Being #AutisticWhileBlack is the constant sensation of being an “only.” I know that’s not literally true, but it still feels that way. Autistic activism is incredibly white, and there’s a lot of deep-seated stigma against being Too Different among some Black people.

Because I’m often an “only,” I feel the pressure to reduce myself to my demographic characteristics, even though I’m more than that. (That’s part of why I often take breaks from discussing these issues, even here, and start talking about editing or video games instead.)

I think being autistic & introverted has caused me to relate differently to my Blackness, too. Honestly, I feel I get all the drawbacks with few of the benefits. I’m terrified of being shot. I’ve been stereotyped & pushed aside. But I feel as though I’m somehow not Black enough.

I don’t use AAVE and never have. There are a few reasons for that: I picked up a lot of my speech patterns from reading, my parents had a lot of internalised racism and would flip out if I used it, I was a military brat, and half my family is West Indian.

If I *were* to use AAVE, I’d sound fake doing it. I’d feel fake, anyway. But I worry that I don’t sound like a Real Black Person on the Internet because I don’t use it!

I think a lot of autistic people connect to their cultures atypically.

Since I didn’t respond to social pressures in the same way as typically developing kids, I developed my own tastes. I would get so much grief from other Black kids about “talking proper” or “actin’ white.”

That always sounded strange to me, because I wasn’t trying to act white by using Standard English or dressing differently from my Black peers. I was just doing what I liked … or avoiding my authoritarian parents’ wrath.

And my parents and grandmother gave me so much grief about stimming, vocal tics, and other obviously autistic behaviour. I wasn’t even doing those things in public, and they STILL hassled me over it.

On the other hand, it’s frustrating to be the only Black person in autistic-advocacy groups. I didn’t know any other Black autistic people growing up (well, other than relatives that I suspect are autistic themselves) until I was 16--there was a Black autistic girl at my HS.

(I didn’t like her that much, but my parents kept trying to push us to become friends. We didn’t even have any interests in common, but apparently we’re all interchangeable. NOPE.)

And it wasn’t even just my parents, either; a few teachers tried to do it, too.

I did find other autistic people I could connect to once I started hanging out in online autistic spaces in my late teens, but I didn’t see many other Black people there.