Autism Vox

J-Mac is Back

by Kristina Chew, PhD on February 15th, 2007

It has been exactly a year since Jason McElwain scored his 20 points in the final four minutes of a Greece Athena High School basketball game. J-Mac’s four minutes of fame were seen over and over by many on the Internet and—after an initial “wow“—his achievement has become a touch point for some in the autism community: It was great, some say, that J-Mac made those baskets, but this is not autism every day. This is not what autism really looks like; this is something very specific to one high-functioning—able to attend high school with his peers—autistic teenager; J-Mac’s baskets were just some stupid autism trick. The true face of autism is not J-Mac shooting the ball, but the screaming, tantrumming, still-in-diapers-at-6-years-old lives of so many “severely autistic” children who, along with their parents, endure one kaka moment after the next.

J-Mac appeared today on the Today show with his parents, who make it clear in an MSNBC article that J-Mac, and they, have been through plenty.

“I never thought he would come this far,” Debbie McElwain said of her son’s disability, which was diagnosed when he was 2 1/2. “When your child is diagnosed with severe autism, you just want him to speak. Jason had most of the autistic symptoms of severe autism. It was just one hurdle after the next … You just want him to say one word, because wants an autistic child says the first word, you are on a roll.”

J-Mac noted that “”My life has changed from going to just an ordinary kid with autism to someone who is a hero’”—-it seems to me that he was already a hero when he said that first word.

Sure, most autistic kids are not featured on national TV and all over the web for the triumphs and accomplishments they work so hard to gain; sure, when you are (as I am, as Debbie McElwain is) the parent of an autistic child, your days have a ways of being filled with more than a few tough moments, and many that are horrible. But I wonder why we seem more readily to speak of such, of what I have called the kaka of autism: Why do we write so effusively about dark moments (often leavened deeply with humor), and decry efforts to speak of all the good our children do, even if it is only the flash of a smile in their eyes on receiving a favorite snack?

Thanks to Whose Planet Is It Anyway for kindly indicating some unfortunate, and unintended, associations in the sentences below.

“Autistic Boy Drops 20 Points” the headlines read a year ago about J-Mac.

Have you heard any headlines saying “Mentally Retarded Student Drops 20 Points” or even “Schizophrenic Athlete Drops 20 Points”?

I hope we hear all of those, someday.

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POSTED IN: Media, Sports, Stereotypes