Black Autistic Youth and Intersectionality

[Dr. LaChan Hannon] I want to go back to here to talk about the importance of representation and just the layered identities of being Black, autistic, Black and autistic. You may or may not have seen a news report a couple of years ago of a Latino autistic man who had left his residential facility. There was a Black worker who was in charge of him. There was a whole controversy with police and intervention and the Black man was telling the police, “He’s autistic. He’s not harming anyone. He’s okay.” And, eventually, the police end up shooting the Black – the Black orderly. My son, who was a teenager at the time, was watching this and was trying to figure out, where is the familiar narrative in the story? Who am I to how people are being portrayed? Am I the Black man or am I the autistic youth? And so this idea of how that intersects is extremely important when we’re talking about how he sees himself and how he makes sense of his possibilities, what he can become and what he can do.