Black Autistics Matter: On Race, Representation, and History

In his book White, Richard Dyer writes “racial imagery is central to the organisation of the modern world.” Yet, while (autistic) white people have long escaped being seen as ‘raced’, autistic Black people are relatively absent in popular cultural narratives on autism, including films and television. Showing how autism and intersectionality needs better representation in popular media, such as in the films that get made, the television shows we watch, and the books that reach mainstream publication.

Autistic Black people must have specialist understandings of whiteness/racism and ableism to survive in this world. Through a framing of intersectionality first articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, but with a longer history with other Black feminist scholars (before intersectionality was conceptualised), this talk look at some of the social and historical formations of violence that pervade through the lives of autistic/disabled people and Black people. For white people (both autistic and neurotypicals), their whiteness is often invisible to them, but for those racialised outside of whiteness – as Sara Ahmed writes, “it’s hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.”

Intersectionality was conceptualised to define how different forms of inequality, disadvantage, or violence can compound themselves creating barriers that are not understood through traditional ways of 'seeing' inequalities. Starting with a conversation on violent policing/criminal justice system and then moving into a short Black history of disability/ableism, it concludes with a discussion of white supremacy as a system analysing how white supremacy permeates the film and television industry, and which types of autistic narratives are privileged in popular media over those that are not.

Main Points

Self-Diagnosis - 1:32
Autism and Policing - 3:16
"The Cure" - 7:37
Coming to Intersectionality - 12:47
Adultification - 21:39
Defining Ableism - 25:52
Education, Neurodivergence, and Me - 26:45
Race Science, Eugenics and the Nazis - 36:09
White Looking - 48:50
Whiteness, Media, and Representation - 54:56
Charles Mills: White Supremacy - 57:46
'Matrix of Oppression' - 1:04:40
Social Murder - 1:06:15
Conclusions - 1:07:52


Referencing and Further Reading - https://padlet.com/treventour1995/pmd...
NREC Event/Discussion -    • Black Autistics Matter