Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture
Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 11
December 2019
Seeing in Color: How Are Teachers Perceiving Our Diverse Autistic Seeing in Color: How Are Teachers Perceiving Our Diverse Autistic
Students? Students?
Merida Lang
The University of Georgia
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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation
Lang, Merida (2019) "Seeing in Color: How Are Teachers Perceiving Our Diverse Autistic Students?,"
Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture
: Vol. 1: Iss. 1, Article 11.
DOI: 10.9707/2833-1508.1014
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Seeing in Color: How Are Teachers
Perceiving Our Diverse Autistic Students?
Merida Lang
A
s a former middle and high school English teacher, I would not
consider myself an expert on autism. However, as a teacher of
Integrated Co-Teaching Classes (ICT) for all of my eight years of
teaching in New York City, I taught students with a diversity of learn-
ing needs and styles. ICT classes in New York City are classes in which
two teachers, a general education and a subject teacher, teach a class
in which a maximum of 40% of students are designated as having spe-
cial education needs (UFT, 2019), or have Individualized Education Plans
(IEPs). What qualies a student for an IEP is far-ranging, and can include
diagnosed learning disabilities, speech and language, vision, hearing,
emotional, or physical needs, and neuro-atypicality, like Autism Spectrum
Disorder. Teachers approach getting to know their students with special
education needs in different ways; some start by reading the IEPs, or
talking with the special education teacher, or by working to get to know
the students directly.
And, just as I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on autism, as a White
woman, I would not consider myself an expert on racism, or at least
not the extent that a person of color would be. But as a scholar I am
concerned with issues of equity in the classroom, specically in terms
of how White teachers, who make up 80% of the teaching force in the
United States (NCES, 2018) interact and affect their students, the majority
of whom are non-White (27.1 million non-White compared to 23.7 million
White) (NCES, 2019). Implicit bias, or the ways that people unconsciously
exhibit prejudice, is well documented and exists in the classroom as it
does in all other spheres of life (NEA, n. d.; Yale Poorvu Center for Teach-
ing and Learning, 2019).
Even with well-meaning teachers, this unconscious bias can (and will)
come through. I believe there is just no avoiding some degree of pref-
erential or discriminatory feelings, even among the most conscientious
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of teachers. For instance, both my daughter and I have red hair, and I
cannot help but feel extra tenderness towards students with red hair
(especially those that are mixed race like my daughter). Similarly, I grew
up in Brooklyn among Italians and Dominicans and am especially fond
of both cultures and so I tend to feel fondness for students from those
cultural backgrounds. On a less personal level, we live in a hierarchal
society that situates Whiteness at the top of the social ladder which
means that the members of that society are both implicitly and explicitly
taught to uphold and value White norms, both inside and outside of
school (Diangelo, 2018; Tatum, 1997). As teachers, White norms permeate
the interactions we have with our students; what behavior we uphold and
what we punish, what kind of talk we value, what sort of discussions and
play we expect.
Although this line of thought can have a myriad of applications, my
purpose in this essay is to call attention to inequity in the treatment of
students of color on the autism spectrum, specically to our perceptions
of behavior and the extent to which that behavior is considered through
the lens of race or autism. While implicit bias against neurodivergence is
an under-researched eld, the difculties that students of color face in
white-normative educational institutions and the challenges that autistic
students face in neurotypical-normative educational institutions are es-
tablished (Hyland, 2005; Ito, 2018; Diamond & Lewis, 2019), and so autistic
students of color must contend with multiple hierarchical systems.
Who Gets Seen?
Greta Thunberg has recently catapulted onto the media scene, becoming
a household name for taking adults and governmental powers to task for
their lack of action addressing dire environmental issues. In 2018, she
launched an international youth action group called Fridays for Future,
in which young people strike on Fridays to protest their governments’
inaction on climate change. In September of 2019 her emotional speech
at the United Nations Climate Action Summit went viral (Chuck, 2019),
drawing the ire of President Trump on Twitter (to which Thunberg had
a much-lauded reply). Thunberg is also neuro-atypical, having Autism
Spectrum Disorder, which she refers to as Asperger’s (this diagnosis no
longer exists in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
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Disorders V (DSM-V), so for the purpose of this article I will use the term
Autism Spectrum Disorder). She is open about her diagnosis, asserting
that it is her “superpower” (see Figure 1), and that it is what makes it
possible for her to have such passion for climate change (Chuck, 2019).
While stories of Thunberg were consistently present on my social media
platforms for weeks, I also began to see instances of counternarratives
that called attention to non-White teenage environmental activists.
Counternarrative is dened by The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative
Research Methods as “stories/narratives that splinter widely accepted
truths about people, cultures, and institutions as well as the value of
those institutions and the knowledge produced by and within those
cultural institutions” (2008). Activists who are trying to call attention to
the centering of White activists by the public, while ignoring the work of
young climate activists of color, are speaking to the values of our societal
institutions that applaud the work of Thunberg while minimizing that of
other young activists of color.
This is not to diminish the excellent work of Greta Thunberg. What she
has done in terms of bringing global attention to a vital and timely issue
is inspiring and impressive. The passion that she carries to her cause is a
model for activists everywhere, young and old. But there are those, like
grassroot organizers (Activism, Actually, n.d.) that believe it is worthwhile
to question why she was able to gain such media attention while others
did not. Autumn Peliter, a member of the Wikwemikong First Nation, has
been advocating for clean water since she was eight, has been invited to
speak at the United Nation Secretary-General’s Climate Action Summit
twice, in 2018 and 2019, and was nominated for an International Chil-
dren’s Peace Prize (Wikipedia, 2019). Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, an 18- year-old
indigenous climate activist, has been advocating since he was six years
old, founded the environmental protection organization Earth Guardians,
spoke at the Rio+20 United Nations Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the
General Assembly at the United Nations, and has published a book on the
subject of climate activism (Earth Guardians, 2019). Why is it that their
work does not receive similar accolades in popular media?
Although it would be challenging to determine with absolute certainty
why Thunberg was able to garner such attention for her work while
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Figure 1. Greta Thunberg Tweet from August 2019
Peliter and Martinez have not been able to gain such visibility, one viable
option is that seen through the White gaze (Morrison, 1998; DuBois,
1903/2014) of global media, Greta Thunberg is a more palatable image of
a young activist, (despite the vitriol and anti-autism sentiments that have
been lobbed her way). Issues of representation and visibility in media are
topics that have been frequently written about both in popular writing
and research (Boboltz & Yam, 2017; Lawson, 2018; Tukachinsky, 2015;
Yuen, 2019), as is the difculty of obtaining a platform for activists to
voice their concerns (Gorsky & Erakat, 2019). It is worth considering the
extent to which it was easier for Thunberg to grab the attention of global
social media compared to other non-White activists who simultaneously
speak to issues of racial justice, a topic with which the White-dominant
media does not always want to engage.
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Diversity on the Spectrum
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 59
children is on the autism spectrum (2018). Although autism is still most
prevalent among White children (making up 54.2% of recorded cases in
2010), the majority of those White children are of a higher socioeconomic
status (79.2%) compared to non-Latinx Black (39.8%), Latinx (42.5%), and
students identifying on other ways (69.2%) (Durkin et al., 2017). Addition-
ally, the reported cases of autism among children have risen signicantly,
with the CDC reporting that the number of cases diagnosed have more
than doubled since 2002. Also notable is that autism is about four times
more commonly diagnosed among boys than girls.
There are some interesting statistical nuggets within the recent data:
rates of diagnosis are consistently higher among White children within
all socioeconomic classes (Sheridan, 2018), White children are diagnosed
at far higher rates than children of other races, (13.2 per 1000 compared
to 11.1 among Black children and 8 among Latinx children) (Furfaro, 2017),
and the rate of autism among Black children from high socioeconomic
families is much higher, suggesting that higher rates of autism correlate
with greater access to diagnostic services, since there is no biological
reason for autism to differ across racial groups. Black and Latinx children
are also more likely to be diagnosed later, meaning that they miss out
on years of valuable services, treatment, and support (Pacic Standard,
2017). Some reports suggest that there are racial differences in the
perception of behavior; that Black parents are less likely to report autism
symptoms, possibly because of a lack of knowledge or understanding
about neuro-atypicality (Donahue, Childs, & Richards, 2019).
But other research has suggested that the medical and diagnostic system
may be at fault for the racial disparity in diagnosis. In a study by the Cen-
ter for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research and Epidemiology
at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers found that among a sample
of children eligible for Medicaid, Black children were 2.6 times less likely
to receive a diagnosis of autism on their rst specialty care visit (Mandell,
Ittenbach, Levy, & Pinto-Martin, 2007). Specically, they are more likely
to be diagnosed with ADHD, adjustment disorder, and conduct disorder.
Another study at McGill found that doctors were “more hesitant” to
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diagnose autism in non-White children (Rentz, 2018). In an investigation
by National Public Radio (NPR), workers at West Regional Center in
Culver City reported that Black families tended to bring documentation
to their intake visits that detailed school and social reports of “behavioral
issues,” prompting an intake counselor to consider a conduct disorder
over an autism spectrum diagnosis (Rentz, 2018, para 13).
In his book on the history of autism, Steve Silberman (2015) tells the
story of Hans Asperger, one of the rst doctors to write about autism as
a phenomenon. While Asperger had patients with a range of symptoms,
in his writing he focused only on the high-functioning ones, painting an
incomplete picture of both his patients and autism. According to Silber-
man, Asperger, who was living in Vienna during the Nazi era, was trying
to save children from the Nazi’s euthanasia of children they considered
“feebleminded” (Senior, 2015, para 2). More recent research has disputed
this narrative, asserting that Asperger was more closely tied to Nazis than
originally thought (Czech, 2018), but either way, Asperger’s early writing
contributed to the white-washing of autism, settling it in the minds of
many as a condition of white wealthy children.
Autism exists on a spectrum, and therefore there is no one way that
a person on that spectrum acts, thinks, or presents. Despite there
being a large range of possible manifestations, some behaviors that
are seen in autistic children are: avoiding eye contact, having trouble
talking about their feelings or understanding others’, giving unrelated
answers to questions, getting upset by minor changes, having obsessive
interests, apping their hands, rocking their body or spinning in circles,
having at facial expressions, avoiding or resisting physical contact,
not understanding unspoken personal space boundaries, or not being
comforted by others during moments of upset (CDC, 2019). Many of these
behaviors, if not understood to be linked to autism, could be considered
disruptive behavior, especially in a standard classroom setting in which
middle-class White normative behaviors are expected (Ogbu, 1995;
Hyland, 2015). But a vital question for educators to ask ourselves is: are
we (either as individuals or as institutions) being more understanding of
White students who exhibit these behaviors and others related to autism
than we are of non-White students who act similarly?
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Unconscious Bias
There have been a number of studies that draw a link between the race of
students and disciplinary consequences, nding that non-White students
experience more frequent and more severe disciplinary consequences
than their White counterparts. Rocque & Paternoster (2011) found that
“African American children receive more disciplinary infractions than
children from other racial categories” (p. 633). Morris (2005) determined
that different demographic groups were viewed in distinctly different
ways by adults at the school, with the White and Asian American students
being perceived in the most “nonthreatening” way (p. 25). In his review
of the literature on socioeconomic and racial disproportionality in
suspension for his study on special education and school discipline,
Skiba (2002) notes that research clearly supports that Black students
are suspended more frequently than White students and receive fewer
mild consequences, even when data are controlled for economic status.
More distressing, he points out that school disciplinary researchers
have found that Black students do not misbehave at higher rates and, on
average, receive harsher consequences than their White counterparts for
comparable offenses.
In an analysis of Maryland’s practices and reporting on race and
disability, the researchers found that not only were Black students more
likely to be suspended than White students, but youth with disabilities
were suspended at higher rates than those without (Krezmien, Leone,
& Achilles, 2006). In the study, the odds ratios for suspensions for Black
students with disabilities were higher than the odds ratios for suspension
for White, Latinx, and Asian students. While the researchers did not
nd evidence that Black autistic students were suspended at higher
rates, given the underdiagnosis of autism among students of color this
might not be accurate, especially considering that the likelihood of Black
students with a diagnosis of emotional disturbance (ED) being suspended
was signicantly higher than that of other races, and as noted earlier,
Black autistic children are often misdiagnosed with conduct disorder,
which is a subset of ED (Council for Exceptional Children, 2018).
Although it would be difcult to see into the hearts and minds of all the
teachers in the above studies and ones like them with similar results, it
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is likely that some of them hold conscious bias against their students of
color. But there are many of them (most of them, I would assume), who
believe that they are unbiased. After all, most people go into teaching
because they care about kids and want to make a difference. But the data
show disproportionate disciplinary consequences for students of color,
especially Black students, even when other factors are controlled for.
Now, of course, teachers and students are part of a larger system, one
that is increasingly built upon measurable outcomes and pressures on
students and teachers, alike.
Very often teachers are forced to follow school rules and disciplinary
procedures that they disagree with or that make them uncomfortable;
doling out punitive consequences when they would prefer something
more restorative, or wanted to be more understanding, but being over-
whelmed by bureaucratic and administrative pressures. But again, when
all other factors are controlled for, non-White students still face harsher
punishments (Skiba, 2002), suggesting that there are forces of bias,
unconscious or not, on the part of teachers and administrators.
And where does this leave us in terms of considering our autistic
students of color? If students of color face more frequent and harsher
disciplinary consequences, and if non-White student are diagnosed later
and less frequently as being on the autism spectrum (and often misdi-
agnosed with conduct-related disorders), then it is clear that there are
overlapping populations; there are autistic students of color who need
services, support, and understanding, and who might be receiving those,
if only they were White. Although the problem is clearly systemic and
institutional, and attention and resources are needed at structural levels,
teachers can also make vital shifts in their individual classrooms.
Teacher Identity as Ever-Developing
Janet Alsup (2006) urges teachers to aim for an identity that exists in
“the place of becoming, the space of ambiguity and reection” (p. 9).
The notion that there is no end goal to teacher identity, that instead it is
ever-evolving and continually growing, is crucial for all educators seeking
to become better, but is especially important for White educators. We
live in a society that privileges Whiteness and we have all been socialized
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to internalize a certain degree of bias, regardless of our social and
political views. If that were not the case, the data on school discipline
would look different, but unfortunately, teachers do not treat all students
equally. But if educators consider teacher identities to be in perpetual
growth, and accept that, as social beings, unconscious bias is inevitable
and mistakes will be made in teacher-student interactions, we can
approach ourselves with more forgiveness and our students with more
grace and respect.
Autistic students of color are an underserved group that exist in a
specic cross section of double-discrimination. They are in the hands of
a system that may not be seeing them with clear eyes and that may not
be evaluating their behavior through the most just lens. Many factors
contribute to their vulnerability, such as a lack of funding for special
education and evaluative services. If class sizes were smaller, teachers
would be more able to attend to individual students’ needs, and if those
teachers were paid more their quality of life would be better, and it
would likely decrease their stress level and ability to handle challenging
classroom situations. Were teacher and student success not measured
by test scores, then learning could me more individualized and enjoyable.
So, by no means am I suggesting that the full weight of this injustice lies
at the feet of teachers. But I do believe that perception is complicated
and sometimes just being aware of the potential for misperception can
make teachers fairer and less biased.
Although the demands made of teachers are already considerable,
building in the space and time to expand teacher understanding of
autistic culture could go a long way in reducing unconscious bias in this
realm. Often what teachers know about autism is limited to the language
of IEPs and the portrayal of autistic people in media. If, for instance,
some professional development time could be dedicated to an explo-
ration of autistic culture and the diversity of experiences, with a focus
on the particular realities of autistic children of color, it might bring an
awareness to the generally narrow way in which autism is viewed in the
educational world.
Sometimes one needs to just see something in a new light in order to be
able to appreciate it. Greta Thunberg, the previously mentioned climate
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activist and modern-day hero, asserts that Asperger’s is her superpower
(Thunberg, 2019). She is making great strides in changing the global per-
spective of autism. And so perhaps as educators we can not only follow
this wave and consider how we view autistic students in our classes but
strive to view the behavior of all our students with fairer
and more forgiving eyes.
Merida Lang is a Ph.D. student at The University of Georgia, in the Lan-
guage and Literacy Department with a focus in English Education. Her
research interests include the ways that care in enacted in the secondary
classroom, and she is especially interested in relationships between
teachers and students who have experienced disciplinary consequences.
She taught middle and high school in New York City for eight years and
holds a M.A. in the Teaching of English from Teachers College, Columbia
University.
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