The Paw Print

Autism is known by most as the “White Person’s Disease”.

Autism: a mental condition, present from early childhood, characterized by difficulty in communicating and forming relationships with other people and in using language and abstract concepts.

I recently discovered this twitter thread:

It made me think of 3 very important questions:

Are black children and minorities less likely to even get diagnosed with autism? Therefore less likely to get treatment earlier on when it’s most vital.

Are minorities in general given less sympathy when it comes to learning disabilities like autism and other similar conditions?

Is autism in fact a “White Person’s Disease’?

My first response was to go to Google and see if this twitter thread was just an isolated experience for one black mom. The other immediate lightbulb that went off was “How many people of each race have autism? Maybe majority diagnosed are white and that’s why autism isn’t heavily focused on in the black community?”

I went to Google and typed “people with autism broken down by race” and thousands of results came within seconds. Articles with headlines like “Blacks are less likely to get diagnosed with autism” or “Autism Race Problem” or “Autism, Like Race, Complicates Almost Everything” were screaming at me. There’s a whole community of people who see and believe that there’s a real problem with blacks and autism, a divide that needs to be dealt with.

Of course, I don’t believe in a utopian society where race never has an affect on anything, but something as simple as a mental condition shouldn’t have any link to a certain group of people.

From its discovery autism has been linked to white people. It’s now became this unfortunate stigma that the black boy having a tantrum “needs a whooping” yet the white boy “must be on the spectrum and needs treatment.”

“In some of the first clinical descriptions of autism, psychologist Leo Kanner wrote that many of the families who sought his opinion were white and middle- to upper-class… Kanner failed to consider was that the parents who had the resources to seek out a specialist about their child’s developmental problems were likely those with resources to begin with. In 1940s America, those parents were almost exclusively white, and ever since, autism has been treated largely as a white disease,” says Carrie Arnold, a Pacific Islander magazine staff member.

1 in 68 people have autism. Autism has been found, by CDC, to not be linked to the race, culture or socioeconomic status of a person, but simply to the symptoms. Yet according to the Pacific Standard, “when you look at children and adults actually diagnosed with autism, white children are 30 percent more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than blacks, and 50 percent more likely than Hispanics, according to 2014 data from the CDC. Minority children are also diagnosed significantly later than white children.” According to the CDC, while many children are diagnosed with autism at around 4 years old, researchers have determined that African-American children may be diagnosed as many as 18 to 24 months later.

Research and statistics indicate that blacks and minorities in general aren’t being treated the same as whites, even in an area that should be as racially unbiased as the medical field. But the real question is why?

Some parents aren’t as lucky as Camille Proctor, who found a support group filled with other parents whose children have been diagnosed with autism. Unfortunately for Proctor, she was the only black parent in the room. She couldn’t identify with the other parents the way she wanted to and she couldn’t get responses to certain questions. The white parents didn’t know how to answer when she asked for advice on how to deal with her son encountering the police, no one else saw it as an issue, she explains in an interview with the Pacific Standard.

With the recent movements against police brutality, I’d say, and Proctor would say, that it is a big issue. Things like this never come into play when the average person thinks about autism. In this interview with NPR.org, Proctor explains her concerns regarding blacks with autism and the police. Most people have a lack of understanding about what being autistic really entails, which could easily lead to an officer assuming that a black person with autism raising their voice at them is angry or one who is hesitant to answer a question is being resistant.

Autism, like many other diseases should be viewed as having NOTHING to do with a specific race. Every person deserves access to treatment and support groups and all the things they need to deal and cope with their autism.