Checking the Boxes: Biracial, ASD, "other"

Should I say 'autism'"?

That question used to pass through my mind often when Charlie was much younger and it wasn't so immediately obvious that he had "something." Should I say the word and "label" him, I used to wonder?

Things are different now. With Charlie rapidly (if not already) becoming adult-size but not like the typical American pre-teen in his walk, mannerisms, talk, it's very clear to people that he's got "something"---he's not "indistinguishable" from his peers.

Before Charlie was born, and way before I had heard about autism, Jim and I had already been aware that he'd be different, Jim being Irish-American from New Jersey and me a 3rd generation Chinese American from Oakland in California. Before Charlie was born, we'd joke "what if Charlie had blue eyes" like Jim does and then outrule that as genetically impossible (though one of my first cousins was born with blue eyes.......not kidding). And then Charlie was born, in St. Louis, Missouri, with brown eyes and black hair (like me)---as he was a big baby (21 1/2 inches long), we suspected that he'd be (like Jim) tall, as has indeed been proven true: Let's just say, Charlie seems to need new pants about every 2-3 months these days---he's going to catch up with Jim in no time.

Charlie's clearly at least part Asian in his appearance, though not in his name (he is Charlie Fisher). When I fill out forms, I check---under ethnicity/race---"Asian/Pacific Islander" and also (if given the option) "white" or "Caucasian" and then get onto the rest of the form which---since it's usual a medical form or one about services or in preparation for an IEP or for the DDD---involves noting his diagnosis ("autism" is what it's always been that for Charlie), and long lists of "onset of symptoms," "behaviors," "communication deficits," "social deficits," "current medications," "Things You Are Concerned About [ = Where Do I Start?]," and on and on and on.

My son is biracial but it's his being on the autism spectrum that most clearly say "he's different." Charlie's being biracial---a Chinese-Irish Jersey boy---has always been important and certainly never something we'd wish to mask. So I've been puzzling over the quite opposite views of another mother of a biracial child, Nicole Sprinkle, in a guest post on the April 9th Motherlode blog on the New York Times. Sprinkle is white and her husband Columbian; their daughter is Nina. Sprinkle seems quite ambivalent about her daughter being of "two worlds."

Nina has a nanny who is Honduran and "soaked up Spanish words as quickly as English ones," but then, as Sprinkle writes:

......my mom asked if I thought this was interfering with her proper pronunciation of English. The next morning, I called the pediatrician, asking if overall language development can be delayed by learning two languages. He assured me that as long as she was hearing native speakers, there’d be no problem. Which language would emerge as dominant, I asked. Impossible to answer, he said, and I began to panic. Yes, I wanted her to be bilingual, but I didn’t want Spanish to be the language she identified with most. Yeah, my kid was of two cultures, and, yes, she would learn Spanish and English, but to emphasize her Latina side, I felt, was somehow a disservice. Frankly, I didn’t want her to lose any of the privileges of being white. I didn’t want prejudice or any extra hardship or confusion — like my husband still feels. I just wanted the eyelashes, and cheekbones, and that lyrical Spanish when appropriate. I wanted the good stuff, and from both sides. I wanted it all.

Eventually, our nanny left us and my husband and I put Nina in neighborhood daycare. The ladies were primarily Dominican — caring, engaged women with whom I truly trusted my child. They had a Webcam to boot. Yet, on the first day I went to check it out, I found myself noting how many kids were Hispanic, how many black and how many white. Out of nine toddlers, there were several white ones. I was both ashamed and secretly relieved.

When the owner of the daycare sent home an enrollment form, I saw she’d already filled out the race portion; she’d placed a check next to Hispanic. I e-mailed her the next day to say that everything on the form looked fine except that Nina was half Hispanic and half Caucasian, thank you very much. There it was again, that uncomfortable feeling, accompanied by an angry reaction. I think I mostly felt indignant that a stranger tried to sum up my kid’s identity when that’s clearly my job for now. And I also wanted that half Caucasian. She might need it later, you know.

It's not entirely clear how Sprinkle's husband feels about her position on this. I've read this last paragraph over a few times, and each time I got the sense, the writer sees it to her daughter's advantage to have the "Caucasian" part of her heritage emphasized, and her Latina side downplayed, at least when it comes to checking boxes. I've had rather the opposite response when noting the racial/ethnic composition of Charlie's classrooms: Last year, three out of the five kids in his class were Asian and this has been a reassuring situation in my eyes and, too, in Jim's. I'm not sure what Charlie thinks about it, but he is certainly always much more aware of more than meets the eye, and that includes not being the only kid who's Asian; who's not white.

In Charlie's case, his disability is how he is identified, whether we, or he, likes it or not. The kinds of worries that Sprinkle agonizes over are issues that would have been much more significant for me, if I didn't have to worry about things like Charlie having the right kind of school program with enough trained staff for the next few years.

But one thing I've learned is that, when it comes to how others, the world, views our kids, we only have so much control about their identity. I know my son very very well, and I know how being Asian American, Irish American, autistic, have all played a part in his life. I don't have control about how people see my son, but I have to open myself to the fact that people don't see what I see, and try to understand why, and not be afraid that there are things I can't control. Sprinkles strives to recognize this in her final paragraph:

Motherhood is constantly realizing that so much of her life will be out of my control. So is it so terrible for me to see that one of her cultures maybe edges out the other? Just a teeny, tiny bit? If Latinos ruled the world, maybe I’d push things to go the other way, but political correctness and cultural diversity aside, I want her doing well in life — money, success, respect, opportunities, and, most of all, safety. Not gonna apologize for that, though I wish it could be otherwise. I also wish that there weren’t so many boxes to check — and that the only alternative to choosing one is to write on the blank line “Other.”

I'm ok with "Other." Even if there's no space provided, I fill in the blank and, too, I'm glad for all those boxes.

And I'm curious about which boxes Nina, and Charlie, might choose to check for themselves someday.