My son is Black and living with Autism. How do I protect him

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Years ago, I was in grad school with a former police officer. I asked him what should an autistic person do when stopped by the police. He said make sure they can use words to immediately say, “I am autistic”. Don’t worry how well the police may or may not understand autism. They will understand enough.

A black male will absolutely be treated differently by the police, especially a young one. This has been studied for more than 50 years at this point. Even a black police officer will be more wary of a young black man than any other type of person. And yes, people don’t think of autism affecting non-whites.

I hate to say this, but I would get your son to practice encounters with the police. Practice with you, and then if you have the opportunity, ask a real police officer to help. They would be happy to. They love that building community relationships stuff. But you want to make it automatic for him to act and speak appropriately if he’s in that situation.

And also don’t let him be scared of the police. I know that’s tricky, but it’s important. If he needs help, he needs to know he can call them.

And if the person’s fine with wearing this tag, it’s an excellent way.

As the person gets older, and develops skills in the slow way we do!, he or she may no longer want to wear a tag, and then there are other skills.

For example, a person can tap lips with open hand and shake head ‘no.’ And then matter-of-factly do it a second time.

It’s short, it’s respectful, it’s very descriptive. And it’s open hands. Nothing is guaranteed, unfortunately. All we can do is get a high probability skill, and then hope that it’s enough.

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PS We are all mid-functioning!

In a perfect world that would do the trick, I on the other hand would never wear one, merely because there are a lot of pathological people with authority that would see you as an easy target to get their jollies off. I'm not saying that's a guarantee, but it's something to think about before tagging yourself as "different".

The trick to tagging yourself as "different" is to not only focus on weak points, but also finding a way to emphasize where your strong points are as well.

I’m not worried about my own strengths and weaknesses, I’m worried about some authoritarian excrement bag that would like to make my life difficult merely because I’m different. I don’t have the time, nor patience for them at this point in my life, and so I’ll forgo the Scarlet Letter. I’m white and can ‘pass’ as NT, and for this thread that’s a lot of privilege, and I won’t think twice about using it to meld into my surroundings for avoidance. To summarize: it’s not about me, it’s about some of the sickos that exist out there.

I figured you understand your own strengths, I was referring to having those in authority understand both sides of the coin.

...the list of police stories in this thread just offers further proof that the US police force needs to be broken up completely, and all current members permanently blacklisted from joining whatever the sucessor organisation is. This is literally insane. A government-sponsored organisation that can and will shoot you dead if they so much as think you're looking at them funny? Definition of tyranny, in my book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... ation_rate

Sort that table by prison population, it's one of the few places U.S. citizens can accurately scream "We're number 1! We're number 1." Also notice, we've got ~ 400,000 more prisoners than China, yes China, and we've got 22% of their population.