One Negro speaks of rivers: change
the term, but the color’s still the same – and I speak
of computer hard drive brains, over-wired
circuitry, and hearts that fracture
at the slightest jolt. The souls of Black Folk?
What about the souls of autistic Black Folk?
We mud colored, we chocolate colored, we
beige colored. We green colored, we alien.
We strange.
(from my poem, “1 in 88, Nicole Style”)
(Note: This is a continuation of the series”The Souls of Black Autistic Folk”. I encourage the reader to read the introduction, part 1, and part 2 of this series.)
When Paul Robeson was alive, autism was not very well known or understood. By the time he was a young man at Rutgers, neither Dr. Leo Kanner nor Dr. Hans Asperger had coined their terms for what we now call autism or Asperger Syndrome – those discoveries would not come until the early 1940’s, when Robeson was well into his theatrical and singing career. The public was not really aware of autism until at least the 1960’s, and unfortunately, awareness and media coverage on the subject came in the form of articles that declared autistic people as “mental cripples” such as this infamous 1965 Time Magazine article documenting Dr. Ivar Lovaas and his research at UCLA which led to the ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) methods of today. (Warning to abuse survivors: this article contains potentially triggering material, as it discusses what would now be considered physical and verbal abuse.) And Robeson lived – and died – before individuals such as Dr. Temple Grandin began to speak public about autism, themselves as an autistic people, and began to allow the public to gain a glimpse into their worlds and realities.
Woman With Asperger's 