clair083

Autistic Savant Artist Stephen Wiltshire completing a panoramic cityscape  from memory credit Atlantic BlackStar In the struggle to have the voices of intersected autistic populations heard, the critical importance of Black autistic savants and the need to include them in autism history cannot be understated. Their existence and the inadvertent documentation of their lives due to savant qualities despite their historic status as an oppressed minority serves as a series of timeline markers in periods of history particularly when African Americans were enslaved; therefore neurodivergence would not have been noted except as a serious detriment to be dealt with through deadly force. In a present day autism conversation rife with structural racism and stereotypical conclusions and analyses drawn from misinterpretation of research on disparities in healthcare, education, and services for the Black autistic population, these indicators that intersected autistics existed long before Kanner...