AutisticWhileBlack #BlackHistory2021: Vaccination While Black

The author, owning
The angry Black woman 
look. Image of a gray haired 
Black woman with glasses. 

The huge disparities between the agendas of those individuals with the largest platforms who are presented as allies to autism advocacy and the realities of what African American autistic families need to survive have continued for all the years since my son's diagnosis. I try to highlight and speak out, but my voice is tiny. But I am fed up and I'm going to vent now.

Steve Silberman, the author of  NeuroTribes, posted this on social media:

Steve Silberman: Vaccine envy is a thing.

I have been trying for months to emphasize the struggles and barriers to our communities of color, particularly my racial peers, having access to vaccination. I have been trying to show the incredible irony between the near gaslighting being done to push vaccination on our people when there is no supply of vaccines to give us. The cruelty of advertising mass vaccination events as "open to the public" at sites that require individuals to have cars when those most vulnerable don't own cars and no public transportation is provided to those sites. In truth, only those who have managed to gain appointments, which require access to the Internet (needs class privilege and access to technology) are allowed at mass vaccination sites, and there can be no mass vaccination without vaccine supply.

Being Black in America during a pandemic means the quality of healthcare given is limited because the staff, equipment, and treatment options that those with race and class privilege have are not available in their zip codes. Add racialized autism to these obstacles, and the idea of achieving vaccination becomes a nearly impossible mountain of barriers to climb.

Black vaccine hesitancy is discussed in the press and narrowed to one incident when the history of disparity in health services and maltreatment of African Americans continues to this day. Only Rachel Maddow has spoken to our own people trying to breach barriers to vaccinate us. 

I tweeted about Drene Keyes going into anaphylaxis minutes after being given the first Pfizer vaccine dose. I am angry that the same excuses for why more of our people are dying from COVID 19 are being used to excuse her death. Her preexisting conditions. This is not the first anaphylaxis reaction to this vaccine. Others have had this reaction so this was a known issue. Why then, was this not thought through before giving the okay for a disabled woman to receive this vaccine? Why is our community not asking these questions? Because the quality of healthcare for the non-racialized disabled population is better than for us.

My son and I are disabled. No one has bothered to care whether disabled people might die from anaphylaxis after a dose of a vaccine. No authorities have taken the time and care to warn African American patients, a majority of whom have preexisting conditions and low access to quality healthcare services, to wait before getting vaccinated. Instead what we hear, from supposed allies, is pressure to forget the disparities in healthcare that are driving up the numbers of us who die from this coronavirus. We hear that it is a lack of education causing vaccine hesitancy, while hospitals that serve our most impoverished communities demand equipment, medical supplies, and staff to fight the surge in infected patients. Entire families are dying. Our people are pressured to sign up for vaccination appointments when they have no access to the means of signing up. We are told to drive to vaccination sites without a car. We are told to stay at home when our jobs require delivering food, medication, and care to those who can stay in homes without risking eviction for not being able to pay rent. We are told to go to mass vaccination events when there is no vaccine supply. 

I want everyone claiming to advocate for autistics and their families to do better. It's time to advocate now by giving us the damn mike since mainstream autism advocacy is clearly ignorant of what has been happening to our community since the beginning of this pandemic. Reach out to your communities and do something to save lives and make this vaccination effort equitable for everyone. We are dying while our supposed allies are posting quips on social media.

When will those who are supposed to be our allies cease making thoughtless, clueless, cruel statements like "vaccine envy is a thing?"

If this is the mainstream idea of allies, miss me with that.

Rant, done.

AutisticWhileBlack: Seventeen

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.

#SaveArnaldo : How Much Is Lifelong CPTSD Worth?

Image of Arnaldo Rios Soto, a nonspeaking
Latinx autistic young man in a gray hoodie
with crew-cut brown hair and a clean-shaven face
smiling broadly for the camera. Credit
Matthew Dietz, Esq.

If your child's school staff,  then his residential care home staff,  harm your autistic child and one terrible day, you get a call that the behavioral aide your child finally connects with has been shot and your grown child, having survived so much, was shot at while sitting in the street holding his toy truck, handcuffed, interrogated, institutionalized, and now has permanent complex PTSD caused by the mishandling of a catastrophic encounter with law enforcement, can you think of a price tag that with make it all go away?

That final traumatic event, the moment Arnaldo Ríos Soto screams out in his frequent nightmares in the single word utterance "POLICE", cannot be fixed or undone. Any parent of an autistic young adult would hold those responsible to account for the lifelong care he needs. The state of Florida is accountable for Arnaldo's lifelong, 24/7 care and support. This should not even be in question.

So why then was the cost for his lifelong care cut? Lifelong damage was done. Irreparable damage. The kind of trauma Arnaldo experienced cannot be undone. Put simply it is the obligation of those who caused this trauma to care for him. 

Arnaldo was evicted from his home because the state cut the funding needed for his care in half. He was evicted after a contract was signed saying his care facility would continue his care despite the funding shortfall. His former care home should lose their license.

I have been steadily updating on Arnaldo's situation because but for the grace of God Arnaldo could be my son.

I wrote an essay on the eve of Arnaldo's eviction that was published in Poor Magazine, but still, no one seemed to give a damn. So I'm reposting it here. Let's hope someone out there listens this time.

Arnaldo Rios Soto, Autistic, nonspeaking, and Latinx, was evicted from his current group home.  

His ongoing crisis brought back a personal memory. 

When I was in my teens, I worked summers as part of the Youth Conservation Corps. One of our projects was assisting efforts to reclaim the Palso strip mine. A group of us were standing with our supervising forest ranger on the top of a mountain of slag looking at miles of blasted fields and ponds filled with acid runoff when suddenly the rubble beneath us shifted and three of us tumbled downward with the landslide. The other two managed to stop and scurry back up. But each time I moved, the mountain seemed to respond by raining more debris around and over me. It was an avalanche. I was sure I was going to die that day.

If we were to create a timeline of each pivotal event in Arnaldo Rios Soto’s life, I believe those traumatic moments would morph into a rubble mountain of suffering and trauma. Arnaldo has now seen the ground shift beneath him one too many times. An avalanche is happening, and Arnaldo, like me the day I hung suspended on a slag mountain, is scraped, bruised, too young to die. The detritus of a failed disability care system falling like rubble all around him, he has now been evicted from another group home on the excuse that money was cut from his care budget.

Arnaldo’s life is measured by how much profit he makes for those who offer services to house and care for him. His family’s lives have been punctuated by seeking the land of autism care Oz, that place where Arnaldo won’t be beaten, chemically lobotomized, where someone, anyone, can truly see him as a human being and not a collection of behavioral reports, untreated complex PTSD and medications. They are tired, burnt out with disappointment in that shattered dream of an American mainland utopian disability care system they sacrificed and journeyed from Puerto Rico for in vain.

What will happen to Arnaldo now?

What happens to Arnaldo now is up to all of us. We are his family now. He is in our care. So we need to understand how and why Arnaldo matters. Arnaldo’s situation is greater than his news headlines. His situation right now is bigger than my personal emotional reaction, informed by the fact that he once looked so much like our son that both my husband and I cried out in shock when we saw that video of him sitting in the middle of the street, holding his toy truck, police shouting and Charles Kinsey shot and bleeding beside him.

 It is greater now than Arnaldo not understanding that he was about to tumble down that cruel mountain of police interrogation for the crime of sitting in the street holding a toy truck while disabled and brown. Arnaldo is now the symbol of what it means to be a nonspeaking autistic male of color at the mercy of a system that views the Black and Brown disabled body as a threat. This system, founded on eugenic attitudes, views those with complex support needs as burdens or cash cows. When the profit margin is not enough the cash cow is sent to the slaughterhouse. For someone like Arnaldo, who was harmed by agents of the state, leaving him without shelter and the complex support he needs is tantamount to destroying his psyche entirely. And returning him to a hellhole institutional setting like Carlton Arms is unthinkable and unacceptable.

What that means is that what happens to Arnaldo now has the potential to impact how future cases like his are handled across our country. If we can act together and change his destiny it will demonstrate that our community has the power to transform the destinies of others brought low by this system. It means that the lifetime efforts of hundreds of disability justice activists have managed to change something. We need this hope because we multiply marginalized people have become the targets of hate groups instigated by those who feel that the current administration has given them a free license to hunt those who are oppressed and vulnerable. So what I am doing right now, typing, wheezing with asthma, pushing past joints that ache to write this is reaching out to say this is the time when all of us, ALL OF US can help Arnaldo. #SaveArnaldo can trend on every social media platform enough to make those who made the decision to cut funding for Arnaldo’s care rethink their decision. Organizations can support the AutisticSelf Advocacy Network’s leadership and issue statements in support of the Sotos family. Legislative advocates can reach out to their lawmakers. This takes a few moments, a click, a retweet. But multiplied exponentially, collective cross-disability community action could be an avalanche that forces a positive resolution to Arnaldo’s crisis.

As I was sliding down a mountain of slag towards my death, two other people volunteered to lay flat, one grabbing the ankles of the other, and acted as a human rope. Five others held on to the arms of the person laying flat on the top of that mountain for dear life. Then they all heaved up and backward.

Together, they saved my life.

I am asking you all to make a human and virtual chain. Get him off that sliding bureaucratic slag mountain and back into a place where his family can see him every day and he can be safe and cared for. #SaveArnaldo.

Peace.

Poor Magazine Lays out My position on catastrophic encounters with Law Enforcement:

https://poormagazine.org/node/5510

Read and hear more about Arnaldo:

Miami Herald coverage of Arnaldo's eviction CN: for Ableism

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article236523038.html

Aftereffect: Against the Erasure of Arnaldo Rios Soto

http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2019/02/affereffect-against-erasure-of-arnaldo.html

Aftereffect: A SWAT team, an autistic man, an American tragedy.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/aftereffect

Podcast: Aftereffect — an indictment of America’s disability care

https://www.ft.com/content/b2187ace-8685-11e8-9199-c2a4754b5a0e?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6

On catastrophic encounters between disabled youth and men of color with law enforcement specific to Arnaldo’s case:

http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2016/08/mustafas-dilemma.html

AfterEffect: Against The Erasure of Arnaldo Rios Soto

Arnaldo Rios Soto, a Latinx male presenting autistic man with dark curly hair
wearing a gray t-shirt is holding a brown and tan teddy bear and smiling at the
camera.

Today, the police officer who shot Charles Kinsey goes on trial. I read a news report describing how Mr. Kinsey has not recovered from the trauma of being an unarmed Black man doing his job and trying to tend to his client and explain to the police that he and his client were unarmed and trying to cooperate. The police officer claimed he was not trying to shoot Mr. Kinsey. He wanted to shoot his autistic client, Arnaldo Rios Soto instead.

It is important to note that police radio notified officers that Arnaldo was holding a toy, and officers 20 feet away did not feel under threat. Quoting Mr. Rios Soto's attorney, Matthew Dietz, in the Miami Herald:

 “I can’t believe that every other officer heard on the radio that it was a toy,” Dietz said. Aledda “aimed, but couldn’t hit a 250-pound man sitting cross-legged on the ground, and he’s a SWAT member? If he was aiming at Arnaldo, he’s the worst shot in the world.”

Arnaldo was a passing mention in the story of the aftermath of this tragedy. In fact, the story of what happens to Arnaldo is told in heartbreaking detail on the podcast Aftereffect, which you can listen to by clicking this link: https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/aftereffect

There were two victims of color that day, Mr. Kinsey and Arnaldo Soto. One was an African American carer, the other was his Latinx and autistic client. There shouldn't be a hierarchy of victims that makes the victim struck by the bullet intended for the other the main protagonist in this horror story. I find it sad but not surprising that this news article uses the power of words to leave Arnaldo a voiceless footnote in his own tragedy.

Arnaldo has paid a devastating price for wanting to take a walk away from his group home. He was targeted because he was autistic and wandering in the street on a route usually taken with Mr. Kinsey, clutching his toy truck.  Arnaldo was unjustly arrested, he was placed in the mental health equivalent of hell for too long. Despite his story having a happy ending of sorts (I mean, he's still in a group home), the memories of that day will haunt Arnaldo for the rest of his life, just as they haunt Charles Kinsey.

I think we need to remind the media that today, the police officer who alleged he aimed to shoot Arnaldo Rios Soto, an autistic young man of color, missed and shot his support staff member, Mr. Charles Kinsey, instead.

Read more about Arnaldo, Autism, and catastrophic encounters with law enforcement:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/aftereffect
The low key ableist news article:
 https://www.local10.com/news/local-10-investigates/charles-kinsey-still-haunted-by-memories-of-police-involved-shooting
Other references
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article226624549.html
http://theautismwars.blogspot.com/2016/08/mustafas-dilemma.html
http://nosmag.org/arnaldo-rios-autistic-man-charles-kinsey-police-shooting/