Living in Full Color

By Mimi Oh

Let’s be brutally honest: Being a Black woman is already hard enough. As part of the overlap of intersectionality, I fully identified as a dark-skinned, cisgender, bi/demisexual,
Catholic, Black-American woman of Nigerian descent, whose culture revolves around the Igbo diaspora, and as disabled (Neurodivergent: autism/ADHD). Speaking of, being an autistic
woman of color, society likes to overlook my demographic. It turns its eyes to white males, whom it paints as interested only in trains and math. That group is unfortunately present in the
media as a so-called “accurate representation” instead of going in-depth into the intersectionality of disability, and because of this, not enough resources for minority students who are disabled,
along with a lack of education/tolerance about neurodiversity, which I’ve faced firsthand. For the first 12 years of my life, I didn’t have a full context of what was going on with my behavior until
I turned 13, when my mother explained to me my diagnosis.

In my toddler years, after I started walking, at the age I should’ve started babbling, according to my parents’ description, I was completely silent, except that when I wanted milk, I would say “mah” a couple of times. To my mother, it sounded adorable. Immediately, my parents had me evaluated, and I received my autism diagnosis. Nowadays, whenever I tell people that I was diagnosed very early on, they would act surprised, telling me about how they got their diagnosis well into their adult years, demonstrating the lack of access to healthcare and medical bias towards the Black community.

Said, namely, if a Black child is taken to get diagnosed, evaluators would dismiss, stating that the child doesn’t “look autistic”, meaning that they’re looking for a type of autistic behavior, which
is based on stereotypes of autism and that white males are more likely to be diagnosed early on.

This is in comparison to non-white people, females, and queer & trans people, the latter of whom autistic people are more likely to be identified as LGBTQ+. Upon getting my diagnosis, I was
placed in occupational therapy sessions to manage my motor skills. When I started kindergarten, I enrolled in an Individualized Education Program (IEP) that required services, including speech
therapy and accommodations, for 12 consecutive school years. During the duration of the IEP, I was able to meet others like me on the disability spectrum, which reassured me that I wasn’t the
only one. However, I did have my fair share of experiencing some form of ableism from my neurotypical peers, as I recall being called the R-word by some, which I assumed they learned
from somewhere else.

It would’ve surprised me if they learned it from their parents, who are one of those types that read misleading websites like Autism Speaks for encounters with disabled people.

Unsurprisingly, I was labeled as the “weirdo” by my peers due to my “problems” (i.e., stimming). Heck, I was even yelled at by various adults over something I had no control over,
which, to this day, makes me feel like I’m always walking on eggshells. I was, of course, bullied as a result, before, during, and after school hours. It was worse during the school bus rides,
which is why I don’t like the school bus that much. My family, it seems, wasn’t good at adjusting the home setting to my disability. Lack of understanding was the culprit here, and it became
more apparent as the student entered junior high. For instance, I went to middle schools that weren’t exactly autism-friendly, as they were in bad areas, and to this day, I wonder why my
parents didn’t go in-depth in trying to find a school with a proper setting for someone like me who is different.

Anyway, trying to socialize with other Black kids (African American) was
severely problematic, as the kids from school weren’t educated about disability and, like my family members, failed to adjust, which was also the case with the teachers I had in middle
school and high school. Growing up with a confirmed autism diagnosis from early on, my household, in my view, failed to accommodate my disability, as I had always felt like I was
walking on eggshells with my parents and older sisters/younger brother, the latter of whom was definitely classified as “sibling abuse”, even by my younger sister. I was harshly punished for
something I had no control over, as I wasn’t aware of being autistic. Makes me wonder if my older sisters were told about autism and/or even did the research on caring for an autistic sibling?

I can assume the same thing for my parents.

During my first three years of elementary school, a few of my siblings and I attended a daycare at this lady’s house that wasn’t operating as a proper after-school daycare because her children
(especially her youngest son) were toxic people and she had a wild dog. She even hit my younger sister for writing on her wall (who was a toddler and not even her own child). Thank the Lord
that woman got her license revoked.

As an adult, I carried hidden anger and resentment towards my siblings, peers (for breaking boundaries), and parents, the latter of whom they failed to put in schools that helped
accommodate my autism due to not doing proper research, as I had to do the parents’ job of finding schools. In those school years, I was placed in schools that weren’t exactly
neurodivergence-friendly, and I felt like I was walking on eggshells around the students and school staff, who I assumed thought of me as irritating and so-called “needy”, which did not help
my social skills or academic performance. In the 8th and 9th grades, without considering my mental health, the teachers I had in two classes (Science and Geography) exposed me to anxiety-
inducing material that has caused me to develop my OCD, starting from age 14 (10 years).

Despite being promised accommodation during my 10th-grade second semester, I was barely provided with any. Furthermore, my family and the academic system failed me terribly.

I hope that now being at university will provide the support I barely experienced before. I recounted times when a group of African American kids my age tried to make me conform to the
stereotype of the ghetto hoodrat because they viewed my neurodivergence as equivalent to “acting white”, based on the false notion that autism is something for white people to only
experience. For instance, they were peer pressuring me into dressing more like those video vixens from those rap videos that objectify Black women as only being good for sex, even
though we were all in our early teens, an unfortunate example of adultification towards Black minors, especially treating Black girls as adults, unlike white girls., which was most likely due to
the home environments these kids were raised in, where they were forced to grow up and exposed to what is true “Black culture”, not knowing that is what society thinks that Black
culture is, ignoring the ancestral roots that are overshadowed by Black trauma, stereotypes, and inner turmoil overrun by violence and sex, which differs from my family’s Igbo cultural roots, as
it not the environment that was born and raised in.

I was still bullied again for not fitting in with the “Black mold” and Eurocentric beauty standards, making me feel isolated from the Black community, as acting in a manner that
invoked stereotypes of Black people made me question my place as a Black woman. It wasn’t until years later that I was reminded of the quote “being Black isn’t what I’m trying to be, it’s
what I am,” and upon attending a support group for Black autistics, it gave me more pride about my unique identity and that I should not be like something I’m not for the validation of society
and to be firmer and more assertive with my well-being.

My name is Mimi Oh. I will be 25 this year. I’m from California. I’m a writer studying screenwriting at California State University, Northridge, with career ambitions to become a filmmaker and screenwriter to share my authentic storytelling. I was diagnosed with autism at a very early age, and this is the story of my own life on the spectrum.