Jason Arday deserved better

How the world treated Jason Arday for being autistic is inseparable from how it treated him for being Black. The gleeful media pitchforking would not have happened in the same way if he were white. Still I think there is something worth saying about autism ‘acceptance’, ‘it’s a superpower’ and all that — because it creates a pressure to be exceptional that is ultimately dehumanising and that contributed to Arday’s death. That pressure isn’t only psychological, but material; if you don’t present socially as neurotypical then you need more objective credentials than them to access the same resources and opportunities. That’s truer the more overlapping forms of discrimination you simultaneously face. When neurotypicals in publishing and academia start blathering to me about how all autistics are supernatural savants, I can’t help thinking: have you considered that the ones who are only as smart as you never made it into this room?

Autism does not automatically bestow a plethora of talents on the lucky bearer. It does not necessarily make us more competent than our lumpen allistic peers; that’s bullshit. Even if it weren’t bullshit, it would be wrong to make our humanity contingent on our clearing a higher bar than everyone else.

Broadly speaking, there are three opinions on autism visible in popular discourse: 1. we shouldn’t exist (proposed elimination via abusive therapies or outright eugenics), 2. we are burdens on society or 3. some of us — and here’s where we enter ambiently fascist aspie supremacy turf — are magic.

The magic framing can look, in isolation, like progress: disabled people being celebrated for what we can do rather than dismissed for what we can’t. This is ‘acceptance’ of a sort: okay, I can see you are in fact of instrumental use, it is now apparent to me that you can indeed generate profit for shareholders, so welcome into the herd, and do feel free to show yourself out again once the very last bit of you has been extracted. Nobody ever asked me to ‘accept’ neurotypicals, since I don’t have the standing to decline them. ‘Acceptance’ as a permanent aim assumes permanent superiority, too, for people who aren’t autistic.

The more troubling implication of this supposed autistic magic is that it compounds the scrutiny people like Jason Arday face. I’m not going to adjudicate any particular claim of Arday’s here; the media has just spent a week raucously doing so, and the question of his individual veracity is irrelevant to the structural point I’m making. Rather I want to outline the incentive structure he was operating in, who made money off it, and who’s making money still.

Media outlets and academia idolised Arday not to do him a favour but because it benefited them. They put him on a for-profit pedestal, then knocked him off it for profit, too. Arday himself did not individually have the power to set it in motion on his own; organisations did it for their own reasons. The more extravagant their stories about him, the greater the revenue — both at point of publication, and again when dramatically tearing those same narratives down. That’s true not only because of the general attention economy but specifically because of racism: some people want to think liberal institutions are changing for the better, others want to demonise Black people, and the media optimised clicks by making one person the object of a manufactured culture war between these camps. For the former group, Arday’s autism made him more sellable as an emblem of progress; for the latter it made him easier to attack; for neither did it make him an actual person rather than an object of discourse. I am not suggesting any particular individual involved had malignant motives. I don’t know any of them, and I think it’s unlikely they did. But their institutions collectively descended on Jason Arday. This killed him. They’re now drumming up further profit through a third wave of coverage.

There is substantial overlap between how the media deploys narratives of autistic wizardry and Black excellence: in both cases, the identity was a barrier that the person has valiantly overcome. In doing so, they become further content for those who got rich off their exploitation. Once they are no longer of service to capital, the vultures descend.

Jason Arday deserved better than this. No ‘because’, he just did.

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