Blackness x Neurodiversity X: (Internalized) Ableism and the Limits it Places on Being Actually Autistic
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.” — James Baldwin
I. That’s Certainly A Take One Can Have
On December 5, 2023, Twitter-user @HumanbeingAwk tweeted the following:
A word of caution:
If you knew what psychology researchers are saying about us you’d be alot more hesitant about self identifying, let alone getting an official diagnosis. Almost all of the theories they’re floating basically classify us as some kind of subhumans.
And my brain has not been able to let go of how wrong it is since the tweet, for better or worse, washed ashore my timeline against my will.
@HumanbeingAwk isn’t wrong about the fact that because autistic people are pathologized by psychologists and psychiatrists as having a “(pervasive) neurodevelopmental condition” called autism that makes us less human and not “normal” like allistic people, we are dehumanized and oppressed in society, and openly identifying as autistic makes us more vulnerable to that oppression.
She is, however, wrong about the fact that that should deter us from openly identifying as autistic, as ourselves.
Because the issue isn’t us.
And it also isn’t openly identifying as autistic.
II. Are You Autistic or Do You “Have/Suffer From/Live With Autism”? It Can’t Be Both
Since at least 2008, autistic people have been advocating for the use of identity-first language (ex: “autistic people”) when referring to our community and us as individuals and against the usage of person-first language (ex: “person with/who has/that suffers from autism”).
The reason being that the latter perpetuates racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, ableist, eugenicist, etc. stereotypes and myths about autistic people whereas the former is a political identity that challenges autistic people and allistic people to understand us (autistic people) as human beings and that autistic is a fundamental part of who we are the way that a person’s race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are.
Unfortunately, however, the problem still remains that unlike with homosexuality and how queer and trans people reclaimed and redefined our identities in a political way to challenge how we saw and understood ourselves, and how cis and straight people see and understand us, autism still remains a “diagnosable” “(pervasive) neurodevelopmental condition” (which is literally still saying that autism is a “mental illness/disorder” that autistic people “have/suffer from/exist with” but in a “radical” way like what “BIPOC” is to PoC) in the DSM 5 and ICD-11.
What’s worse, there’s very little interest within the autistic community in removing autism from the DSM 5 and ICD-11 and challenging psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, teachers, and anyone who has a relationship with and/or provides care for autistic people to abandon anything they think they know about autistic people as defined within the pathology paradigm and learn to understand and engage with autistic people from scratch with the fundamental understanding that autistic people are as normal, natural, and fully and complexly human as non-autistic (allistic) people the way that queer people advocated for and demanded the removal of homosexuality from the DSM and ICD.
In short, people are both advocating for and against our oppression by arguing that autistic people don’t “have/suffer from/exist with” a “mental illness/disorder” and that being autistic is a fundamental part of who we are while still arguing that autism exists, and that it’s a “(pervasive) neurodevelopmental condition” that can be “diagnosed” because there are unique “traits” that all autistic people have that are/can be easily identified because of our autism.
That is what fosters the inability and fuels the outright refusal to confront this contradiction and completely, resolutely, forcefully, and confidently reject being pathologized in any way, shape, and form as well as the belief that we need to still be pathologized in some form in order to be accepted by, included in, and receive support and accommodations society.
Part of the reason why this issues exists and is so ubiquitous has to do with how white, Western (and, even more specifically, US-centric), and liberal (despite how “radical” many claim to be) the mainstream autistic self-advocacy and neurodiversity movements are both online and IRL; and how the leading white voices in the movement (most of whom are academics, students studying psychology and/or psychiatry, and/or work within the mental health industrial complex, which is important to note) are less concerned with challenging the status quo in any meaningful way than they are with improving their positions, assimilation (which is important to white autistic people in the same way that it was to cis white gays and lesbians, and how it birthed the gay rights movement and suppressed the queer liberation movement), and redefining ableism and eugenics in their image. I’ll table the deep dive into this for a later date.
More to the point, though: another part of this equation that is equally significant is that a lot of autistic people (especially white autistic people) have not actually begun to and have no genuine desire to actually address and work through their internalized ableism.
And it’s steadily becoming the inevitable, final nail in all our coffins.
III. The Call Is Coming From Inside The House
As we all know, we (particularly those of us in the West, and places around the globe that were fundamentally altered due to colonization and slavery) live in an extrospective society created for and by allistic people that requires the oppression of autistic people to sustain itself.
Because of that, we are socialized and society is fundamentally structured in ableist and eugenicist (as well as racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, etc.) ways in order to maintain the status quo.
And while that means that all allistic people are ableist (to varying degrees), have power and privilege in society because they’re allistic, have to challenge and unlearn all their ableist and eugenicist biases (without making autistic responsible for their (often willful) ignorance, education, and the ways they dehumanize themselves to oppress autistic people), and have the most responsibility for dismantling systemic ableism and eugenics; it also means that autistic people are ableist and eugenicist as well, and have to go through the same lifelong process of challenging and unlearning the ableist and eugenicist biases and ideologies we’ve been indoctrinated into wherever and whenever they arise (especially and necessarily within ourselves).
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that, to most, this will come across as my not saying anything new, as though I’m preaching to the choir.
I know that most people who’ll read this will already know this, and I’m banking on this being the baseline understanding that you’ll have with regards to the subject.
And I’m banking on this because I am also aware that a lot of people in the choir to whom I’m preaching also believe that openly identifying as autistic or neurodivergent; engaging with and/or creating content about autism, being autistic, neurodiversity, etc.; calling out allistic people for being ableist and eugenicist; criticizing how ableist and eugenics social rules, norms, and settings are, etc. is a direct reflection of the work they’ve done to challenge and unlearn their internalized ableist and eugenicist beliefs (especially about autistic people and themselves).
And I am here to tell you: no.
Because if that were true, the autistic community and the neurodiversity movement wouldn’t still have an allegiance to the pathology paradigm, wouldn’t still be perpetuating ableist and eugenicist beliefs about autistic people and “mental illness,” and wouldn’t still be so fundamentally misinformed and spread disinformation and misinformation about neurodiversity itself.
And if you are of the belief that only autistic people who openly support Autism Speaks, ABA, finding a “cure” for autism/finding ways to “fix” autistic people so we can be “normal” (read: subject autistic people to literal torture and abuse in order to force us to socialize, communicate, and act like allistic people so they can be happy with us) — which, if you believe that we’re autistic people not “people with/who have/that suffer from autism” and that being autistic doesn’t require a “cure”/being “fixed,” you can’t also claim that there is a “(pervasive) neurodevelopmental condition” called autism that is the reason why autistic people are autistic — and any other explicitly ableist and eugenicist anti-autistic beliefs, practices, organizations, “therapies”/“interventions,” etc. are the source of ableism and eugenics within the autistic community and opposition to neurodiversity from autistic people, I have some galaxies and a few black holes to sell you.
The plot has been lost for a while, and the lack of and allergic reaction to introspection is only leading us further astray.
IV. This Doesn’t Make You A “Bad Person,” and I Have No Interest In Moralizing Anything
Something everyone has to understand is that:
- having racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, ableist, eugenicist, etc. biases doesn’t mean that you’re or make you an inherently “bad person”; it simply means you are a person raised in the world we currently live in.
- being able to call out other people’s biases doesn’t mean that you’re or make you an inherently “good person” either.
- and moralizing our awareness of and how we navigate dismantling systemic oppression only helps to maintain them.
In “The Undeniable Blackness of Vine (RIP)”, Lauren Michele Jackson writes:
There are the Good White People who stumble over each other to prove their goodness, who would declare the use of any GIF verboten if a black person wished it so, but only if they could broadcast such on social media. This black person never asked for that, but Good White People don’t care so much for reading and listening either, they want to fast-forward to whatever prescribed action alleviates their guilt. “The impulse towards action can work to block hearing,” writes the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. “In moving on from the present towards the future, it can also move away from the object of critique, or place the white subject ‘outside’ that critique in the present of the hearing.” It feels bad to wade in the repercussions of our behavior, it feels good to apologize and disavow and consider oneself exempt moving forward. But being online, being white, being online as a white person, means never being exempt. Antiracist as a noun does not exist. There’s only people doing the work, or not. The person genuinely invested in the work doesn’t run from discomfort, they accept it as the price of personhood taken for granted.
In terms of images, discomfort means knowing that circulation of any kind is never neutral. Even those willing to be convinced that blackness is both reviled and relied upon for what happens on the internet — an ambivalence to the tune of Eric Lott’s classic study Love and Theft — tend to feel uneasy about the suggestion that the out-and-out racism of anonymous users bears any relation to their own, very casual, user behavior. But we all drink from the well poisoned by the anti-blackness that wants everyone to forget when blackness goes viral.
I believe that this is the way that we have to shift our perspective if we want to make any meaningful, long lasting, fundamental, positive changes in society to dismantle and eradicate ableism and eugenics (and every other form of systemic oppression since they are all inextricably linked, and none of us are free if we’re all not free) everywhere they exist.
If we don’t understand that we have to be as aware of our internalized ableist and eugenicist biases as we are of allistic people’s; that mostly focusing on calling out and criticizing how ableist and eugenicist allistic people are and society is can often make us unaware of our own biased; that we shouldn’t be doing any of this to look like a good person and to prove we have the “right” politics; that this requires an active and daily commitment to doing the work in all areas of your life (however you’re able to do so while also remaining safe); and that we need to do this work within the community and the movement so we can develop a better praxis around community and individual care and support, develop an understanding and critical analysis of being autistic and neurodiversity and mental health that centers the social model of disability and is trauma-informed, and actively oppose the medical model of disability and the pathology paradigm while providing alternatives forms of care to those who may need it instead of waiting for allistic people to decide when and how society should change to include us, anything we do to challenge the status quo will be inefficient, ineffective, and co-opted.
V. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
To be sure, I don’t say any of this to mean that we shouldn’t continue to hold allistic people’s feet to the fire; or that autistic people’s internalized ableist and eugenicist beliefs are a bigger threat and more deleterious to autistic people and society as a whole.
I just mean that we need to be as vigilant about challenging, unlearning, and combating the ways we consciously and unconsciously uphold and perpetuate ableism and eugenics; and provide a nonjudgmental environment for us to work through things, and help each other learn to do and be better.
In “Hello, internalized ableism,” Lydia X. Z. Brown says:
It’s scary, sure, because it means I could face discrimination I didn’t think I might have to deal with (being relatively less fucked if able to pass for not-disabled), because it means I could be read more easily as a target for potential violence (given the rates of all forms of violence against cognitively and developmentally disabled people, especially those read as feminine or women), because it means I am more visible than I realized and visibility itself also means violence.
But it’s also scary because I’m becoming intimately acquainted with my own internalized ableism in all the little dark crevices in corners of my mind I forgot existed and haven’t thought to check, and I can’t shake the immediate thoughts that I should try harder not to seem so autistic in public or else what am I doing wrong that other people can tell? Essentially, I’m finding that my reactions to this ongoing realization of just how much my neurodivergence shows are that there is something wrong and that I should feel ashamed and self-conscious if (non-autistic) people can tell that I’m autistic. For all the time I’ve spent in conversation with other disabled people — and autistic people in particular — about ableism and neurodivergence and neurodiversity and radical disability, I have never stamped it all out.
We build cultures of perfection in activist spaces. This is not unique to autistic or disabled spaces. Purity politics pervade activist and social justice spaces. Call-out culture demands that in the rush to create safe spaces, we shut people out and throw them away if they fuck up once. (This is not about forgiving privileged people for repeatedly entitled or outright abusive behavior targeting marginalized people. This is about disposability politics.) We’re constantly competing for limited resources (“likes” and “reblogs” and “retweets,” all the twenty-first century trappings of social capital — and that word “capital” is critically important), trying to be better activists, always on, always saying the right thing. We give pithy acknowledgements of privilege and past ignorance/fuck-ups, but functionally act as though in the present time, we no longer fuck up because now we’re Educated. That it is our duty to jump down each other’s throats at the slightest mistake or misphrasing — ignoring the completely classist, racist, and ableist implications of expecting people to always say the right thing and never accidentally say the wrong thing or not know the correct terms.
All we’ve done is replicated the painful violence of white supremacist, (cis-hetero) patriarchal capitalism in supposedly revolutionary, transformative, liberatory spaces.
All we’ve done is take the practices we find harmful and do the exact same things to each other.
We have to remember that issue is the way eugenics and systemic ableism have allowed allistic people to tell us (autistic people) and themselves who autistic people are allowed to be, and how society is allowed to think of and engage with autistic people.
And allowing that to continue to dictate how we allow ourselves and other autistic people to identify as autistic, who is allowed to be autistic, and how we redefine being autistic on our terms (that doesn’t center existing in opposition to being allistic, try to positively reframe how we’re pathologized, or seek the approval of allistic people) is doing the work of our oppressors for them.
If all allistic were to suddenly disappear from the world, ableism and eugenics and the status quo will not disappear with them and we won’t immediately become liberated.
Our oppression is a self-perpetual motion machine because a lot of autistic people, even those who are pro-neurodiversity, have already been and continue to be recruited by people in power to target “undesirable” autistic people in exchange for (conditional and limited) access and proximity to power and (a false sense of) security and safety (that will disappear once the “undesirables” are gone, thereby incentivizing policing and surveilling the community to find “undesirables” to target).
And we have to prioritize combatting that in both the community and the movement if we are to survive and change society for everyone’s benefit.
To borrow a quote from James Baldwin:
Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious [allistics] and the relatively conscious [autistics], who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the [ableist and eugenicist] nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
And, finally, I will leave you with this borrowed quote from Malcolm X:
Who taught you to hate yourself from the way that you think to the way that you feel? Who taught you to hate your own kind? Who taught you to hate the wiring of your brain so much so that you don’t want to be around each other? [. . . Y]ou should ask yourself who taught you to hate being what God made you.
