We're Not Broken

by Eric Garcia

  There are many things that could make autistic people seem threatening to police. The fact that we stim and fidget could be mistaken for a sudden movement—like reaching for a weapon—that police view as a threat. The fact that many autistic people don’t make eye contact could be seen as not being respectful to police officers. If police don’t know that autistic people speak in echoing, they might interpret a person as indirect or evasive. All of these risk factors are combined with the fact that young Black boys are often perceived to be older than they are and are viewed as less innocent than their white counterparts, according to a 2014 study from the American Psychological Association. When I interviewed Ron Hampton, a Black former police officer in Washington, DC, who has an autistic son, for a piece after Charles Kinsey’s shooting, he told me that “when our children have episodes, we call each other,” referring to other people in the community rather than the police.

  The increased attention to police violence against Black lives in 2020 also returned a focus on the August 2019 killing of Elijah McClain by police in Aurora, Colorado, for which the three white officers were initially cleared. McClain’s family said he was stopped on his way home from getting iced tea for his brother. The Aurora Police Department said it had received a call about a suspicious person in a ski mask “acting weird” and “waving his arms around.” Initially, McClain reportedly told officers “I’m an introvert” and asked them to respect his space. Police say McClain resisted arrest and one officer warns in in the video that McClain was going for one of their guns. Eventually, police put him in a carotid hold, which is meant to restrict blood to the brain. When first responders arrived, they injected him with the sedative ketamine. McClain went into cardiac arrest twice en route to the hospital and died on August 30.

  It has not been disclosed whether McClain was autistic. But many autistic people and their loved ones immediately saw similarities between McClain and themselves, particularly because McClain’s last words to police were “I’m just different.” Autistic people and their families fear that their being “different” makes them a target, that it makes them seem suspicious or stand out. All autistic people, but particularly autistic people of color, know that we could be Elijah McClain and that telling police officers we are “different” will not save us.

  This does not mean that police are inherently bad or evil; rather, police are often ill-equipped to handle situations with autistic people. In recent years, there has been a trend to train police to better interact with people on the spectrum, and there have been efforts to use virtual reality to train police. In 2017, a year after Kinsey’s shooting, Florida passed legislation requiring autism training for police. The training, as laid out in the legislation, included guidance on how to recognize symptoms of autism and examples of appropriate responses when interacting with autistic people. Pennsylvania and New Jersey have passed similar bills.

  Still, there won’t be an easy fix to this gap in understanding. A 2016 study published in Police Practice and Research found that 23 percent of respondents to a survey said their agencies had not mandated autism training. Furthermore, though Illinois began to mandate training for new police officers in 2008, the Stephon Watts shooting happened four years after the law had been passed. The public deaths of Black people that disturbed the public consciousness led to a call for defunding police departments. Supporters of that movement make the case that psychiatric services or other types of intervention might be more effective at helping people with mental illness than police intervention. Whether one supports or opposes defunding the police, it is likely that finding alternatives to police could benefit mentally ill, autistic, or otherwise disabled people.

  The fates of Watts, Rios-Soto, and Hayes reminded me of my own interactions with police. As a Boy Scout, I was taught to see the police as respected civil servants meant to protect the community. Some of my scoutmasters worked in sheriff’s offices and some of my fellow Boy Scouts became police officers themselves. Meeting and personally knowing many police officers is precisely why I do not believe all police officers are bad, inherently racist, or have malicious intent. Most of the time, they are trying to do their jobs and go home, just like I am.

  Growing up, I only interacted with the police when they busted my garage band after boring neighbors called them. Even then, I didn’t see police officers as a threat. But my mom, who grew up in East Los Angeles, had a very different relationship with police. Like most parents of Black and Latino teenagers, she told me to be respectful of police if I was ever stopped. If I saw a police incident, she taught me not to wander over to see what was happening lest I wind up being apprehended myself. For a long time, I thought she was being a bit too hysterical; we were far removed from Los Angeles and lived in the suburbs, where we knew the police officers.

  That would change in my junior year of college when one of my classes involved traveling to Raleigh to cover the state legislature. It was my first real taste of legislative reporting and it quickly became a favorite beat of mine. I would hitch a ride with my friend Kathryn to Raleigh and then cruise the legislative office buildings as well as the main building on Jones Street. It was exhilarating and would serve me well when I later covered Congress.

  But one week, Kathryn could not take me to Raleigh, so I took a bus to Jones Street. In addition to writing a story for class, I often reported stories for the campus paper, the Daily Tar Heel, from the legislature. When I got there, I parked myself in the gallery and pulled up my laptop to report on the petty accusations of bad faith between the all-powerful Republican majority and the hapless Democratic minority. Soon, one of the attendants approached me and said he would need to see inside my backpack if I stayed inside the gallery. I decided to duck out and wait near the large doors on the bottom floor, where legislators would exit once the session was adjourned.

  Shortly thereafter, two uniformed police officers approached me and sternly asked what I was doing. I explained I was a student at UNC, but I didn’t have a press pass. I pulled out my student ID card and then my proper ID card, but since it was issued in California, it only raised their suspicions. As I began to panic, the things that went through my mind were that I was a kid without enough identification, I was at a government building in North Carolina, and I was Latino. Those statues that lionized the Confederacy that I usually ignored were now a startling reminder that I was a guest there.

  The whole thing lasted five minutes tops and nobody else seemed to notice; all of the legislators exited the doors and went on about their days. But I was absolutely terrified that somehow, I would wind up going to jail. By that time, I had remembered that I still had my Arabic textbooks in my backpack (I was taking Arabic classes to fulfill my foreign-language requirement and hoped to one day become a foreign correspondent). I worried that those books, along with my California ID, dark skin, and lack of connections to the state, would make them think I was plotting a terrorist attack.

  The officers asked if anyone could vouch for me. I called Daniel Wiser, my editor at the DTH, and handed the phone over to the officers. Eventually, they left me alone after explaining I was considered suspicious for not wanting to reveal the contents of my bag.

  On the surface, no harm was done; I did my interviews, took the bus back to Chapel Hill, and finished my work for the day. It even became a joke in the DTH office that I was willing to go to jail to get a story. But for those brief moments, I was aware of what it means to be a person of color in America, particularly in the American South. I was frustrated, angry, and scared.

  To this day I wonder what would have happened if I had started to exhibit autistic behaviors. What if I had started stimming to calm myself down, as I occasionally do when I am scared or frustrated? I probably would have become too upset to let the police know I was autistic, and if I had made one false move, they could have put cuffs on me or worse.

  Giwa Onaiwu told me about an experience she had in 2018 when she was stopped by a police officer while driving when she was
using a toy for stimming. “I realize [the police officer] thinks I have a weapon,” she said. “I’m like, ‘No, this is a stimming toy.’ He was like, ‘What do you need it for? What are you doing with it?’” She said the officer initially reached for his gun but luckily didn’t pull it on her. “I’m just grateful that he didn’t just pull his gun and shoot me because he saw something fast moving out of a Black woman’s hand,” she said. Still, the incident was unnerving.

  These days, A. J. Link does not drive much since he lives in DC, but he said he has been pulled over by the police before. Just in case, he has a signifier on his license showing he is autistic. Link knows he is fortunate because he is a law student and has knowledge of his rights that other autistic people and people of color might not have.

  Link and I had our talk right before his last semester of law school. By the time this book is published, he will have graduated and passed the bar so he can practice law. He has said he hopes to get involved in space policy, which is another similarity between us (when I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut). To this day, when Link is having what he calls fits, he sometimes asks his friends to play Carl Sagan’s famous Pale Blue Dot excerpt, in which the late astrophysicist and popularizer of science describes an image of Earth that shows it to be a small speck in a vast pitch-black void.

  “If it’s a really high-end incident, I’ll put that on YouTube right quick, or I ask someone to put that on YouTube, listen to three or four minutes, and it kind of just puts me at ease,” he told me.

  In Sagan’s famous work, he deduces from looking at this little fleck of blue on which all of humanity has ever lived that it is “our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

  But autistic people often feel like we may be on this planet, but we are not of it. Temple Grandin, the famous animal scientist, once told Oliver Sacks in a New Yorker interview that that she struggled with complex social interactions and that many times, “I feel like an anthropologist on Mars.”

  Though Grandin has faced scrutiny by other autistic people for her sometimes outdated or myopic ideas about autism or autistic people, that feeling that we are on another planet is familiar. If we do not belong to this neurotypical planet, how do we compel others to be kind to us? We may come to understand the planet’s culture and learn its language but speak it with an autistic accent. Furthermore, autistic people of color not only have to navigate this foreign planet but are thrust into this country’s most original and fraught struggle. Some of our nation’s greatest sins are its racist legacies. While some autistic white people can simply ignore this reality, autistic people of color cannot. Unlike actual Martians, this is our home planet; this skin that is our space suit can be a target for pain. So we wander through this space, hoping to find balance but knowing we will be pulled by these dual gravities of our neurotype and skin color. Autistic people like Link, Giwa Onaiwu, Gardner, Gordon, Garcia, and Garcia-Spiegel, and me will always live with that.

  “Living in America”

  As a third-generation Mexican American, I grew up in largely suburban settings. Even when my family moved to the more heterogeneous Southern California, it was to Chino Hills, an idyllic town that could easily be in the Midwest (a far cry from East Los Angeles, where my mom was raised). When I am around other Latinos, I am often ashamed that I don’t speak fluent Spanish, even though a Pew Research survey showed that only 26 percent of third- or higher-generation adults with Hispanic ancestry had parents who “often” encouraged them to speak Spanish. I have never been to Mexico and, aside from family reunions on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, don’t often attend Mexican cultural events.

  In the same respect, when I am around autistic people, I simultaneously feel a sense of ease and tension. While writing this book, I traveled to Ortonville, Michigan, for Autspace, a retreat for autistic adults. In the woods, replete with a campfire circle, basketball courts, and a mess hall, I met autistics who ran the gamut of the spectrum (this is where I met Timotheus Gordon in person for the first time, along with Charlie Garcia-Spiegel and Kris Harrison). I also met other autistic people with higher support needs, people who had limited verbal capacity or used keyboards to communicate. Some of them were professors, some still undergraduate students, others unemployed. But we all were autistic, and we all felt safe and able to be fully ourselves. But at the same time, I worried I was not steeped enough in the history of autism to fit in this space. I imagine I would react similarly if I went to Mexico; I would feel a deep connection to my roots by seeing the source of my family but also fear I was too far removed from my origins, as if I were not “authentically” Mexican.

  I still struggle with these feelings, but as time progresses, I’ve realized there is no “proper” way to be autistic or Latino or male. I see this in my family, which is very much a symphony of identities: Stephanie’s husband, Benny, is the son of an Italian American immigrant and an American-born woman, and I love spending Christmases with them since they moved to Virginia. My father’s soon-to-be wife is an Asian American immigrant. Bob is the son of an Irish American immigrant and is firmly proud of his Celtic heritage. All of which is to say that my family’s heritage is today on as broad a spectrum as autism exists. Our lives are a tapestry of our own lived experiences; we weave together different threads until we form an individual identity made from the disparate cloth that blends into our own insignia to tell the world who we are. It is by recognizing these various materials from which we are born that we can understand our distinct communities and how they shape our own perspectives.

  9

  “Till the Next Episode”

  * * *

  What Comes Next

  Washington, DC, is a city of suck-ups, cynics, and strivers. Social capital courses through the veins of the nation’s capital, and, aside from campaign cash, personal relationships are the preferred currency in the halls of the Capitol. It is a town where people greet you, even if they are meeting you for the first time, by saying “Good to see you”—because chances are, one of you already follows the other on Twitter. The first question you are always asked is “What do you do?” but the unspoken follow-up is How can I get ahead? The question is a way of measuring whether you are worth their time and energy, even when it is at a party.

  At times, this type of networking can be a lot to handle for an autistic person such as myself (especially as I enter my thirties). It isn’t just the difficulty of navigating conversations and determining if someone wants to be my friend or if they’re just trying to get something out of me; often, these parties are in cramped spaces with blaring music and lights that are either far too bright or too dark for me to make out anyone’s face. Still, these gatherings are a large part of living and working in DC, especially when you are an up-and-coming journalist trying to build connections in a new and unfamiliar city.

  It was at one of these riotous parties in 2015, held by two reporters for the Daily Beast, that I found the impetus to begin writing about autism. These parties were a veritable who’s who of young Washington. I bumped into one of the hosts, Tim Mak (who would become infamous after Donald Trump’s lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen threatened to “take [him] for every penny you still don’t have”). He and I had met only once or twice before, and like a good host, he offered me a drink. I declined, explaining that I didn’t drink because I was on the spectrum and medicine I took doesn’t go well with alcohol. Instead of giving me grief about not drinking, Mak mentioned he knew tons of autistic people in journalism in Washington and suggested I write a piece on it. I was actually taken aback by how accepting Mak was. Furthermore, Mak thought autism was newsworthy enough to be written about and thought I was the right writer for that. I agreed it was a good idea but figured I wasn’t smart enough at the time; maybe one day in the future.

  At that point, I was still a correspondent at National Journal, where I was enjoying my job covering economic policy, f
inance, and politics. But in July, National Journal’s management announced the print edition would be shuttered at the end of the year. With only a few editions left, Richard Just, the print magazine’s editor, made a call for audacious pieces, which led me to pitch the autism story Tim had suggested. I pitched what was supposed to be a fun, chatty piece about life in Washington, DC, as an autistic person, but Richard wanted me to go bigger. Eventually, the article evolved into a think piece in which I suggested society should stop trying to cure autism and instead focus on helping autistic people have more fulfilling lives. Richard loved the idea and told me to run with it, something that completely reoriented my trajectory as a journalist and in life.

  “I Read the News Today, Oh, Boy”

  At that same time in 2015, culture was changing around autism. One day, my mentor Ron Fournier, a columnist at National Journal whose son was on the spectrum, dropped a book on my desk called NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman, whom I would eventually interview. Steve’s interest in autism began when he wrote an article for Wired in 2001 called “The Geek Syndrome” that chronicled what seemed to be a boom of autistic kids in Silicon Valley. Silberman said he was moved to write the book because he noticed a gap between the lack of services for autistic children and mainstream media reports about autism, which focused mostly on the mistaken connection to vaccines.