Tommy Hilfiger, Odds and Oddity

Autism Speaks has a bizarre new ad campaign which seems to be making the following point: you are much more likely to be related to someone with autism than you are to be a celebrity like Tommy Hilfiger or Jamie McMurray.  And even celebrities like them can be related to people with autism!  So being related to someone with autism is both normal and cool, so you should learn the signs that will help you see autism in a family member.

It's really well-intended and some of the animation is nice.

But it continues two of the central negative messages that Autism Speaks has always promoted.  First, it suggests that all autistic people are unable to speak for ourselves and need family members to speak for us.  That is true for some people, to varying degrees.  But most autistic people can talk.  Most autistic people are not children.  And it is when we talk, not when neurotypical celebrities do, that autism really speaks, even if those NTs stars have autistic relatives.

Click here to keep reading and see the Jamie McMurray ad.

Second, the commercials suggest that what really matters about autism is how it affects family members.  They don't see autism as part of what makes some people what they but as something that happens to families.  I cannot express these ideas as well as Ari Ne'eman did here:

In my opinion, the real fight here is over who disability happens to -- who all the policymaking and conferences and dialogue and various other forms of hubbub are, at the end of the day, about and intended to serve. I’m glad to see you acknowledge that “the crux of the issues we're writing about isn't parents, it's the person with the disability.” I think that, consciously or subconsciously, that acknowledgement does not exist on the part of many parents or on the part of much of society. I’ll always remember a Washington Post book review I read during my freshman year of college. The writer was reviewing a recently published parent memoir and criticizing the author for not elaborating on her personal life -- the words she chose to use cut to the bone:

"Moore knows, twice as well as I do, that precisely because autistic kids don't much notice or care about the outside world, autism actually "happens" to the sentient human beings around them. The heartbreak, the drastic realignment of expectations, the fury, the terror -- even the fleeting moments of elation or amusement or solidarity in the face of insurmountable weirdness -- happen to the parents and the siblings."

Some people would say that this is a lone instance and write it off. Others would say that the writer was using literary license, and that the offending language should be ignored. I think this example is more representative than most parents will give it credit for. In fact, I am less concerned by the accusation that I and others like me are not “sentient human beings” – an attack so risible as not to be worthy of a response – than by the second part of the statement claiming that my disability only really happens to parents and siblings. To me, this accurately describes the everyday dialogue of much of society about disability. As of the day of this writing, I watched the Senator from my home state give an impassioned speech condemning one of his colleagues for referring to the autism community as a 'lobby’ – this is how he chose to do it, “What's the lobby here? The lobby here is parents – American citizens, husbands and wives, taxpayers – who advocate for their children before their representatives." Who’s missing from that description, I wonder?

I would ask that people who continue to support Autism Speaks contact the organization and ask that they stop sending the message that autism is something that happens mostly to family members.

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