3:34pm June 26, 2014

I want everyone to remember Christopher DeGroot the way they remember Katie McCarron.

youneedacat:

Everyone remembers Katie McCarron for reasons that disturb me. Everyone should remember her. That’s not what disturbs me. The reasons that disturb me is that they only remember her because she was young, cute, photogenic, and had grandparents and a father who 100% opposed her murder and worked hard to get publicity for her cause, plus the autistic community took up her cause.

She was murdered in a way that was probably influenced by the Autism Every Day video. Certainly the video was used to defend her murder. But everyone forgets that the same weekend she was murdered, there was another murder, of a man named Christopher DeGroot.

All I know about Christopher is that he was 19 years old and that he loved photography, he went everywhere with a camera taking pictures of things. That’s all I can find out. When I made an online memorial to him and other autistic murder victims on Second Life, I put up a little model of a tripod in his name.

That’s all I can find out because nobody in his family is talking about who he was. His parents locked him in the house, deadbolted the doors and the windows, and set the house on fire. On purpose. Like Katie McCarron, this was doubtless influenced by the Autism Every Day video. He died needlessly and pointlessly.

And now nobody will ever know anything about him.

And most people will forget him because he wasn’t cute and photogenic and he didn’t have other family members standing up in the media to tell his real story.

His parents were charged with arson and manslaughter. For a hate crime.

http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/departments/inclusiondailynews/001098.html

Don’t forget him. Please don’t forget him. I’m tired of people forgetting everyone who doesn’t have the right connections to be seen widely. Years on, everyone still knows Katie McCarron. Years on, nobody knows Christopher DeGroot.

Remember Christopher DeGroot. Remember that he liked cameras and photography. Remember that he was alive. Remember that he died fighting for his life. Remember that he was a human being, not a statistic or a number on a list. Remember that the reason we don’t know more about him is because we live in a horrible, profoundly violent, ableist society that kills people and erases their memory and replaces it with the memory of their murderers.

I was all for you until you said that it’s society’s issue. Most people do not condone this shit. The reason why people are forgetting about him is because the media do not think that a face like that is as marketable as one of the woman mentioned. We need to get to the root cause of issues like this, such as the propaganda tactics of organizations like A$, not blaming the whole of society, because most people do not think that this shit is okay.

Saying that society is part of the issue isn’t saying that everyone in a society is part of the issue. But the society we live in is part of the issue. The ableist values of our society are part of the issue. And there are ableist values – ones that contribute to these murders – throughout all of our society, not just Autism Speaks. Believe me, I was around cataloguing these murders before Autism Speaks even existed, I was one of the first two people to even compile a list of murdered autistic people, I know all too well how our society responds to stuff like this. If society wasn’t the issue, then there wouldn’t be a trend throughout every society that Joel and I looked at, for murderers of disabled people to get reduced sentences or no sentences compared to comparable murderers of nondisabled people. Things like that don’t exist just because of organizations like Autism Speaks, they exist because a society values our lives less than it values the lives of nondisabled people. And “a society” doesn’t mean everyone in a society, it means sufficient number of powerful people within a society to make a difference. Do you really think that all those juries all over the world that made all those decisions were specially chosen to be especially ableist people? Because they weren’t.

Joel Smith and I have been doing the math since 2003, Dick Sobsey has been doing the math even longer (read his book Violence and Abuse towards People with Disabilities: The End of Silent Acceptance? for a ridiculously-footnoted take on all this if you really want to get into the details), and society is a huge part of it. A huge part. Autism Speaks doesn’t just create these ideas, it reflects ideas that are already common, it’s a nasty kind of feedback loop that exists with other disability organizations as well. Societies have values, and our society has profoundly ableist values, as do most Western societies, and that doesn’t go away just because some people within the societies don’t share those values. But you’d be surprised how many do. I really think you would.

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