hypermeta - White Supremacy + Autism

January 2, 2012

Here’s an excerpt from a NYTimes piece (Navigating Love and Autism) about a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome:

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.

Oh ho! Well isn’t that fortunate? Cleared of all charges and offered great opportunities with the local university! Things sure did work out well for Jack!

Meanwhile, autistic teen Neli Latson is still in jail for existing in public. Neli was just sitting under a tree, waiting for the library to open on May 24, 2010… But all neighbors saw was a Black kid existing in a place, and, naturally, they became terrified and called the police to say a Black man with a gun was lurking around, being Black. After the police showed up, they searched Neli for the non-existent gun, didn’t find it, then tried to arrest him anyway. Neli became afraid and tried to run back home. I wish so badly he could have gone back home***. Instead…

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.

And this is the first thing I thought of when reading that NYT story about Jack, his girlfriend Kirstin, and their struggles with being white on the autism spectrum. I thought of how Jack was, ultimately, rewarded for detonating bombs in his backyard, while Neli will probably sit in jail for years just for trying to go to the library…

And it all kind of makes me want to cry and them flame-thrower everything in sight.

***I am relieved that he was not simply shot, like so many other Black kids who are unlawfully harassed by the police. Which is kind of an absurd and horrific thing to be relieved about…