Alice: I consider myself a cousin of Darth Vader.— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 31, 2017
Ana: It's ok to say crip?
Alice: Let's get awkward, let's get really real. #CripTheVote https://t.co/hO53qy3H8c
Let’s start by looking at the character Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck). They present the character as an edgy, unique autistic character who is different from other autistic characters that people have seen on screen before. This is why he is
A white male, unlike Raymond Babbitt, that kid from Mercury Rising, or Hugh Dancy’s character in Adam… Oh wait.
The vast majority of portrayals of disability not exclusive of autism are of white men. This is problematic in that it erases a visual representation of the huge diversity within the disabled population.
An autistic savant, unlike Raymond Babbitt, that kid from Mercury Rising, or Hugh Dancy’s character in Adam… Oh wait.
I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only autistic person who wishes that Hollywood would put a moratorium on autistic savant characters. Savantism is rare and does not accurately represent the average lived experience with autism. In film and television the opposite is apparently true. Autistic people who are not savants are basically an endangered species.Or read Alex Hagaard:
The Accountant most assuredly is an honest depiction of autism — but it is an honest depiction of what autism looks like through the eyes of humans who are allistic . . . that is, not autistic themselves. As such, it is a painful and often stereotypical rendering of a character who is constantly and explicitly signified as Other.I've been thinking a lot about Speechless. It's not perfect. No work of cultural creation is perfect, especially when engaging in complex intersections of identity and agency. But it starts and ends with trying to make sure disabled people finally take control of their own narratives, in so many ways. As I wrote for Pacific Standard, I think the tightness of the genre (family sitcom) helps. Similarly for Switched at Birth or Spring Break Zombie Massacre.
For the duration of the film’s 128-minute runtime, we are treated to the cold spectacle of a man whose human qualities are confined to a minimum. His face is uniformly mask-like; he exhibits no sign of a life outside the confines of his work (and of the plot); he doesn’t even bleed when punched in the face. A number of motifs do the unsubtle work of reminding the audience that Chris is not one of us.
Latest culprit: Keshia Dotson, who snapped a picture and is happily reaping the attention, as stories percolate around local news, always looking for an inspirational angle. I once wrote about a similar incident:
- Don't take pictures of disabled strangers without their consent.
- Don't share the pictures you shouldn't have taken to the internet without their consent. Their story is not your story to do with as you see fit.
In objectifying this woman, as writer and disability activist Emily Ladau points out in a piece for the Center for Disability Rights, the stories all ignore the woman’s personal agency. “The woman is not helpless. She specifically requested assistance with eating,” Ladau writes. “She advocated for what she needed. The employee’s assistance was simply a kind acknowledgment of her request. [The comments] regarding the man are all to the effect of “bless his heart,” “what a hero,” “such a saint.”
One reporter led his piece on the Qdoba story with, “Faith in humanity, restored.”
Real support
Then there are the legal and policy questions. Why is Qdoba not accessible to disabled patrons in the first place? No one should have to wait outside a door to be let in. And shouldn’t Kentucky provide appropriate community-based supports for this individual so a disabled woman can lead a more independent life rather than rely on the kindness of strangers?Here I think the answers aren't that complicated. T. here seems to be a relationship between this husband and wife and the server in question. That's lovely. Ask for consent before posting.
I spoke to Dotson over FB messenger:
Following a physical confrontation with another student and after school employees' attempts to restrain Corona failed, the bus driver pushed the teen's shoulders down, forcing his head between his legs, for 12 minutes until he stopped breathing, a San Bernardino police report stated. He died in the hospital a short time later, officials said.
Authorities concluded the death was a homicide, which means "death at the hands of another, but not necessarily implying intent or culpability," states a coroner's report provided by the family's attorney Dale Nowicki. His death resulted from "positional asphyxia," meaning he was put in a position where he couldn't breathe for several minutes, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department Coroner Division and San Bernardino police Lt. Mike Madden. Corona's autism and mental retardation contributed to his death, a coroner's report states.I'm looking for the actual report, but this trend of blaming a diagnosis, rather than the violence visited on the disabled body, is both pernicious and pervasive. This kind of restraint is lethal far too often to far too many people, and in the aftermath, medical and law enforcement authorities fixate on the disability rather than the action (even should the action be justified). See both Ethan Saylor and Eric Garner for widely publicized examples.
A recent Northwestern Medicine study that examined the South Side neighborhood of Oakland found that 29 percent of the 72 African-American study participants have the disorder and an additional 7 percent exhibited a large number of signs that are part of a PTSD diagnosis. Researchers said they believe that points to a need for more mental health services and screenings in poor neighborhoods.This isn't news, but more data is important as advocates work for better trauma-informed practices among government agents.
A total of 650 reported Taser incidents involved 610 people. Of those subjected to Taser use in 2015:
83 percent were unarmed
53 percent were people of color
49 percent were under the influence of drugs or alcohol
33 percent were described as “emotionally disturbed”
13 percent were suicidal
Two died
When involved in Taser incidents, including instances when a Taser is drawn but a shock is not delivered, people of color were more likely to be shocked and less likely to be given a warning before being shocked than whites.
Policing the PoliceAccountability must be part of reform. Data serves accountability, so I'm glad they are counting.
McGuire says, in Connecticut, all the Taser investigations “have vindicated the officers and found no police misconduct.” But there are cases in which justification of Taser use is unclear, he says. “A few years back, in Middletown, a person who was in mental health crisis was [shocked] 34 times by three different officers, and that was deemed a justifiable use of force and ultimately the officers were exonerated.”
For decades, Democrats and Republicans have come together to pass legislation and support regulations to make America more inclusive for people with disabilities. Not only did a Republican president (George H.W. Bush) sign the ADA in 1990 after it passed with overwhelming majorities, but the same congress and president easily reauthorized the Education for the Handicapped Act and renamed it IDEA. A Republican congress reauthorized the same bill under President Bill Clinton, in 1997. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the ADA Amendments Act, passed by a Democratic congress, which explicitly expanded ADA protections to people with mental disabilities. President Barack Obama signed a law permitting some disabled people to work and save money without jeopardizing access to benefits, and another encouraging integrated work opportunities for disabled people. These were both passed by huge margins in the otherwise highly partisan 113th and 114th congresses.Read the whole piece here.
“Katherine Lavoie spent the last moments of her life with her husband pointing a gun at her. Olivia Clarence was four years old, and the last thing that will ever happen to her was her mother cutting off her air. Olivia’s brothers, Ben and Max, ended their lives the same way. They were three years old.”
Julia Bascom, executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, reads these words from a sheet of paper that she holds in steady hands. Her voice is quiet, but it carries through the meeting room of the National Transitions Youth Center, a small office building near Foggy Bottom in Washington, D.C. Bascom seems tall in her black dress, almost ministerial, as she leads a small congregation of mourners in a ritual of shared grief. It’s March 1st, 2017, the Disability Day of Mourning, and we’re about to recite the names of the dead.I wrote for Pacific Standard on murder of disabled people and the way the victims are erased from their own stories, based on my visit to DC and the Disability Day of Mourning this year, plus the Ruderman Foundation white paper on filicide.
These are my stones. This website is not good. There’s too much that’s bad tipping the scales toward ableism and stigma. I hope Sesame Street listens. I think they can still fix this. Go back to the drawing board (literally and figuratively) with Julia, scrap everything else. Yep, scrap it. You made an autistic muppet, awesome. I love that she does happy flapping and loves to sing. Make her a real muppet. Make her part of the Sesame Street family. Let her talk instead of just talking about her. Let autistic kids see their reflection in her and feel that they are real people too, not monsters. Let them tell their own stories. Sesame Street has always known how to let kids be kids and they can do it again, and they can start now.And now here is Biannon Lee:
Lee writes:Julia the autistic muppet finally joins her friends on TV. What I liked. And didn't like . https://t.co/8FqJ9LgGjb pic.twitter.com/ltl2RwefEc— Briannon Lee (@Briannon) March 21, 2017
I am really hoping autistic Julia is someone we can love, who is accepted and valued for being autistic, and not someone who gets talked over by her friends and adults in her life.So, it's good to see Julia on air, but plenty of ways in which Sesame Street promotes ableist narratives rather than resists them.
As a practical matter, though, the genie is already out of the bottle, and it is unlikely we could stop embryo editing if we wanted to. New advances are coming rapidly, and gene editing is only becoming easier, faster and cheaper.
Again, that need not be a bad thing. Twentieth century eugenics has rightly been called a “war on the weak” — its goal was to stop people with conditions like Huntington’s disease from reproducing. Twenty-first century eugenics can enable people with the Huntington’s gene to have children without it. The new eugenics can be a war for the weak.The whole thing reads to me like a pitch to sell more copies of his book, now out in paperback. I get it. I, too, am finishing a book and hope to sell many copies. But I think he's taken precisely the wrong lesson from the history - an ableist regime, whether based on forced sterilization or gene editing, will always reflect the oppressive biases of the society that constructs it.
Approximately once a week, a person with a disability is murdered by a family member or caregiver. We have found that when these murders are covered, they are often called “mercy killings” which perpetuates the stigma and myth that the life of a person with a disability is not worth living and that it is a kind deed to end such a life. Such coverage simply must stop. It is dehumanizing and dangerously continues to stigmatize disability. We’ve found that the voices of the victims are nearly always erased to favor the perspectives of the perpetrators. This too must stop.A disabled person is killed by their caregiver at least once a week. There are patterns in these cases. There are patterns in how we talk about them.
The study found that taking a life ― something typically not tolerated in society ― is sometimes treated as acceptable in the justice system when the victim had a disability. Killers are commonly portrayed as angelic caretakers who killed out of mercy, or who could no longer bear the burden and snapped. Those perpetrators often face less than vigorous prosecution, the study found.In Paste, Annamarya Scaccia summarized the report, then published a Q&A with me.
“The message is that murder is a reasonable response to disability, and courts will treat you lightly if you murder a disabled child, parent or spouse,” David Perry, a disability rights activist and author of the Ruderman report, told The Huffington Post.
Vilissa Thompson, an advocate and licensed master social worker from Winnsboro, South Carolina, said there is an obvious discrepancy in how the law and the public treat parents and caregivers accused of killing someone in their care.
“When someone, especially a child, is killed, it is called a hideous crime, and there is an urgency to punish the person responsible,” said Thompson, a contributor to the Ruderman report who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease. “But when it comes to the disabled kids, there is this gross level of excusing that behavior.”
Paste: That was the one thing that stood out to me—that none of the reporters had any thought to contact a person with a disability.
Perry: It goes against basic journalistic practices. And I think it’s because most journalists don’t see disabled people as an identity group and the disability rights community as a group you would reach out to. Journalists are just not instinctively picking up the phone and calling the Autistic Self Advocacy Network or the Arc or United Cerebral Palsy or whoever it might be. That needs to become an instinct for journalists across the country.This is one of the lines I keep repeating. Journalists know how to report. We are supposed to go to all sides for comments and framing, but when it comes to disability, that happens pretty rarely.
I have a BA in History. People who don't know the field or its applications will claim it = minimum wage. Actually it always meant I made $$— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) March 10, 2017
Dominican University, where I teach history, is a small tuition-driven private school. The classes are small. The students tend to be first generation college students. We're diverse - over 50% Latinx in the last few entering classes. We're relatively affordable, as small private schools go, and provide that intense, small-class, personal attention, that really can transform a person's horizons.Because (and this is a fun fact) every industry needs people who can write well. They need people who can learn & synthesize info— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) March 10, 2017
The special needs teacher complained that Dominic, who has autism, was chewing on his hair and that it covered his face.Haircuts are super fraught. My son does not like haircuts. He also will not tolerate brushing hair or significant washing of longer hair, which puts us in a complex situation, but honestly not an unusual one for parents of kids of any degree of neurotypicality or neurodiversity. Every four months or so, we go to a barbers and we wait. He goes to the bathroom. He surveys the room. He picks a chair. He sits in the chair. He says, "big," by which he means the big clippers instead of the smaller buzzier ones or scissors. I kneel in front of him and hold his hands. We count together. It's a whole process. Parents and kids - neurotypical or neurodiverse - have a lot of these kinds of debates and decisions, and I feel pretty good about where we end up. He also likes the texture of his short hair, just not the process getting there.
When Brandon [the mom] asked her son if she could cut his hair, the boy refused, saying he wanted to grow it out "to touch the ground."
Since her son's hair seemed to be so important to him, Brandon decided to let it grow.A lot of folks responded to my tweet saying, assault! I bet not, alas.
"I didn't think it's hurting anyone for him to grow his hair out, so when a teacher kept persisting that I cut his hair, I was like, 'I don't need to get his haircut. That's OK,'" Brandon said.
She was shocked when the teacher called her a few days ago, before her son arrived home, to tell her Dominic had given him permission to cut his hair.
"I know that my son would never say that it was OK, because he has asked me to never cut his hair," she said.
When her son came home there were thick chunks of hair missing from the sides of his face, as well as some cut from the back.
Brandon called the principal to complain.
"He's a teacher, not a hairdresser, and we didn't get any consent or anything," she said.
In a statement, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board said the haircut was "an unusual practice" and that it had placed the teacher on "home assignment" while an investigation takes place.
An African-American man in a wheelchair. Blue ADAPT sweatshirt: Our homes, not nursing homes. LOGO: Figure in a wheelchair breaking chains. https://t.co/11pNOgttEZ— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 13, 2017
Image: A temporary ramp up two flights of stairs. The path then veers left, and inside veers back right. Oy! At @SpeakerRyan Kenosha office. https://t.co/ukEqkBkA9C— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 13, 2017
Image: A panorama shot of a group of people, some in wheelchairs, at the Marina Garden Family Restaurant parking lot. https://t.co/3ycVSv3ZCC— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 13, 2017
VIDEO: Adapters chant, "Up with attendant care, down with the nursing homes."Images: Gloria Nichols, an older woman in a wheelchair, wrapped up, thumbs up! And a crowd of protesters outside the Racine office. https://t.co/5uzDq23Mlt— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 13, 2017
In the ensuing debates about platforms and protests, which will be extremely complex and often uncomfortable, forcing us to choose between abstract principles, tactical effectiveness, and protecting ourselves and others. We're gonna need good tools, rhetorical as well as organizational, as we stumble forward.Giggling GOP student groups have hacked the free speech pieties of my generation. It's murky ahead. But recognize we've been hacked.— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 7, 2017
I want to state that peaceful, non-disruptive protest is not only allowed at Middlebury, it is encouraged.There's been a lot of disruptive protests over the past few years, from people shouting at Trump events to Black Lives Matter blocking highways. True protest is disruptive. To limit protest to polite non-disruptive action is to to take a position opposed to protest. Protest cannot be civil.
The repetition involved in the work is actually perfect for those on the autism spectrum who gravitate toward repetitive behavior. "Their attitude is strong," said D'Eri. "That goes to the consumer and nothing can beat that."It's the classic example of how not to cover these "inspiring" stories.
Now, four miles down the road, a second Rising Tide Car Wash is under construction. Despite not having a single ad, they've already received over 700 job applications.
D'Eri's efforts to help those with autism in his community started in his Parkland, Florida community but has since gone global. Through Ted Talks, seminars, and even a testimony to the United Nation, D'Eri is not only uplifting autistic people, but shifting the way people view them and their capabilities.
As for Andrew — he's a new man. "He's motivated," his father said. "And motivation is something Andrew never had but is key to life, right?"