ableist definition of autism, Brobrubel shows the disparity in our criminal justice clearly.
Here is his 2011 essay, Autism in black and white.
Please read it and try and understand the reality of being Autistic While Black in America.Then share this, and remember that we who are African American are the first to feel this weight of violence but we are not the last. Injustice expands like a balloon if those who believe they are protected from it ignore it.
Peace.
"The Web site Liquor & Spice caught this in the New York Times this weekend involving a 19-year-old kid named Jack Robison in Massachusetts with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism:
" A chemistry whiz, he had spent much of his adolescence teaching himself to make explosives and setting them off in the woods in experiments that he hoped would earn him a patent but that instead led the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to charge him with several counts of malicious explosion."
" By the following spring, he would be cleared of all the charges and recruited by the director of the undergraduate chemistry program at the University of Massachusetts, who was impressed by a newspaper account of Jack’s home-built laboratory."
"Reginald “Neli” Latson, is a 19 year-old autistic young man, who on the morning of May 24, 2010, sat in the grass outside the local library in Stafford, Va., and waited for it to open. Police allege that it was reported that there was a suspicious black male who had a gun. Deputy Calverley then approached Latson and searched him for a gun. No gun was found. Calverly asked Latson for his name, and Latson refused and tried to walk away as he had committed no crime. Calverly then grabbed Latson and attempted to arrest him without reading him his Miranda Rights or calling for backup.
After a 3-day trial, Latson was found guilty of assaulting a law enforcement officer, among other charges, and 10 1/2 years in prison was recommended. Latson’s defense centered around the fact that he has Asperger’s syndrome, part of the autism spectrum, ... "
" Massachusetts didn’t see a crime in making explosives at home. Virginia saw a crime in waiting to go to the library. Robison was blowing things up. Latson was waiting for the library to open. Robison is rewarded. Latson is going to jail."
" "Robison is white. Latson is black."
"We don’t want to admit it, but race does matter."
Arnaldo Eliud Rios Soto, the 26-year-old autistic man sitting on the pavement with a toy truck in shock in a viral video could be our son. Arnaldo sat beside Charles Kinsey, his trusted aid, helpless while Kinsey was lying on his back with his hands up, shot, with Miami police surrounding both men 50 feet away.
Our son Mustafa has so many similarities to Arnaldo that several people who know our family and have seen Mustafa in person remarked on how much Arnaldo looked like an older version of our son. Like Arnaldo, Mustafa is labeled Hispanic in ethnicity, has an equally lengthy name and heritage, carries the same disability labels although my son carries additional labels to nonspeaking autism and the added stigma of reactions to his name, given in honor of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Mustafa's father's grandfather. My son's skin is a tan hue that when combined with his curly hair makes it clear he is not what is considered "white" particularly when he is beside me, his Black, Hispanic, Indigenous mother. Like Arnaldo, he loves toy trucks, cars, and construction vehicles. Like Arnaldo, if a series of sirens sounded around him, and men 50 feet away began to shout at him, he would sit where he was, and hold to one of the objects that never leaves his hand because they provide him sensory calm in a world of violent, changing sensory overloads. Mustafa is Arnaldo's peer. Arnaldo's traumatic event, is Mustafa's dilemma, a potentially disastrous event I have fought to find a way to avert since February 27, 2009, the day I was told my son disappeared from the most restricted public school environment.
That story still hurts, and I've already spoken of it in bits and pieces like the essay "Afterlife ." Suffice it to say that amber alerts weren't created for missing autistic children. And no amount of police training prevents police who want to believe they need to shoot your disabled son or daughter from taking aim and firing. If the chew tube in your daughter's hand looks like a knife to them, police will shoot to kill first and apologize later even when equipped with tasers and training certificates in autism and disability awareness.
Mustafa's dilemma should not exist. His choices should not be to either never be active in his own community or become a target by wanting to participate in it. People ask, as more autistic males of color like Arnaldo Soto and Tario Anderson are traumatized and more Black autistic young men like Paul Childs die, what can be done. I have been researching the same question since I learned brothers Lance and Ronald Madison were shot for sport on Danziger bridge while Lance was trying to walk Ronald safely out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Those police officers, who pleaded guilty and were convicted of killing Ronald Madison, had their convictions overturned and were later released.
The answer to Mustafa's dilemma is not to retaliate against innocent police officers or paint all police as evil. Nor is it to erase these continuing catastrophic events in the name of preserving the public image of law enforcement while these deaths and traumatic events continue to escalate. But the answer does lie in understanding that it is the solemn duty of law enforcement to lead the reform of a culture that does not hold racist, ableist, and corrupt officers accountable for the mounting deaths and injuries of those vulnerable citizens they engage while on or off duty. I keep waiting for them to step up and disavow coverups and punish those who do wrong. Being a police officer does not and should not equal an exemption from the rule of law. Police leadership in other places has shown that proper police culture builds community trust, reduces risks to both vulnerable citizens and law enforcement officers while decreasing crime. Yet disabled victims, in particular, continue to be blamed for their own deaths, and lack of compliance or erratic behavior are always put forth as the evidence justifying the executions. What Arnaldo witnessed, what we all learned witnessing Charles Kinsey's shooting is very basic to my position that law enforcement autism awareness training alone is failing:
Complete compliance and appropriate behavior make no difference to outcomes.
Lack of community training and the resentment of witnessing neurodivergent people included in communities was directly responsible for Charles Kinsey's shooting and similar catastrophic encounters but is being ignored in the lessons learned of each of these deadly events,
The trigger that sets the stage for the catastrophes is inaccurate or deliberately false 911 calls using three code words: black, male, and weapon. All other parts of the call, words like suicidal, or 'toy' before 'gun,' don't matter.
Why have organizational toolkits, rhetoric, photo ops with powerful lawmakers and law enforcement authorities, autism parents who are law enforcement officers training fellow police, and parents with autistic adult offspring rushing to don the "autism expert trainer" mantle failed to stem the tide of harm washing over disabled people of color?
A. Everyone has skewed the root cause of the problem. Because the problem is misdefined everyone addresses the wrong areas to solve it. Everyone wants to make the solution a need to train police. Catastrophic encounters with police are an outcome symptomatic of the problem, not the problem itself. What people and organizations are doing is very much like seeing people dying in car accidents because of a manufacturing problem that causes brake failure and blaming it on the car's driver. Elaborate solutions are found for improving driving ability, knowing drivers are not the root issue. Cameras record trip data, engines won't start without seat belts, but the problem is the faulty brakes on certain cars, and everyone wonders, as those selling flawed solutions profit by them, why people continue to die. Neurodivergent people cannot continue to be the drivers blamed for the damaged system that is causing their deaths and traumatizing them.
Policing is a community effort. Therefore, the primary route to defining the root cause of catastrophic encounters with law enforcement does not begin at what happens when a police officer meets a nonspeaking autistic person. It begins with asking questions like why, if everyone in Arnaldo's group home was known to the community, a citizen of that community would make a false report to 911 that would deploy armed police to an area where there was no gunman. It continues with why the caller isn't being charged with filing a false police report. Because the community knows the group home, and they know the route taken by group home clients and their care providers when walking. So when we look at each of these incidents, the root cause begins with why police were summoned in the first place, what information they were given, and whether the situation required police, guns, and violent endings.
While everyone is lining up to train police departments, no one is training communities to understand and accept neurodivergent community members. Policing is community dependent. Yet no one builds any community to support and include vulnerable community members. Oh everyone has something to say about this, but most never address this because again, we defined the wrong problem, and we are continuing to train police while our people continue to die and become traumatized.
Life qualitatively improves for everyone when communities act to truly include and support neurodivergent people . The city of Matsudo, near Tokyo, has built a dementia inclusive community and saved dozens of lives and police resources in the process. Their approach is a potential global model for rebooting communities who must learn to include neurodivergent citizens as the rights to autonomy and community living become as commonplace as they are just.
B. Correctly define the root problem, then make workable multidisciplinary solutions at the community and legislative levels. Having now accurately defined catastrophic encounters with police as the end result of the problem and not the problem itself, let's try to state the actual problem clearly. The problem is that communities are uneducated and unaware of how to deal with neurodivergent members exercising their right to active inclusion. Uneducated and unaware communities mean public entities like schools and public access areas as well as those public servants charged with administrating and maintaining them. Structural ableism then intersects with structural racism (and in our son's case, structural Islamophobia) and the toxic result is Mustafa's dilemma. I've stated multidisciplinary solutions in prior articles and interviews. Those proposals include suggested programs to help build peer-run respite centers for those with a psychiatric disability to recover from moments of crises and receive training in interdependence and supports to help them navigate their community. Or hold training sessions for small businesses and community public servants that help make public spaces safe for autistic people to interact with the public with acceptance and understanding.
C. Don't erase disabled AAC using, activists of color from being the voices of their own experience. There is an appropriation of neurodivergent voices in advocacy that is just heartbreaking. It is one of the residual tragedies of these events is that those who speak out about them with experience, cultural knowledge, and authority are erased while those who have privilege but no true grasp of what it means to live with Mustafa's dilemma set themselves up as experts and are bolstered, sometimes even provided with grants, to authoritatively discuss issues of racism or ableism without discussing the convergence of racism, ableism, and things like Islamophobia, Transphobia, or structural intolerance of psychiatric disability they cannot begin to understand quite simply because they are not POC who are disabled, AAC users, and survivors of such police encounters. So people who are like my son continue to die while others appropriate the voices of activists who can represent him because they are ASL users, nonspeaking, AAC using disabled adult activists who understand intersectionality and the impact on community barriers to inclusion.
Mustafa's dilemma, with its critical high-risk factor of nonverbal communication not being acknowledged by law enforcement officers engaging nonspeaking people, is not addressed sufficiently by disability rights activists who have verbal speech privilege. Its most recent disastrous result was the death of Daniel Harris, an unarmed Deaf community member shot by a police officer while trying to sign to him during a traffic stop.
I consider this an escalation, happening because the deaths of POC by police in general, and nonspeaking disabled Black people, in particular, were allowed to continue without accountability and with misguided calls for law enforcement training rather than reform of a militarized police culture even in instances where videos clearly show excessive use of deadly force against unarmed people who were subdued, compliant, restrained, or otherwise unable to inflict harm.
D. Create annual, cross-disability, online actions to demand transformative change . I have never seen an annual event that flash-blogs awareness and calls to reform action about the deaths and harm of non-white autistic adults and children in catastrophic encounters with law enforcement. Why is that? I can tell you, dear readers, that one reason is squarely based upon who is dominating the autism conversation in our country. Affluent, white, parents who can keep their own divergent offspring from harm don't see this as an issue until a victim is white or affluent. Excessive use of force against disabled people cannot only matter when the victims are white. Activist across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic divides should be shouting about injustice as loudly for disabled nonwhite people as we do for white disabled victims. Only this persistent spotlighting by an entire community makes an issue important enough to force lifesaving nationwide legislative change.
We need a noninstitutional, community-based infrastructure that can respond to disability and mental health related crises without doing harm to the clients needing supports. This is one answer that arises from the accurately defined problem. Change must be multidisciplinary to dismantle structural ableism and racism.
Multidisciplinary change combines community partners at both the grassroots and federal levels who do not normally collaborate to find real solutions to the properly defined problem and lobby together for funding to support those solutions. Things like having our most radical Black Disabled activists be part of task forces with their state and local police chiefs, disabled disability and mental health activists, and families to reduce violence against autistic and other intersected neurodivergent people of color.
When I say 'radical disabled activists of color,' I don't mean privileged by way of beginning in poverty and leaving it through education or success - I mean people who are still trying to navigate disability in inaccessible poverty ridden, over-policed communities, are known and respected in those communities for their grassroots activism, and continue to know first hand what Mustafa's dilemma looks like because they actually live it on a daily basis.
We individual activists can also start the inclusive community conversation with our own towns and city councils, our own local governments. What national organizations should be doing is presenting this case rather than rushing to stand in line at the police training queue. The less police have to respond to inaccurate 911 calls about neurodivergent people, the less chance of catastrophic encounters. It isn't really their job, you see, to manage disabled people in crisis. It is the responsibility of our entire community to embrace our people. The sooner we cease allowing community ignorance and ableism to keep our loved ones from living as everyone has the right to in this society, the sooner everyone can be part of bringing Mustafa's dilemma to an end.
ADA Americans with Disabilities Act 25 1990-2015 Official Black Logo
I just read "How autistic adults banded together to start a movement", Sandhya Somashekhar's Washington Post article on the neurodiversity movement. While I was reading it, I realized that the Washington Post tried to produce an article that wouldn't anger those who dominate the autism conversation while giving a nod to the autistic civil rights movement without presenting it for what it is meant to be, a legitimate arm of the greater disability civil rights movement. On the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, that is inexcusably sad.
I am an extremely demanding woman. I have to be. I'm fighting for my son's right to personhood and his right to live his life qualitatively better than what is dictated by those who profess to know what autism is and what he needs without making him and those like him part of that conversation. A half-measure is not enough.
It is as if some major media outlets have a formula for dealing with the disability rights movement in the autistic community and this article is an excellent example of that disturbing formula. These are the ingredients in the recipe for dismissing and derailing autistic civil rights as a movement:
Recipe for Erasure By Implementing Structural Ableism:
Skew the term Neurodiversity so its meaning is conflated with a social group and hobby for quirky geeks. Make certain to stretch that veneer tightly over the group you wish and entrap them in the misrepresented term. Present the entire history of disability rights movement in the autistic community as beginning with the foundation of The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) thus erasing every activist who is an adult over the age of 30 and polarizing the autism rights community not involved with ASAN. Bake that at 400 degrees. Divide and conquer Dismiss disabled disability rights activists as "quirky, nerdy, weird, highly functioning mavericks" this reduces the threat that they may be more intelligent than is wanted. Dismiss major accomplishments by focusing on small ones like changing verbiage to satisfy those darned "neurodiversity" people
add a pinch of clinically depressed crusader parent who hates her life and anthropomorphizes and demonizes autism to feed a heavy digital exhibitionism habit (see my previous article on other crusading people) Be sure to erase nonspeaking autistic people by the exclusion of their voices! Including them would dismantle the pinch of crusader parent's argument that "real autism" doesn't speak and therefore isn't any good to society. Don't forget to also add a pinch of the word Autism Speaks - branding Autism Speaks as the enemy of Neurodiversity is critical so it appears legitimate by comparison Do not discuss autistic culture even when it is clearly presented because that would be acknowledging such a thing exists exclude any person who is not white from the conversation because we all know that only white people are autistic? Only what white members of the community say matters?
Result? A beautifully derailing, non-article that presents autistic adults who are doing autistic pride and presenting themselves publicly at great personal risk as fringe disabled people who need tolerance but are misguided.
Some Good In the Mix
The good parts of this article? It was great to see autistic activist Alanna Whitney there. New faces to the public are a good thing, and she was eloquent in her presentation despite the article's attempts to present her as quirkily and as oddly as they could. The term NeuroQueer appeared in a Washington Post article, a very big milestone for the movement and I hope they saw that despite the attempt to present it as a fringe group to a fringe group. Steve Silberman was quoted and his book "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity" was mentioned. Now back to what truly concerned me or just was very, very odd.
John Elder Robison As The Neurodiversity Authority
I am still trying to wrap my head around John Elder Robison being cited as a topic expert on neurodiversity. I could fill pages with the activists who have worked from the time before I was born, and I'm 54, for the human rights and civil rights of autistic people, and who will never be recognized for their contributions. Mr. Robison is a recent convert and was made a neurodiversity scholar in residence at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. after Asian American Autistic Activist Lydia Brown was invited to William and Mary to explain what neurodiversity was and its importance in disability rights. Mr. Robison is a quick study and has learned a great deal. But the sad fact is that his fame allowed him to simply step from his prior role of years at Autism Speaks to this new role. In the process many activists, who did not become activists to be famous, who are not white, who are not cisgender, are silenced. Mr. Robison can't speak for them. Only they can speak for themselves. If NeuroQueer was going to be mentioned, then an activist who was NeuroQueer should have been quoted. If neurodiversity was going to be addressed, the first thing any scholar on neurodiversity should have done was correct the misconception that neurodiversity is solely an autism-related term and refers only to the autism rights movement. Neurodiversity must be properly defined. This conflating is harming the progress of a greater movement for civil rights.
Conflating The term Neurodiversity's history with ASAN
The term 'neurodiversity' pre-dates the foundation of ASAN. It is a term that refers to a larger group of people than autistic people. The movement for autistic civil rights and personhood began prior to the existence of the internet. But deliberately conflating the term neurodiversity with ASAN divides the community and that is the goal.
Presenting Clinically Depressed Parents as Autism Activists
The Washington Post sees no harm in using Ms. Stagliano, an extremely unhappy mother of three autistic young women with intense support needs, as a polarizing figure to up their hits on both this article and the one she wrote before about Autism Awareness Month, which they clearly feel they can squeeze a few more hits from. I am always horrified at what Ms. Stagliano is willing to allow to be published about her own daughters to further her crusade to make everyone believe that her experience of autism is the only one that matters. Her huge platform and too loud voice have done such great harm. Yet she is continually given the opportunity to shout her message of doom and woe to all who will hear.
In this case, the Post again mentions her role in meeting her daughters' personal care needs from her previous article that may again violate their rights under HIPAA. Please see my article on Digital Exhibitionism in the Internet age here, explaining why these types of disclosures are concerning and inhumane. Depressed parents of autistic adults who have not kept up with new assistive technology, medical services that can increase autonomy by reducing or eliminating certain types of personal care needs for disabled adults are out there. Ms. Stagliano's religious beliefs may not allow certain medical supports for her daughters. Given Ms. Stagliano's lack of concern for their privacy and since according to her own rhetoric, they are not able to give consent, I cannot speak to that much more except to say that if she got some treatment for her depression and sought out organizations like the Autism Women's Network, she might learn that her daughters can live autonomous lives after her passing regardless of their degree of disability and despite her misconception that because their needs are intense, she is the most important person in their lives.
She spends so much time writing about how awful her life is that I am assuming she has more respite than she is presenting to others. There is no way one can spend as much time online and involved in all the activities she is involved in with 3 disabled young adults to care for unless she has these supports. Most of the families I advocate for just don't have the time to demonize autism to this degree because they have no respite and are too busy caring for their loved ones and fighting for their futures to crusade for a cure of their parental unhappiness by creating an autism boogeyman and making it a medical monster that continues to frighten parents into not vaccinating their children.
I am always concerned when I see the amount of time Ms. Stagliano spends on this topic. With three young disabled women to care for, sleep deprivation must be a real concern. That lack of sleep interferes with executive function and over time can lead to disaster. There are other parents who get sufficient rest, have proven track records of legislative and community advocacy that have improved the lives of autistic adults, children, and families, who might be better alternatives to present as parent activists. Simple rule. If a parent hates their life, they aren't really going to be the best resource for discussing how to be a life coach. It is responsible journalism to find resources who are experts on their topic through training and education as well as simply giving birth to a disabled child, balanced in their views, and logical in their presentation of facts. The Washington Post knows about the recent outbreak of the measles and other preventable childhood diseases. Yet they present a mother as an autism authority who leads a large community in crusading against autism with the idea that vaccines cause autism and autistic people are vaccine injured.
Opportunities Lost In Translation
So there is Steve Silberman with a 400+ page book on the history of the neurodiversity movement and no brief timeline of history prior to ASAN is mentioned or illustrated in this article. Why not? Why was the story of Alanna Whitney and a chapter of ASAN turned into a stereotypical view of autistic adults in the movement being quirky, using verbal speech, presenting as 'highly functioning' people? Human rights should never be presented as a social science experiment that became a nonprofit.
Someone should have been allowed to say that Autistic people are fighting for their existence and acceptance as equal members of society. The autism rights movement is part of the greater disability rights movement.
Then there is the statement in the article:
"Neurodiversity advocates, by contrast, consider people with autism a minority group, albeit one with extra challenges that might need accommodating. They compare themselves to the gay rights movement and to the protesters trying to improve police treatment of African Americans."
Wow. Dear Ms. Somashekhar: The movement that predated and gave rise to the gay rights movement was called the Civil Rights movement. You might want to google that. All those protesters you're mentioning, they are this generation's civil rights activists. What you took away from the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which is a small fraction of a decades-long struggle for Black civil rights equality is "the protesters trying to improve police treatment of African Americans?" Over 600 deaths and you dismiss a human rights crisis in half a sentence? This is about the lack of accountability. This is about no one giving a damn when our people are shot by those who are supposed to keep us safe. This is about video footage of horrific crimes against Black people witnessed globally and the World seeing that justice in America doesn't exist for people who aren't white and wealthy. Now this has escalated to targeting predominantly Black churches and the innocent worshipers in them and you present all that as a 'profiling while black' thing? My what a social change reporter you are.
Statements like "They compare themselves to" imply that disabled people have no legitimacy to declare their own personhood. I grasp that by definition journalism must present things in as unbiased a fashion as possible. But damn. All disabled people have the same rights as everyone else. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act has clearly blown past the Washington Post and left no understanding that disabled people have been succeeding in fighting for their right to take an active, central, and inclusive role in society for more than 100 years. This isn't a hobby for quirky people. This is civil rightsmovement. Until a major paper can give it that respect, we will not succeed in educating against ableism.
We need to stop allowing Neurodiversity to be displayed as the thorn in the side of Autism Speaks
This dichotomy really is giving Autism Speaks free advertising and also allowing people to bring it into conversations where it does not belong. We need to correct the definition of neurodiversity. We need to establish clearly what the autistic disability rights movement is and explain that disabled people across communities are fighting for survival and personhood in a society that others them. That is the job. Everything else confuses and confounds the conversation. This isn't about Autism Speaks. It is about Autistic activism.
Okay, I need to stop. My nonwhite, nonspeaking, intensely disabled and awfully wonderful tween son is hugging me and telling me it is his time now.
This post may wander a bit. Recent events have made me very emotional, shocked and sad.
Our son is twelve. His father, sister and I have spent a major part of his life trying to meet a single goal before his thirteenth birthday. We have been trying to ensure he is equipped to survive his adolescence without being killed in a catastrophic encounter with police. He has been fortunate, and so far, safe. But recent events make it clear that we must act in some way to change the way things are or chances are, he may not be safe in the future.
When I realized that roughly 70% of people with disabilities encountered law enforcement more than once in their lifetimes, learned how many were victims of abuse and crime, and how many disabled males of color died in such encounters, I went to Annapolis to ask for an autism training bill for first responders. I later came to the realization that the training concept is inherently flawed and limited in its success. For police officers, in particular,training them in awareness of autism and how someone autistic reacts to sirens, strobing lights, and people shouting at them wasn't the solution to the problem of keeping our son and his nonspeaking peers from accidentally being shot or wrongfully arrested in a police encounter. Particularly for autistic and other neurodivergent males of color, police training in other states did not deter or reduce catastrophic encounters. Understand that Freddie Gray was diagnosed with disabilities resulting from lifetime exposure to lead paint poisoning common to the low-income housing in West Baltimore. Freddie Gray was neurodivergent. His death is not counted as a Black disabled catastrophic encounter death but it should be.
I have recently realized I must accept the idea that just about the only way to ensure our nonspeaking autistic son isn't harmed is instilling in him that he must avoid the police as much as possible.
The only legislative goal that will reduce catastrophic encounters with law enforcement for neurodivergent males in general and neurodivergent Black and brown males, in particular, is legislation aimed at not placing them in the path of police, to begin with.
I never thought I would have to consider how to teach my son to avoid police. But there is no denying that recent events demonstrate race relations in this area of modern society have reversed 50 years, and we are now living in a dangerously polarized country. So here we are with our sweet son, standing at this intersection of racism, ableism, and disability. We are looking for breadcrumbs we can leave to aid him in preserving his own life and the thought is frightening. So frightening that I can say the only thing that frightens me more is the rising number of autistic school children being arrested for school infractions and forced into the criminal justice system .
How do we teach him that the safest way to deal with law enforcement is to avoid engaging them at all? Even if he needs help. Even if they seem kind and appear to understand he is unable to speak. Despite what he's been presented by well-meaning people who don't know what it means to be a Black man in America. Because if he meets a good cop one day, he may meet the one that hates him the next, and that could end his life. Too many others have died because they could not speak and were not provided with the means to respond when police ordered them to do so.
The bullet-riddled windshield of Timothy Russell's car shows where some of the 137 bullets police fired at the car landed. (credit: Marvin Fong/The Plain Dealer)
One of my main goals for the remainder of my life is lowering the odds that my only son will die by pushing our community to rethink what the role of law enforcement should be in our lives and to support efforts to remove law enforcement from inappropriate roles in the lives of autism families so we are able to avoid police engagement as much as humanly possible. I am tired of watching our people die.
We are traumatized and tired of being helpless witnesses to the lives destroyed and lost in such encounters. Freddie Gray, Matthew Ajibade, Tario Anderson, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones. It is the list of the dead and injured that just keeps getting longer by the month while the criminal justice system keeps failing them and our entire race, first by allowing them to come to harm, second by allowing those who harmed them to not be made responsible for their actions, and third, by blaming the victims in order to absolve the perpetrators. I continue to repeat that even someone who is suspected of committing a crime has the right to be safely arrested and tried by a jury of his peers. Police are never supposed to be executioners.
Knowing police officers who sully the uniform will not be held accountable for any wrongdoing, regardless of how much evidence of their guilt is apparent is soul destroying. We've been swallowing this bitter bill for my entire life. It is a spiritual struggle to continue to defiantly declare one's right to exist and human right to humane treatment knowing this is true. Here is one of many examples of justice denied.
Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo mounted a car that 5 other police officers had riddled with bullets after "confusing the car backfiring with a gunshot" and continued shooting down into the windshield of said car until the two already wounded victims, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, where dead. Officer Brelo was acquitted of any wrongdoing. 137 bullets were not, in a judge's opinion, excessive use of force. If you believe that compliance of a traffic stop would have changed the conclusion of this encounter, then you are deceiving yourselves. If the moment the car backfired, the knee-jerk reaction was to shoot with impunity, this act was driven by the presumption that Black suspects are dangerous criminals who should be shot. That is racial profiling. Which makes this a hate crime. This was never going to be an arrest. It was an execution. Understand why we fear for our son. If you don't understand and don't act to help everyone fighting to change this deadly sequence of events, more will die.
This week the Supreme Court ruled in favor of San Francisco in the case of City and County of San Francisco v. Sheehan, overturning the decisions of all lower courts and placing all disabled people at risk. Specifically, they ruled that police who forcibly enter the premises and shoot a mental health patient have qualified immunity from litigation. This sets a legal precedent that weakens ADA protections despite the court's attempt to bypass the impact on ADA issue and enables further cases of excessive use of force when dealing with neurodivergent people in general and mental health consumers in particular.
I have already pointed out here that both Paul Childs and Stephon Watts were shot dead by police officers who had autism training, knew them, and had even helped them in the past. A police officer being familiar with your son's autism, knowing your son doesn't use verbal speech, being trained to approach and manage neurodivergent people doesn't protect them from being shot by those very police officers later on.
Jurors in the trial of the New Orleans police officers who shot multiple
victims including the Madison brothers inspecting Danziger bridge. Credit
Michael DeMocker NOLA Media
If I seem pessimistic about what is happening it is because even in cases where video evidence of wrongdoing supports witness accounts, and even in cases where convictions are handed down, inevitably, as in the Supreme Court decision in San Francisco v Sheehan, justice eludes the victim. The conviction of the New Orleans police officers who shot among others 40-year-old autistic Ronald Madison and his brother Lonnie, who was trying to walk him over the bridge and out of New Orleans after Katrina, was overturned and they have now been granted a new trial. We all know these men will never see prison. Ronald Madison was a gentle person, loved by his family and neighbors. His brother refused to leave New Orleans without him and remained behind to help lead Ronald out after the storm because he didn't understand why he had to leave his home. It seems now that no one will ever answer for the innocent lives taken that day either.
If you ask my opinion of possible solutions to keep our autistic offspring of color safe by avoiding unnecessary engagement with law enforcement, I'll respond that I have a list. Here is part of that list
1. Retrain 911 operators to clearly distinguish the difference between a mental health crisis call and a law enforcement call. Do NOT use police officers as mental health support staff to transport MH consumers in crisis to help facilities. 2. Train parents to properly request an ambulance and mental health crisis support; train loved ones and caregivers not to call the police unless a weapon is involved. 3. Remove the use of police and school resource officers (SROs) from the chain of school discipline and prohibit the profiling of disabled K12 students through files maintained by SROs, as they are neither qualified psychologists or psychiatrists. 4. Block school administration from calling the police to arrest students for school-related infractions and fine them if they do so. This holds them accountable for not providing staffing support for disabled students who require it. 5. Ensure that any incident involving the arrest of disabled students is automatically reviewed by that state's department of education's office of civil rights to assess the degree of violation of the student's civil rights and ensure the student is provided with properly trained classroom support staff per IDEA . 6. Establish grassroots mental health crisis support teams and peer-run respite and crisis centers for MH consumers. This will increase respite for MH consumers and families, averting crises where police might be called to homes or schools for interventions outside the scope of law enforcement .
I must continue my efforts to find a way to explain this all to my son and together we must ensure that even after we, his parents, are gone he knows how to survive as a nonspeaking neurodivergent male of color in this increasingly corrosive world of hate.
