AutisticWhileBlack #SaveDarius II The MTA, 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 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. 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 black lives are compared with white ones..

So let's look at someone else from New York, with the same love of the New York transit system, and how his life turned out.  Jonathan Mahler's The New York Times Magazine essay, The Case for the Subway, includes a brief history of a man named Max Diamond. He lived in Park Slope, not Jamaica, Queens. Max displayed the same hyper interest in trains and the subway system. Like Darius, Max had a prodigious knowledge of detailed information related to trains, subways, track layouts, signals, and switches. While Darius was trained by employees to such a degree that he could cover their shifts, Max had the resources to start his own YouTube channel under the handle Dj Hammers at age 14. 

Max became a celebrity and gathered a following of fellow subway lovers.  Per Jonathan Mahler: "In 2016, Diamond was hired by the M.T.A. as a paid intern, and at 21, he now crunches numbers in its performance-analysis unit while he works toward an economics degree at the City College of New York. " Darius McCollum repeatedly applied for employment with the M.T.A. but was repeatedly rejected. The M.T.A. staff who trained him and were complicit in his impersonating staff by teaching him to do their jobs and cover their shifts have not been held accountable for leading him into his present predicament. Darius' family had set up a job for him driving a bus route in the Carolinas, but because Darius had a parole hearing in NYC, he fell back into seeking out his 'friends' in the M.T.A. and back to the pattern of indulging in his singular focus, the city's transit system.  

Max Diamond filming and sharing details about the NY transit system was never considered a security risk. Darius McCollum, trained by M.T.A. employees and knowledgeable enough to correct issues when they occurred in the same transit system was considered dangerous. Max Diamond is now a conductor for the New York City Transit system. Darius McCollum has been rewarded for the same interest and hyperfocus on the same transit system by a lifetime in prison. 

Within the autism conversation, the violence visited upon the Black autistic body is never felt as we who are African American, feel it. Yet  we have been denied the platforms and resources needed  to counter the harm done to our people. The number of late-diagnosed Black autistics in the carceral system is a statement of the difference between being disabled and Black, or white. The question is, is our community going to act to solve the inherent injustice of structural ableist racism and how it impacts autistics like Darius? 

This is the second time I've asked that our community act to build a bridge to a better life for Darius and others who should never have been behind bars in the first place. 

Either our entire community acts to aide Darius or accepts their complicity in the harm done to him.

Want to help?

Start here: https://www.change.org/p/new-york-state-attorney-general-darius-mccollum-is-not-dangerously-mentally-ill

Cognitive Dissonance and The "Aspergian" Question

"The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate is what it was. You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all."

-Trevor Noah

Born A Crime

It is my opinion that the history of the term "Aspergian" is so rife with ableism and eugenicist ideology that nothing may redeem it. I say this knowing that had I been born in the late 1980s or 90s, this term, which is today conflated with the term Aspergers,  might have been added to my own "gifted" label.

My son is considered Black under the one-drop rule.
 He is a diagnosed nonverbal autistic.
Image of a Hispanic male presenting youth  with
curly dark brown hair and tan skin clean-shaven in
a wheelchair drinking a bottle of water Image
posted with permission of the subject.© Kerima Cevik 

In the fall of the past year, I was bombarded with a rage tweetstorm by individuals who felt I was threatening their identity by tweeting my views on the Aspie supremacist nature of the fabricated term 'Aspergian' and for that matter the eugenic past of Asperger himself ("He joined several organizations affiliated with the NSDAP (although not the Nazi party itself,) publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child 'euthanasia' program"). Eventually, I chose to stop trying to justify my position or explain it in any way because I realized that no matter what facts I had to back up my points, what I had to say would never be accepted.

So what I am writing here is for readers who truly want to understand my point of view on the topic of Aspie Supremacy, Aspie Segregationism, the Aspergia Island myth, the error of using the term Aspergian interchangeably with Aspergers and Aspie, and how the language of Aspergian promoters so closely resembles white nationalists post-election attempts to change their lexicon of terms to make white supremacy more acceptable to mainstream audiences that I began to push back against the use of the term Aspergian entirely.

I also need to remind people that this is my perspective, based on how things are right now in the United States, and how much damage and hatred is harming us all by building these disability hierarchies within already marginalized communities.

What made me so sure that explaining the link between eugenics, disability and racism, and how this informed the Asperger supremacist philosophies that gave rise to the Aspergia Island concept and later the conflation of the term for citizens of fictional Aspergia, i.e., Aspergians, would make no difference to those people who identify as Aspergians?  It has to do with how people hang onto desired identities even when presented with any factual evidence to the contrary. An excellent example of this rejection of any identity viewed as less acceptable to society is the story of Susie Guillory Phipps, and how an unknown fact can induce cognitive dissonance that results in serious emotional reactions in people.

Susie Guillory Phipps' Crisis of  Racial Identity

Susie Guillory Phipps and her husband Andy went to request her birth certificate to apply for a U.S. Passport needed to travel to Europe. But when Susie got her birth certificate "she was, as she put it, "flabbergasted and sickened" to learn "the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics had her down as ''colored.'''

''I'm not light,'' she said, pointing to her face. ''I'm white.''  But the State of Louisiana had a surprise for Susie. A genealogical record going back 222 years to a maternal ancestor, a black slave named Margarita. Margarita was the daughter of white planter John Gregoire Guillory and an unknown slave. So Susie's race was not determined by 222 years of white ancestors but by a 1970 Louisiana law that codified the "one-drop rule" meaning if a person had one thirty second percent "negro" blood that made them "colored".

The idea that she had a black ancestor, even in 1982, was such a shock to Susie Phipps that she upended her entire way of life to reject this truth. She believed she was suddenly not accepted in the most privileged caste of her state. She vehemently denied any ancestry that linked her to the caste of least privilege. The cognitive dissonance was too great. In her own words, "sickened" by the idea she could be "colored", Phipps spent over five years and $20,000 demanding in court Louisiana change her race on her birth certificate to "white." Before the one-drop rule applied to her, Susie probably never gave racial identity a thought. But once such a rule directly impacted her class and race privilege she reconciled a fact about her ancestry by rejecting it.

Informed by eugenics, white supremacy remains part of the structure of society in Louisiana and much of the United States. Even now. Mrs. Guillory Phipps's identity crisis and desperate efforts to get her suddenly 'lost' white privilege back demonstrate that individuals faced with a choice between any uncomfortable revelation that places their perceived identity into a lower status and a pleasant myth that allows higher societal privilege they will choose the myth every time. They will passionately defend the myth, and they will abhor the idea of being associated with anything they view as a less privileged or exclusive identity.

I began writing about the harm done at the intersections between racism, eugenics, and autism through the stories of individual autistic youth and children when my son was constantly harmed because of these biases against him. Within the autism community, there are parents, professionals, and adults who segregate and classify autistics by their ability to use verbal speech, their degree of disability, the degree to which their autistic loved ones can mask any outward sign of their disability. or their achievement potential. Some parents weaponize complex support needs nonspeaking autistics like my son to justify usurping the right to dominate discourse about autism resources and public policy, thereby controlling funding and decisions about my son's quality of life that should belong to him. Others use the Asperger's label as both a stick to beat their offspring into what they hope will be a path of being indistinguishable from their typical peers and a way to show superiority over parents of nonspeaking, complex support needs offspring. Then there are those folks whose entire identity hangs on carrying the Asperger's label in the way Susie Phipps needed to have the label "white" rather than "colored" to somehow prove her right to access all the privileges of being in what she considered the upper caste of an apartheid-like social system.

When the American Psychiatric Association updated its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and renamed the diagnosis Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), dropping the sub-diagnoses (Autistic Disorder, Asperger Syndrome, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Disintegrative Disorder), all hell broke loose.  Parents who wanted complete control of the autism conversation demanded a "severe autism" subcategory. Parents who wanted their children presented consistent with the "little professor" myth and wished to distance themselves from autistics with ID/DD labels wanted to keep their Aspergers labels. Others wanted more. They wanted to be another degree of distance from the rest of those with the ASD diagnosis. They rushed to embrace the fabricated label "Aspergian."

In 1999, Aspergia Island, an imaginary island state, was created by a group of people who wanted to design a culture in which their genetic differences were a mark of human evolution. They built an online site that tried to establish a full-blown virtual nation, including passports for members, a logo, and an origin myth. The myth of being diasporic refugees from the Aspergia utopia drew a following that filled chat rooms and threads with disturbing rhetoric. They flirted with eugenic based language, the idea that perhaps they, diasporic Aspergians, were the next phase of human evolution. They discussed their own intellectual advantages. While much modifying of the original messaging happened as more information on autism positivity and unity spread online, the underlying message of Aspergian superiority and the emotional need to build an identity of higher status based on the name Aspergian was passionately embraced by those who wished to separate themselves from other autism community members. 

In 2007, John Elder Robison published his memoir Look Me In The Eye. He identified himself as Aspergian, thus doing irreparable harm to the autism community by perpetuating what amounted to a North American rule of hierarchy-of-disability-based hyper/hypodescent to autistic identity. Late diagnosed at 39, Robison spent years dealing with internalized ableism, and this was unfortunately reflected in his writing. Robison's books became bestsellers and expanded the Aspie separatist culture globally. Other famous autistics, most notably Temple Grandin, was justifiably taken to task for making ableist statements against autistic youth with ID/DD labels and complex communication/support needs.  In her book Thinking In Pictures, she says

In an ideal world the scientist should find a method to prevent the most severe forms of autism but allow the milder forms to survive. After all, the really social people did not invent the first stone spear. It was probably invented by an Aspie who chipped away at rocks while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.

 After 2007, the rift between families wanting to distance themselves from those who could not mask autistic traits and those who did not want funding and support given to autistic children and adults who could pass for typical intensified. The resentment of families whose loved ones required lifetime support and services and who could not mask ID/DD labels became toxic online. Wealthy parents wanting to be free of their complex support needs offspring began using their wealth and influence to lobby for institutionalization. They learned to present institutional settings as less toxic places by changing the labels used to describe them, but this continues to be the goal.

The Aspergers label is still used in other parts of the world, and it is an identity that those who own the label are so emotionally invested in that like Susie Guillory Phipps, any idea of replacing it with any label of less status causes such cognitive dissonance that people will react as she did and drop everything else to protect the risk they will lose their perceived identity. Those like me who believe that it is critical to understand that autism as a single label allows everyone to receive every right to needed services and health support throughout their lives will continue to be viewed as threats to this need for holding on to the identity of most privilege.

Parents of those who wish to distance themselves and their offspring from any hint of association with the more marginalized "autism" label continue to demand a return to the Asperger's label in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5). I will continue to state that Aspergian is a harmful term, it should not be conflated with Aspergers or Aspie. I believe that at least here, in the United States, the DSM change that collects all subcategories into a single disability umbrella was the right thing to do.

My son is autistic. There was never any chance, even when the label existed here, that he would be diagnosed with Aspergers. He is one of the folks autistics like Temple Grandin consider collateral damage and that is not acceptable to me. Everyone who insists on demanding I accept the term Asperigian in this community should take a deep dive into the history of the term, why those who use it refuse to accept factual information about the toxicity of it and explore the internalized ableism inherent in perpetuating a term meant to make those like my son less in a hierarchy of disability to feed their own need for an identity of misperceived higher privilege.

One last note. Supporters of a magazine that uses the term "Aspergian" insist that Googling the term proves that the magazine's publisher has succeeded in redeeming it. I disagree with this because of the way Google searches work. What these people are viewing are search results based on their personal search histories and preferences, not what will result when anyone else does the same search.  "According to Google, personalized search gives them the ability to customize search results based on a user's previous 180 days of search history, which is linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. ... By tracking search results Google attempts to provide the most useful and relevant content based on your search"

Resources and Further Reading
——--------------
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/30/us/suit-on-race-recalls-lines-drawn-under-slavery.html
United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Bhagat_Singh_Thind

https://www.aapd.com/racism-and-ableism/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599.2013.844104

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29713442/

http://www.seobythesea.com/2017/08/personalizing-search-results/

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread588498/pg1
https://web.archive.org/web/20050207195310/http://www.aspergia.com/ethos.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20050122053233/http://www.aspergia.com/

https://planetaspergia.webs.com/

http://www.aspergia.com/lead.htm
https://www.autistichoya.com/2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandin.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR3Ri8miMKzmSWO0fM4ZGVzbibslfcHvKHUCEGMP98Gkw9HwtOJuzuSMWmE

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Me_in_the_Eye#Story

https://www.wsoaonline.com/does-your-internet-history-effect-google-search-results/

Mustafa's Dilemma

Mustafa N. Çevik Garibaldi, reading on our deck ©Mrs. Kerima Çevik

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.

Arnaldo Rios Soto ©Miami Herald

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:

1. Complete compliance and appropriate behavior make no difference to outcomes. 
2. 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, 
3. 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.

Danziger Bridge, where Ronald Madison and his brother were shot by
New Orleans Police during a shooting spree after Hurricane Katrina
©CNN

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.


-------------------------------------
References:
Dementia Inclusive Communities in Japan Part of National Plan
http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-japan-offers-dementia-awareness-courses-to-city-workers/
The Death of Daniel Harris
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/cop-shoots-kills-unarmed-deaf-mute-man/
The Tasering and Arrest of Tario Anderson
http://www.wyff4.com/news/greenville-family-file-complaint-after-autistic-adult-son-is-shocked-with-taser-arrested/30415354
http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2015/01/catastrophic-encounters-with-police.html
On the Shooting Death of Paul Childs
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0714/p01s02-ussc.html
On The Shooting of Autistic Ronald Madison and others on the Danziger Bridge
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/us/new-orleans-danziger-bridge-plea-deal/
The Shooting of Charles Kinsey in front of nonspeaking autistic client Arnaldo Rios Soto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT7HcbEo9WM

Autism Month Essays: The Price of Erasure

Harriet Tubman,  By artist H. Seymour Squyer, 1848-18 Dec 1905
National Portrait Gallery, Public Doman,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9717226

According to POLITICO, "Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Wednesday will announce plans to both keep Alexander Hamilton on the front of the $10 bill and to knock Andrew Jackson off the front of the $20 in favor of Harriet Tubman." 

If this is true, it is a huge lost opportunity for a tremendous victory in the disability rights community's fight for representation and the presumption of competence.

If this is true, despite the erasure of neurodivergent people of color from histories of autism and disability studies textbooks , it is a victory for intersected disability rights activists because Ms. Tubman was neurodivergent, the result of repeated beatings and catastrophic head trauma while enslaved. Consider that her best civil rights work was done after becoming neurodivergent and what I mean becomes apparent. Harriet Tubman is the textbook historical example justifying the argument for the presumption of competence.

This dual situation of loss and gain is a typical example of why I began to write constantly about racial injustice within our community, particularly on the damage done by erasing neurodivergent people of color from histories of autism. Does everyone feel the price of erasure now? So much gaslighting has been done on how whitewashing must be accepted by those of us who are not white in order to present these histories to fragile white audiences that this incredible opportunity to move from reading about a neurodivergent historical figure in a recent history to lobbying in support of representation for all neurodivergent people was squandered by the very act of allowing our own activists to accept the erasure of Ms. Tubman's disabled Black identity, perpetuating structural racism among our own movements and organizations. It could have had the lobbying power that Lin-Manuel Miranda's voice had on the heels of a triumphant broadway production of Hamilton, personally reaching out to Lew to keep Hamilton on the $10 bill. No monumental opportunity some best-selling history of neurodiversity followed by a powerful voice for Harriet Tubman's face on U.S. currency will ever happen.That ship has sailed.
What is the benefit of editing out the voices of people so powerful to disability rights representation that their places in history have overcome the standard erasure endemic to their race and origin? How does this erasure from histories benefit the fight for my son's right to equal representation as a brown autistic teen?

Ah, the irony of the victory and failure of this series of events! Anyone grasping this after I've pointed it out should know that Ms. Tubman's neurodivergence, which was described very much with the same symptomology as today's TBI-induced autism, should have merited a mention in histories of autism. Those activists who aggressively insisted I was overreacting to the new slew of histories of autism and critical disabilities studies books that perpetuate the same erasure can now see where this kind of gaslighting leads. Neurodivergent Black people existed and mattered at periods in history when my race was made into chattel in this country. They played major roles in our nation's history and in the histories of human rights movements for centuries.

But all of these enablers of erasure can keep worshipping at the temple of white-washed histories only acceptable when written by white people and call themselves disability rights activists.

Here are the choices. Stew in the hypocrisy of fighting for disability rights while denying the rights of disabled people who aren't white. Or, when looking in the mirror becomes difficult, maybe try giving nonwhite disabled voices equal platforms along with their rightful places in history. 

Hopefully, this can be more than a token victory or appropriation of Ms. Tubman's life, objectifying her while silencing her neurodivergent black peers.

Resources:

About Harriet Tubman, Civil Rights Activist

http://www.biography.com/people/harriet-tubman-9511430

About Tubman replacing Jackson on $10 bill

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/treasurys-lew-to-announce-hamilton-to-stay-on-10-bill-222204

About the erasure of Black Autistics from Histories of Autism

http://intersecteddisability.blogspot.com/2016/01/autistic-while-black-erasure-of-blacks.html