Drapetomania, Legalizing Harm, And Pushing Segregated Autism

The image on the left captures a Tweet promoting an opinion piece by Alison Singer. It reads:

 "Spectrum (Autism Research News) @Spectrum "Pretending people with profound autism don't exist by eliminating language to describe their symptoms is itself ableist," writes @alisonsinger in this Viewpoint. @AutismScienceFd

spectrumnews.org Opinion: It's time to embrace 'profound autism' | Spectrum | Autism Research News

 

Ms. Singer's OpEd brought to mind the published opinions of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who believed that Black skin was the result of a mild form of Hansen's disease, and his pupil, Samuel Cartwright, who imposed the terms Drapetomania and Dysaesthesia aethiopica for the singular purpose of manipulating public policy in the slaveholding South. 

 Cartwright's abuse of science to preserve the inhumane enslavement of those who share my race (because he deemed it convenient to the comfort of himself and his southern white peers) is called scientific racism. So is what Singer and her small but influential group of frustrated autism parents and guardians doing by promoting this label as a means to a segregated end, scientific ableism? 

During this moment, when the American Psychiatric Association is just beginning to confront and acknowledge the harm done by its racist past, witnessing these disingenuous attempts to bombard opinion pieces to force an unneeded label that centers the worst moments of high-support-needs autistics is extremely disturbing. This driving of the parent-created 'profound autism' label is too akin to that ghastly habit of legalizing harm through pathologizing difference. In other words, it seems like the ableist equivalent of scientific racism.

The long and intentional effort to diminish my nonspeaking autistic son's civil rights and personhood by the constant piling on of dehumanizing labels in the name of justifying their desired shift towards mandated increases in institutionalized methods of care and research that are to this day harming those meant to be helped should not be happening in this millennium. The ongoing horrors in institutional care settings should concern us more than adding a label to wrest control of where and how autism public policy and funds are distributed and managed. The autism conversation has wrongly followed the path of enforcing behavioral compliance. It is too much like the enforced compliance codified into laws and imposed upon my enslaved ancestors. It must find a new, humane direction.

The history of harm visited on my ancestors informs my worry. I am disturbed by individuals like Ms. Singer using crushing power to try and dictate public policy decisions based on their own intolerance for nonspeaking high support needs adults. BIPOC parents and our nonspeaking autistic offspring are powerless witnesses in a world where parents and guardians with financial power and racial privilege are the primary voices heard in public policy spaces. The money, networks of power, and platforms given to these adults cannot be matched by voices like ours.

How can my son and I fight for his right to exist as an autistic nonspeaking adult free from the conscription to the faux 'profound autism' label? The current definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder in the DSM V is all-inclusive and enough. And yet, a concerted effort to drive the term 'profound autism'  into existence to segregate my son from his peers who use verbal speech is popping up in OpEds anywhere these influential parents' networks reach. 

My distress won't ever be heard in white-dominant media spaces. But I keep coming back to Samuel Cartwright and how his invention of the term Drapetomania codified the pretext for slave catchers to use mental health as an excuse to harm ancestors who wished to be free and live in the same society as any other person. Scientific racism in research, medicine, and psychiatry has done irreparable harm to BIPOC Americans for years. There has not been a complete reckoning of the damage done to disabled Americans for decades, either. To see this continuing war for control of public policy through the creation of labels meant to push for reductions in community-based, humane treatments of nonspeaking autistics is heartbreaking.

Each time one of these OpEds appears, remember the scientific racism of Benjamin Rush and his student Samuel Cartwright. Labels matter; the wrong label, used as leverage to strip nonspeaking autistics of autonomy and humane approaches to living, only drags autism public policy back into the abusive world of institutionalization, seclusion, and harm. Don't just look at the attempts to increasingly impose the term profound autism. Ask yourselves why these attempts are happening. Save your offspring and mine. And help all their communication to be accessible, autonomous, and heard.

AutisticWhileBlack: At The Intersection of Deaf Culture and Nonspeaking Autism

 

Image of Mustafa, age five, signing to his sister in a gray 
long-sleeved shirt and black slacks. He is a brown Latine 
presenting boy with short black curly hair. Image credit
Kerima Cevik

When Mustafa was three years old, he began to miss speech milestones. At first, when I spoke to him in English, he responded in English. When one of us spoke to him in Turkish, he responded in Turkish. When a kid at the playground, or I, spoke to him in Spanish, he responded. But one day, when he was spoken to, he ceased responding verbally.

After we got his diagnosis, his sister began teaching him baby sign language. Simple things, to help him communicate his needs. About the time we were struggling to learn these signs with him, both his father and I were working and Musti's sister was going to college. So baby signs began to lag.

One Friday night, we were all exhausted and decided to order a pizza. When the pizza arrived Mustafa rushed to the door and peeked up at the pretty delivery person, a young woman who was working her way through college. Without speaking she looked at him and began signing at him. Mustafa signed and jumped excitedly in response. It took us a moment to realize our delivery person was deaf. She was reading our son's baby signs and body language and totally understood him.

She understood him completely. It was a monumental event for us.

This kind of interaction happened whenever we met deaf people until he entered Kindergarten. Whenever we were in a public space, deaf people simply presumed he was deaf and would immediately sign back, so joyfully and rapidly that it took us moments of standing before them confused before they realized that we didn't know enough sign language to communicate at that pace, and neither did Mustafa. 

They didn't just presume he signed. Those who responded so quickly were mostly African American deaf community members. They observed his body language as well as his attempts to sign. We, verbal speech-centric folks, have somehow forgotten how critical gestural language is to communication. But deaf community members have not.

What does a family do when the school system refuses to implement communication as an IEP priority, teachers and staff who sign refuse to respond to their son's efforts to sign his needs, and that family encounters lateral ableism that bars them and their nonspeaking son from learning sign language? Here's one example of what happened to us. His first thanksgiving event at his school resulted in a series of holiday photos posted to the school's webpage which inadvertently showed our son trying to sign to his teacher. The parent who took the photos, upon realizing that they showed our son signing to the teacher and the teacher who was trained in sign language deliberately turning her back on him, warned the school, who took down the photos before I could capture them and bring them as proof to the upcoming IEP meeting that our son was capable of learning sign language. That parent's reward was the school providing her child with a much wished-for item on the child's IEP. Because somehow it was her belief that stepping on my son's right to communicate was necessary to help her child.

His teacher insisted that our son did not have the fine motor skills to learn sign language.

I tried using programs and online resources. It is difficult going and I find that nuance is lost, meaning one might believe they are signing one thing when they are actually signing something else entirely. Then there is the cultural specificity of Black sign language. For our son, the sign language he learns needs to make him a part of his community. Like African American Vernacular English(AAVE), Black sign language should include him. But those who might teach him are not put in a position to be paid for their labor. In our former school district, where the non-speaking student body is disproportionately Black and Brown, no African American sign language teachers were employed. Why does this disparity exist?

In 2014, I watched a documentary of a class in rural Uganda being taught sign language. The ages of the students ranged from 9 to 80. They were taught by a teacher who was given intense sign language training in order to return him to rural areas and teach people of all ages born deaf or deaf as a result of illness how to communicate through sign language. 

We are the supposedly developed nation, yet we do not do as much for our own nonspeaking adults and children. Despite the challenges of the Ugandan program and the ableism displayed in the documentary, deaf rights activists are fighting to give their community the gift of communication. It is that important. 

Meanwhile, Mu, my husband, and I are back to the task of trying to find a way we can all learn to sign properly in order to help our son communicate beyond baby-sign. There is a universal sign language. Perhaps we will try that. But the reality of our sign language story is that sign language learning should be free and open to everyone who is nonspeaking, in the same way, it is being offered to the deaf rural citizens of Uganda. The basic sign language lessons featured in the documentary above were life-changing for the people who walked miles to get them. The lessons lasted three months. In three months, these people went from isolation to community. The idea that people with ID/DD are not worthy or able to learn sign language is a crock. Lateral ableism as a barrier to access to anything that might help another disabled human is intolerable. Sign language is affordable, can be learned at any age, and can be life-changing.  

So why is something so affordable, basic, and scalable not part of language support for our nonspeaking loved ones and their families? We are such a technology-centric society that we tend to forget that sign language is a communication method that can be gained by all nonspeaking autistics who don't have OT challenges regardless of class and income level. When we say communication first, that needs to mean that all available methods of communication should be considered for AAC.

AutisticWhileBlack: Against The Erasure of Ron'Niveya O'Neal

 

Ron'Niveya O'Neal, a beautiful
Nonspeaking Autistic Girl wearing
a filter crown of flowers that 
match her pattern pink and white 
sweater.

On April 7, 2018, the body of 9-year-old Ron'Niveya O'Neal was laid to rest in Tampa, Florida. Ron'Niveya was a beautiful, nonspeaking autistic African American little girl who was brutally murdered by her own father, Ronnie O'Neal III. 

I have been following the case. The press had a feeding frenzy with O'Neal III defending himself, shrieking at the jury, and being allowed to cross-examine his now 11-year-old son Ronnie O'Neal IV. Young Ronnie is the only surviving member of that night of familicidal violence. 

Neither the press nor the autism community gave a damn about Ron'Niveya. The media rarely mentions her by name. She is called Ronnie IV's disabled sister, or Kenyatta 'Keke' Barron's daughter. She is the evidence of a double murder. But that is all. Her humanity has been stripped from her.

I have seen no cries for justice for Ron'Niveya. Was she mentioned in the day of mourning rolls? I honestly don't know. But what I do know is that Ron'Niveya mattered so little to all stakeholders in the autism conversation that no one mentioned her. No one cared. And that, after the entire world view of Black suffering shifted in that wake of witnessing the murder of George Floyd and learning about the shooting death of Breonna Taylor is inexcusable.

 I am posting Ron'Niveya's obituary below. Read it. Remember her not because she is a symbol of violence against nonspeaking disabled youth but because she should matter as much as Alex Spourdalakis mattered. She should matter more than those in our community who sat silently while John Elder Robison happily provided autism as an excuse for Dylann Roof, someone who premeditated and murdered innocent African American parishioners at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in the hopes of beginning a race war. 

The erasure of Ron'Niveya and so many other nonspeaking autistic children and adults of color like my son made me so angry that years ago I began writing about them. Trying to keep them visible. But now I am much angrier. Because this did nothing to stop the horror of what a high profile autistic white cis male like Robison did while everyone else except Lydia X. Z. Brown and Sam Crane was silent. 

Everything about how Autistic Black people, especially nonspeakers, are treated in this community needs to change. To those who put themselves at risk to demand change happen, to the true allies against ableist racism in our community, thank you for your tireless efforts. You all have my deepest respect. 

Obituary (via Integrity Funeral Services) :

Miss Ron’niveya O’Neil

Ron'Niveya O'Neal, a
beautiful brown-skinned girl 
wearing her natural hair into 
two high puffs, and huge tulle
 pale pink bow and a pink T-shirt
with a big white heart at its
center with the words 'boy, bye'
written in the middle of the heart. 

A Celebration of Life for Miss Ron’niveya O’Neil will be held on Saturday, April 7, 2018 at 11:00 a.m. at Greater New Salem PB Church located at 1605 N. Nebraska Avenue, Tampa, 33602 with Elder Dr. Benjamin Curry, Pastor officiating. Interment will follow at Rest Haven Memorial Park.

Ron’niveya O’Neil was born July 29, 2008 in Hillsborough County to Kenyatta Barron and Ronnie O’Neil. Ron’niveya attended school in Hillsborough County. She attended Foster Elementary and continued on to Corr Elementary. She loved getting up and seeing her Mommy and brother. She loved dressing in pretty clothes and wearing earrings. She loved eating Oreos. She loved seeing her bus driver Terry Wallace and her teachers and Corr Elementary. Ron’niveya is preceded in death by her mother Kenyatta Barron. She leaves her cherished memories to her loving brother Little Ronnie, grandparents Booker Ray and C. Barron. Alonzo McNair and Lisa Smith. Her aunts and uncles Jonathan Barron, Alisha Barron, Javario Barron, Daisatta Baldwin, Sasha Eliza, and Tabario Cobbs. Her great grandparents Samuel and Pamela Barron, and Alvin McNair Sr. 

Her great aunts and uncles Latonya Barron, Teresa Barron, Claire Barron, Inez Foxworth, Sabrina Foxworth, Aretha Foxworth, Josephine Holmes, Carolyn McNeal, Jacqueline Monge, Tony Barron, Simmley Barron, Jimmy Foxworth, Eddie Holmes, Rodney Baldwin. Her cousins, Carrieonna Baldwin, Roslyn Baldwin, Rodneya Baldwin, Destiny Baldwin, Rodney Baldwin Jr., Herashiona Crum, Deontae Barron, Tony Barron Jr. , Randy Barron, Tyler Barron, Olivia Barron, Cynthia Green, Chianita Austin, Tavaris, Cammi, Marcus Nesbitt, Lisa and Elaine McCormick, Joyce Ray, Romaine Wint, and a host of other relatives and friends. A special thanks to the men and women of the Hillsborough County Fire Department, the Hillsborough County Sherriff's Department, and to the various staff at Tampa General Hospital.

Power, Disability, and The Realities of Consent

Image of Mu, a Hispanic presenting biracial child at age four with short wavy hair wearing a maroon T-shirt, his head
resting on the blue metal rung of the slide he is climbing at one of his favorite playgrounds. Tennis courts can be seen in the background. Image posted with permission of the subject: ©Kerima Cevik 

Over the past decade, I frequently posted the same few photographs of my son on my blogs and social media, and people would occasionally ask why I didn't post more. There are photographs of my son that he likes, and images he does not like. Sometimes I like images he does not. However, I do not have his consent to post the ones he does not like, even if I think my preferences matter. I now ask my children, both the adult and the disabled teen, for permission before I post any photos of them on any public forum. It isn't something I gave enough thought to before the arrival of this age of deep fakes/extreme photo editing/child predators/online stalking/revenge porn/etc, but it is something I am really concerned about now. I spend serious time agonizing over these questions:

Does my nonspeaking autistic son really know what it means that his images are on the Internet forever? Have I been able to successfully explain the Internet enough for him to understand the implications of what that means to him?

This is really important. Where do my parental rights to share my children's photos end and their rights to individual privacy begin? I decided to write about this on the heels of witnessing a parent doing something we parents do a great deal automatically with little regard to the consequences. We proudly display photographs of our kids during the rite of passage events in their lives. And if our kids are autistic, we insist that come hell or high water, they are going to get their rite of passage event photos too, and we are going to splash them all over social media. But should we do this without their consent? And what about their worst moments? Should we record and broadcast those moments for all the world to see?

As my Autistic son is dependent on my care and support, this means I have the power in our relationship. I need to grasp that when I ask a question, he may be afraid I won't like his honest answer. I have to make certain that when I ask my disabled teen son a question, I ensure he is not answering to make me feel better or because he is afraid of giving an answer I won't like.

What are the repercussions if an Autistic teen does not support what their parents are saying or doing? They may lose quality-of-care, affection, support,  even a safe home. They may be institutionalized for being noncompliant. It doesn't take verbal speech for anyone in a position of complete dependence to grasp this. We can't assume that we have their approval or consent unless we have spent years building a trust relationship with them. They must know its okay to say or gesture "no" to you without retaliation.

Autism consultant Carol Greenberg pointed out that even with precautions, what we parents believe is consent may be compromised by a lifetime of compliance training, trauma, and other factors that might keep our autistic loved one from giving an honest response to our requests.

I have seen recent instances of parents putting their reluctant autistic teens through rites of passage events, then broadcasting them in the hope they will become viral. What disturbed me about these events was the storytelling language usage by the parents that left the autistic teen a voiceless prop in their own event, the way the parents allowed coverage of each event without regard to their autistic teens feelings on what content and how much content should be disclosed (one autistic teen's mother bragged about calling boys in her daughter's high school class trying to get one of them to take her to the prom), and the infantilization of the autistic person involved.

And what about autistic people of color who have become public figures after catastrophic harm? While it is important that we know what has happened to them and what is being done to rectify the harm or seek justice, how far can anyone reporting these traumas and their aftereffects go in discussing private health information on public forums without that disabled person's consent?

I've written about Arnaldo Rios-Soto. He was the subject of a podcast, and there was a moment in that podcast episode that some reviewers didn't grasp the need for but for me could be called the pivotal moment of the entire podcast.

It happened during then WNYC reporter Audrey Quinn's interview of disability justice advocate Lydia X.Z. Brown, Esq, on the podcast "Aftereffect." Brown was asked to comment on their view of other's information about Arnaldo's behavior.

Brown responded. "I don't know Arnaldo personally, and I think it's inappropriate to be talking about Arnaldo specifically at his worst moments in such a public forum. Because I wouldn't want someone doing that to me. Don't be a predatory reporter."

When professor Quinn pressed on about third-hand information regarding Arnaldo's behavioral history, Brown answered: "Is that something that Arnaldo has given you permission to talk about publicly? Because that's a really important question."

This was a clear reference to Arnaldo's right to give or deny consent. Gaining Arnaldo's consent was something Quinn agonized about doing. I wondered why an attempt wasn't made with the support of a Speech pathologist, using the methods of communication already familiar to Arnaldo, for example,  by presenting him with a very brief, illustrative YouTube video in Spanish. What many journalists reviewing the podcast didn't understand was how groundbreaking an interview that emphasized the need to gain the consent of a disabled involuntary public figure to share private information about their behavioral health during moments of complex post-traumatic stress was.

So let's think about why I'm saying this. Disability justice advocate Brown demanded Arnaldo's behavioral health history not be debated or discussed with strangers in a public forum without his consent. They reminded Quinn that people who have survived trauma will react to trauma (that is what post-traumatic stress disorder literally means) and that such reactions should not be fuel for victim-blaming or mislabeling survivors. They also reminded Quinn that disabled people are people, and like all people, disabled people can be violent, abusive, terrible or compliant, kind, and passive.

Chanel Miller's identity was protected during the trial of her attacker. She made a decision to disclose her identity and gain control of the narrative about her experience as the victim of a violent crime. Arnaldo, I realized, was never given that privilege, something that regardless of his degree of disability and CPTSD, he should have had the right to do.

Sometimes people end up memes or subjects of viral social media content and lose agency over a moment in their lives forever. For our offspring, who are forced to live in social structures built to deny them any agency in their own lives, it is up to us to do whatever we must to ensure we truly have their consent to present them in public forums.

In lieu of general comments, I hope to hear recommendations on how parents can facilitate their offspring's right to give consent even when that person is a nonspeaking autistic youth or adult, and how to support ID/DD children so they gain the confidence to give or deny consent. This also needs to be a discussion on how to help parents reduce fear so they learn to respect a denial of consent from their disabled children.

Peace.

#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

Forcing Friendships Doesn't Equal Autistic Youth Gaining Social Skills

My son's first friendships were with family. Image of a hug between Mu and
his adult big sister. His back is to the camera. His sister is smiling.
Posted with the permission of the subjects. Image by their father, Nuri Cevik.

"How do I handle my child seeing the children of every new family who moves into the neighborhood surrounding us included in outdoor play knowing he is being excluded from the group?"

I saw another parent posting this question as one of the most frequent questions autism parents ask as their kids become preteens and teenagers and I cringed a bit. It is a common concern for all families with autistic youth trying to navigate a world where they are often othered and mistreated. My son and I also see them when we hang out on our deck or the backyard in the summer or on snow days. Kids his age, teenagers, will for the most part either ignore him, ridicule him, or ask to do his respite care to fulfill their community service requirement at school. They never ask him what he wants.

That last bit is particularly anger-inducing. Asking for my son as if you are doing me the favor of walking the family dog is dehumanizing to my son in a dismissive way that reeks of ableism on steroids. These are not the kinds of interactions that will help him build the self-confidence he will need to navigate this world after his father and I are gone. He needs to understand that random people may be ableist and some people are dangerous. He needs to know that some will offer friendship as a ruse to some other end.  He must be given the chance to interact enough to grasp the differences between true friendship and all other types of approaches.

My son is not just Autistic. He is the son of a Black woman. Survival social skill building is a requirement of being Black in America. Like code-switching to gain access to better education and employment opportunities, knowing who hates you and what that looks like can keep you alive. In approaching/considering my son’s interactions with others, my racial and ethnic experiences inform my stance on his human rights.

Parts of my childhood were spent in areas where my siblings and I were the only African American children in predominantly white neighborhoods and schools. We were in North Carolina in 1972, where "This is Klan Country" billboards appeared on highways in several parts of the state. We never lived or went to school with the expectation of friendship. We were taught to survive the environments, which were for the most part hostile to us.

My mother was an educator. Her parenting flaws were legion but she had a tendency to rise like a phoenix in times of adversity. When I came home at age twelve with a bruise on my cheek asking what an n-word was, she pulled out an unabridged dictionary and had me look it up. Then she told me in terms that I could understand what this slur was meant to do and why it was untrue. We discussed how I would handle my bullies. She warned that even those in authority might hold biases and turn away while I was being beaten and how to reduce situations ripe for being dragged off and beaten up at school in the future.

My mother said something to me back then that was life-changing. She said people were not required to like me or befriend me. They were required to respect my right to exist, to move in the same space, and to be treated equally under the law.

That is what I want my son to learn. I want him to know, as an Autistic person, that he can choose to befriend someone or not. An autistic young person has the right to have an active and willing agency in the process of deciding who to befriend, what boundaries should be set on such friendships and who they are just not comfortable with. Before any of that can happen, they must understand not to comply with every demand made to them from everyone. They need to understand they have a right to say no to people. And they need to know what kinds of behaviors are abusive and wrong.

But I don't see this happening with parents. The focus is on finding friends, even finding dates when children become teens and adults,  without assessment or understanding of their children’s needs, wants, or ability to protect themselves from harm. This goes hand in hand with the belief that friendship by any means necessary with "normal" teens will "rub off." As long as parents force friendships their autistic kids will someday go to sleep at night and wake up magically typical in the morning. Any sign of intolerance from their autistic offspring for whatever the parent views as ideal social interactions with peers is then a behavioral challenge needing to be imposed not only on the disabled child but on peers in the neighborhood. This escalates to pleas to communities to create normalizing events by inducing pity for the autistic child or young adult to elicit a response from the schools, friends, or neighbors.

I hope I never embarrass my son by blasting a social media demand that someone come and befriend him without his consent. He played with other children on playgrounds until he didn't wish to go to them anymore. The noise of a gaggle of young folk filling a sidewalk and refusing to yield to his wheelchair is not particularly pleasant for him. If the nondisabled peers who are his neighbors don't even have the courtesy to yield when needed unless he glares at them, how can I as a parent demand that those same teens befriend him?

Contrary to assertions that these forced experiences are a necessary part of the social skills process, the aggressive demand of parents that other teens interact or befriend their autistic teen can backfire by being offputting. Negative responses from teens cliques/groups parents wish their autistic teen was part of are NOT teachable moments. My view is that my son is a human being, not a social science project. He doesn't exist to teach his nondisabled peers tolerance.

Two cautionary tales of autistic teens irrevocably harmed by the mistaken parental idea that somehow they had neighborhood friends are the cases of the autistic teen boy in Ohio who was assaulted by five teen males with bodily fluids during a faked ice bucket challenge, and the case of an autistic teen boy who was systematically tortured during snow days and holidays by two teen girls. In both cases, parents spoke of insisting their teens leave with their abusers, even when they showed reluctance to do so.

The parents spoke of being relieved their offspring had made friends with typical neighborhood peers. They had no idea their children were being victimized by their "friends." The need for the parents to want their children to have friends in order to make parents feel better overrode possible red flags about these relationships they might have spotted immediately otherwise.

In contrast, every person who has genuinely befriended my son has come directly to him, not me, and extended their hand or signed to him or asked him if he would like to sit with them. They made it clear to my son that they wanted his friendship and their intent was transparent. And yes, they knew he was a nonverbal autistic. They only asked how he communicated, respected boundaries, and made an effort to find activities that allowed him to see us and understand he could return to us anytime he wished.

My point is simple. We parents shouldn't push friendships on our autistic children because we think they need to have them to reach a goal of being indistinguishable from their typical peers. We shouldn’t presume their incompetence at acquiring friends or berate them for not having any or enough friends. We should not create or force participation in events requiring typical partners and then send social media lamentation that our kid is autistic and has no friends when things don't go well. What parents do by this behavior is to broadcast across a global platform that they have a vulnerable disabled person who is friendless. They broadcast that they are willing to force their autistic loved one to comply with anyone who presents themselves as a potential friend to them. This destroys our young people’s self-worth, reinforces the belief that they must comply with everyone’s demands, and leaves them with a sense of helplessness and lack of agency in their own lives.

Look at what your autistic offspring like, what they want and how they navigate the world first. Consider what would work for them. Then sit with them and however they communicate with you, explain consent and boundaries. Only when parents are certain their autistic teens want friendship facilitation and understand boundaries and consent should friendship facilitation happen with the active agency of the autistic teen. Otherwise, this is about us, not them.

P.S. Friendship facilitation does not mean broadcasting your teen's lack of friends online or trying to gaslight other teens into taking them to events like homecoming dances, proms, or birthday parties. It means looking for meetups and events that will be accessible to your autistic teen, asking them if they want to participate, and allowing them to leave if and when they wish.

This could save our children from irreparable trauma.

Peace

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/

AutisticWhileBlack #SaveDarius Criminal Justice in Black and White

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."

" And then caught this information involving a case in Virginia".

"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."

#AutisticWhileBlack: Against The Miseducation of M. Cevik

“When told we could not be educated, we went out in the woods, we dug a pit, and when somebody learned to read, they’d sneak out at night, go down in that pit with a light, and teach [others] how to read, because it was that important.” Today, for black home educators, “it’s still that ‘each one, reach one’” mentality, she explained. “It looks different, but it harkens back to who we are, who we have been in our educational history.”

Cheryl Fields-Smith
Associate Professor of Educational Studies
University of Georgia 

The Radical Self-Reliance of Black Homeschooling

I watched social media bloom with the photos of other people's disabled children ready for their first day of school. From the parents of twice-exceptional autistic offspring to those who have what they feel is a great school or outstanding teaching team for their nonspeaking children, the parade of photos with running commentary from proud parents was a conundrum for me. I was happy for all of those families but I understood they had no grasp of how that display of pride, that lack of understanding of privilege would feel to parents who didn't have the advocacy or means or demographics to send their disabled students off without trepidation. Children and young adults were photographed and ushered off, everyone secure in their right to be safe and educated. I sometimes wonder what that sense of entitlement must feel like.

I am the Black home educator of my high support needs autistic son. This path to educating him was neither planned nor expected to succeed. I have my son to thank that so far, it has.

Electric Light and Switch built by Mustafa Cevik,  Image of a
snap circuit DIY project to build a light and switch completed
in the foreground. In the background, an instruction book with a
diagram of the project and written instructions can be seen.

Our enormous push against the miseducation of Mu is the latest episode in the history of how the Black and Brown branches of our family tree struggled to gain literacy and numeracy. As I am typing this, countless other people fight for the right to be literate in America, while countless others give no thought at all to having that right, because for their loved ones it is never denied.

Education is something our elders risked their lives for. I carried that weight when I joined the first generation of African American children to attend public schools after Brown v Board of Education of Topeka.

I was a girl brought back to her stepfather's hometown and forced into the nearest school in a neighborhood where we were the only African American family.  My older sister, younger brother and I integrated a rural, all-white school mostly filled with the offspring of farmers.
 One of the many moments in that history, during my early teen years,  happened when I sat watching the tiny black and white portable television my stepfather had built for us to watch in our rooms. The news showed mobs of white adults from Boston throwing bricks and whatever else they could find at buses full of students like me.

It was a sobering moment. All those people who might feel justified in lynching us for the skin we were in, feeling they were losing something by our gaining the same constitutional right to a public education they enjoyed.

Our first homeschool field trip was to beautiful Art Deco
Greenbelt. Mu is in a yellow winter coat, his college student
big sister is wearing a green AmVets jacket. They are facing
Greenbelt's mother and child statue. Image by Kerima Cevik

Then there was the moment my grandmother sat me down to have a serious talk about my honor roll winning grades. My grandmother told me she was proud of me, but I was to settle for lower grades. She emphasized to me that my life depended on not being significantly better than the white students. It was devastating to be told to pretend to be less intelligent than my white peers so as not to put myself at risk of bodily harm.

Public school for me and my peers was unjust and sometimes dangerous. Forty years later, the reality for many Black and Brown disabled students like my son seems to be equally unjust and at least as dangerous.

Our family learned the hard way that the reality of a Free Appropriate  Public Education (FAPE) equal to nondisabled peers, like the reality of an equal, and nonsegregated education, didn't live up to the promise of either the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) or Brown v Board of Ed.

 We had to argue for our son's right to FAPE. We fought to ensure his safety while he was trapped in school placements where IEP teams strove to gaslight us into believing that our son could not be educated, therefore services and supports for him weren't worth the school budget.

An image of a page from Mu's 3D textbook,
The Human Body by Miller and Pelham
displaying a 3D popup image cross-section
of the human heart. 

I have been homeschooling my nonspeaking high support needs autistic son since a series of abuses in school escalated to a point where his school principal called to say that while she was off campus at a scheduled meeting the staff had "lost" him. That day we nearly lost our son for good. The reality of public educational life for my son despite the protections that IDEA was meant to provide him left us horrified. We realized they had no real intention of educating him and his life would remain in jeopardy as long as we stayed in that county's school district.

We knew our son's degree of disability. We presumed our son was competent. We believed all children could be taught. We wanted him to be educated.

 We have been home educating for nine years. He's a teenager now.

This is the hardest thing I have ever attempted in my life.

In his first year of homeschooling, our daughter helped me find a certified Montessori special education teacher who recommended a special education curriculum and resources for building him a Montessori environment at home.   My husband began to buy equipment, school supplies, hardware, and software and acted as Mu's physical ed aide and Mu's sister became his homeschool paraprofessional while continuing her college education.

 We dove into his education passionately, perhaps against their miseducation of Mu and the harm done him by people who were supposed to protect and educate him.

Tyrannosaurus Rex's head bursts out of Mu's textbook
on Dinosaurs. These beautiful books combine stunning visuals
with information that is appropriate for all ages.

I was incredibly fortunate. Mu's big sister decided to get her masters in special education and make her specialization multiple and high support need disabilities. She and I now build curriculum and instruction to fit his individual needs as he grows up and she follows through to see how he is progressing. This kind of individualized education planning and life skills consulting would be unaffordable otherwise. Both my daughter and my husband have introduced all manner of tools and texts to enrich his learning environment. This has helped Mu relax and overcome a great deal of his hesitation for learning.

  I learned that home educating was different from any classroom teaching I'd done. It takes an extreme degree of dedication and patience from both teacher and pupil. You must adapt and accommodate for your pupil's disabilities.

You give up your rights to just being a parent several hours a day, seven days a week. You have to measure progress and sometimes begin again. You cannot give up. Your child is depending on you. What that means some days is both of you taking things one breath at a time. This is our narrative. No advice, no judgments, just knowing that we must synchronize the ebb and flow of facilitating and absorbing learning without preconditions or forcible compliance. We reached this moment one breath at a time.

 Some parents are great at getting their children what they need within this broken system. Others are great at supplementing where the system fails. For Black and Brown parents choices may seem limited, but in the age of technology, enrichment exists if we know where to look for it. I have had a very singular life, and part of it gave me an odd collection of skills that helped me help my son. Most importantly, Mu wants to communicate. He wants to learn. So he puts forth the effort and I don't push him to some point of frustration.

Homeschool Adaptive P.E.,: Musti with his Dad in the pool,
 learning to float Image of a Brown young man with curly
brown hair floating in a swimming pool supported by his father,
a  white male with dark hair whose back is to the camera.
@ Kerima Cevik

There are activists out there fighting to preserve our children's right to FAPE in safer, nonsegregated public school settings. We believe in the work of those activists but found ourselves making the choice an increasing number of parents of Black and Brown children are making when public school districts fail their children. We were pushed to dig an educational pit, light a candle, go into that pit with our child, and teach our son what we know. What we have gained from being at home is understanding our son without barriers. We wake up knowing our son is safe; a happy and stubborn scholar who has regained his curiosity and zest for exploring and learning again.

Mu has taught me how to interact with him, and how to understand how he communicates. I have learned to help facilitate his learning rather than make his learning a series of demands with rewards for compliance and deprivation for shows of frustration and errors. When we see how this process empowers him, my fatigue dissolves, my regrets fade, I focus on my son, and I press on. Regardless of what the future holds, these years with my youngest child have been precious, no first day of school photoshoots or bragging rights required.

Time to light my candle and get back in that pit. Peace.

--------------------------------------
Further Reading:
Resisting the Status Quo: The Narratives of Black Homeschoolers in Metro-Atlanta and Metro-DC

Surviving Inclusion: At The Intersection of Minority, Disability, and Resegregation

On Surviving Inclusion

Autism Month Essays: Against The Presumption of Incompetence

Mu in a green hoodie in his favorite spot, debating whether or
not to visit the wild ducks in the pond. Posted as always with
the permission of the subject. © Kerima Cevik

When parenting both our children, my husband and I tried to make certain they knew exactly who they were and hoped they eventually understood that the labels they carried were things they could take ownership of and apply to help them navigate their lives more effectively. 

Our daughter has a clear idea of the entire scope of her multiracial and multicultural identity. Our multiracial, multicultural, nonspeaking autistic son is 15. I have tried my best to ensure he knows his heritage despite communication challenges. I have found other ways of showing him who he is; of indicating to him it is okay to be who he is and that we are proud that he is our son as he is. We want him to know we will be doing our best to support his efforts to live an autonomous life, and such a life must begin with an acceptance of his entire identity.

My son likes to watch Disney World travel infomercials on YouTube. One day he came into the office I share with him to show me a video. The video was a Disney Parks episode where parents were describing what the Disney experience was like with their daughter, who carried an ID/DD (Intellectual Disability/Developmental Disability) label. At the point where she described her daughter as having a developmental disability, my son stopped the video and put my hand on the child's image and then placed my hand on his head. I shook my head yes in response. I said "Yes, son. You are like her. She has a diagnosis of Down Syndrome. You are Autistic."  He hugged me and left the room. I stared after him, an emotional mess, stunned with surprise, shock, sadness, and relief, unknowingly shedding silent tears of pride. 

Knowing ourselves and understanding where we are similar and different from others is a life-altering affirmation of one's competence. My son arrived at this understanding and communicated his suspicions to me without uttering a word.Grasping the scope of one's disability is a giant step in self-advocacy.

 To some degree, everyone needs certain labels. They form the framework of how we begin to define ourselves. But many labels are not positive or even accurate ones, and sometimes they are forced upon us. In fact it may not be the label itself but how we ascribe meaning to it in everyday usage that may devastate. Some labels carry the baggage of bigotry. 

Many parents who impose the goal of becoming indistinguishable from their typical peers on their autistic children feel the idea of acknowledging that their child may carry an ID/DD label is an abhorrent barrier to normalizing them. Additionally, some schools abuse the power to label a child ID/DD on IEP documents because they want to segregate the child from typical peers when said child might do better with supports in an inclusive classroom. The results of either of these circumstances are some devastating potential outcomes to the autistic student that parents and professionals don't spend enough time considering when making arbitrary decisions for or against the use of the ID/DD label. 

I began thinking about how many autistic students were labeled ID/DD and how they came to terms with that label a great deal after my son came to me to question his own identity in gestural language. I was trying to catch up on my friends' status posts on Facebook when I read an entire thread that brought the entire question of the ID/DD label into sharp, painful focus. It was about a family being pressured by an IEP team to add an ID label to their child's disability designations. Several people who were academics, educators, activists and autistic advocates who carried the twice exceptional label were tagged to give their input on the advantages and disadvantages of accepting such a label. I was not one of those tagged.

My son carries the ID/DD label, not by choice but because that is his medical reality. If there is pressure on any family in a school setting to add this label, they need to understand that whatever they decide potentially changes the entire quality of their child's educational future, and this is not always a positive change. The aversion and abhorrence that people who should know better displayed when discussing accepting this label truly disturbed me.

 I'll try to explain why.

I came into this world with dark skin. I am no more able to hide or deny this identity than my son is able to hide or deny his ID label. Yes,  the ID label comes with a heavy burden to fight society's lifelong presumption of incompetence. There was a time when African American labels came with the presumption of incompetence as well as the false accusation that the amount of melanin in one's skin determined who was more intelligent. We dark-skinned people continue to fight these stereotypes. 

Being an African American woman carries lifelong challenges and injustices with it that made me more aware of ableism directed at my son. Despite the hardship, we now know that a clear grasp of a person's identity can give them self-respect that hiding it in shame cannot. The idea that because of these hardships, an identity is something that can be opted out of is wrong. What needed to be said in this thread that wasn't was does this child have a full professional diagnosis? Does that diagnosis include an ID label? If it does, then depriving them of the support they need by hiding this is like leaving a wheelchair user's chair at their departure airport. 

I thought it was our job to right the wrong of institutionalized presumptions of incompetence. That bit of ableism is the fundamental rock in the wall of segregation from every opportunity that keeps our loved ones from their rightful place in our society. History shows clearly that presuming anyone incompetent begins an othering of groups that slides into catastrophic abuses and oppression. There was an air of defeatism in this thread asking whether or not to allow the ID label on a child's educational record that brought me down. Our loved ones will always feel they are less than others if we simply accept the wrong-headed belief that giving a person an ID/DD label equals a lessening of their personhood.

I just don't know when we will get past the idea that if a person cannot speak or learn in the way the average person can, they are less than others in society. We tend to blame our student's disabilities for our societal failure to meet their educational needs when the truth is we have not changed the fundamentals of the way we educate our children since the industrial revolution. Why aren't we fighting to rethink and redesign learning to reach ID/DD students' needs and learning potentials? We simply passively accept things as they are. And each year, our offspring are given less support and less access to learning particularly when they are made to wear that label.

The largest issues I have about parental fear of the ID label and the presumption of incompetence is that if we do not fight the baggage forced on our loved ones with their neurological identity. How can we teach them allow them to carry this label with pride unless we can let our children know with sincerity that ID/DD labels are nothing to be ashamed of?

I wonder if this defeatist attitude contributes to depression and anxiety in our loved ones? I also worry  that denying knowledge about a critical aspect of a student's disability enables the potential devastation to the mental health of the student not aware of why they may have challenges in areas where their peers are succeeding, I wonder how much trying to opt out of ID/DD labels inadvertently slows progress creating educational methods that may maximize our students' potential because distaste for the ID/DD perpetuates our society's  presumption of incompetence. 

It is our responsibility to make our children matter by fully understanding what accepting the ID/DD label means. They can't accept themselves if we are afraid to say whoever they are, whatever their disability constellation entails, we accept them. Believe me, our offspring feel our shame and insincerity and internalize it.

We parents passionately demand better schools, better IEPs, and an end to the use of the r-word. I am thinking that we also need to take a hard look at our own attitudes and make an active effort to change them so our offspring can sense that shift organically and not internalize any subliminal ableism about the labels used to identify their neurology. 

Peace