Traveling Show

It is admirable that the LA Times has made the issue of autism a priority. The autistic community appreciates publicity. However, the first article tends to talk around the people most central to the story; it is problematic from its opening line.

“Amber Dias couldn’t be sure what was wrong with her little boy.”

Why did the author use “wrong” when less stigmatized terms like “different” are available? Following that up with a quote about “the kid rocking in the corner” perpetuates stereotypes. Some autistic people rock. Others pace, spin, fidget, flap, chew gum incessantly, or feel restless and go for a walk or drive. The public image of autism is still a child rocking in a corner. It would have been a service to autistics and their loved ones, if the author had challenged the stereotypes and shown the spectrum in all its diversity.

It was wise of Zarembo to mention that diagnosis, rather than autism its self, has expanded in recent years. He deals with the double-edged sword of labeling without undue bias. In the twelfth full paragraph, he acknowledges that increased diagnosis keeps kids who might otherwise struggle from falling through the cracks. He also notes the possibility of misdiagnosis and the rise in special education costs, important positive and negative results of more labeled children, while completely missing a major consequence: labeled people are treated differently. Zarembo never mentions the stigma associated with autism, the way that will change the experience of these children, nor weighs it among the pros and cons. The people most affected by the diagnosis are ignored.

This trend continues in the second section, titled “No More Monsters.” The implication that obviously autistic people, termed low-functioning, are monsters is unavoidable. While the author never calls them that outright, his quotes from Dr. Kanner, the one who blamed autism on ‘refrigerator mothers,’ imply their inhumanity. Zarembo perpetuates the notion that people with involved autism are rabid savages, movie zombies, when growing numbers of nonverbal individuals are using alternative means to communicate their awareness of a world outside their own minds. People with intellectual and developmental disabilities and neurological differences are often members of their communities. The author’s apparent sensibilities about the disabled are reprehensible but would at least have been current in Kanner’s time. In 2011, they are decades out of date.

The trend of ignoring the story’s central characters continues in the third section. Parents and the sociological passage of diagnosis are mentioned, but Zarembo never considers that heightened awareness that leads to correct diagnoses could be a good thing, that children who take resources from state systems under one diagnosis would take it under another if that diagnosis was not autism in most cases, that what little fraud exists is parents striving to get an adequate education for their children. If this problem exists, it could be solved by equipping every neighborhood with a decent, public school.

The themes of blaming parents and ignoring autistics continues in “Seeking Services.” There is a brief mention of the capacity of labels to “damage children psychologically” when misapplied, but Zarembo continues to ignore the stigma of labels applied correctly and the people to whom they are applied. He lets the assumption that “social problems” are small problems, though they can be the reason an autistic job or graduate school candidate is turned away after an interview, complicate navigating bureaucracy, and have deadly consequences in encounters with the police. In “Early Intervention,” he does something similar, letting the suggestion by his source that only LFA is “real autism” stand uncontested.

Throughout, the implication is that true autism is a child rocking in a corner, not the broad spectrum in all its variations. Zarembo denigrates autistic people and everyone associated with them without asking the individuals what they think of themselves. If this article was about any other minority group, Part 1 of Discovering Autism would never have made it past the editorial staff. A document so riddled with prejudice would have been kept from the eyes of readers. If articles were published in a major American newspaper implying the inhumanity of any other group, the public would be outraged.