Black Autism:A Conversation with Diana Paulin1 Julia Miele Rodas (bio) and Diana R. Paulin (bio) On May 18, 2019, at the Hotel Belleclaire on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I had the privilege of sitting down with Diana Rebekkah Paulin, author of the Errol Hill Award-winning Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction and Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Trinity College, Hartford. This interview was the outgrowth of years of more casual, ongoing conversations with Dr. Paulin about the ways that autism articulates with experiences of race, voice, representation, parenting, and definitions of personhood. Over the years, my conversations with Dr. Paulin have been far-ranging and exploratory, informed by intellectual questions as well as by personal concerns. The purpose of formalizing this conversation and bringing it to print is to offer readers a glimpse of Dr. Paulin's ongoing, long-term project—delving into expressions, experiences, and representations of Black autism and exploring the cultural configurations of autism in Black families and communities. The dialogue transcribed here is grounded in our May 18 interview and draws as well on the arc of our longer conversations to present some of her project's core questions. Julia Miele Rodas: I'd like to begin by asking you about a quotation from Paul Heilker's article, "Autism, Rhetoric, and Whiteness," where he talks about autism "being rhetorically constructed in public discourse as an overwhelmingly white condition." In your own project, "Black Autism," is this the starting point, this larger cultural context that privileges white autism and obscures Black autism? Diana Rebekkah Paulin: Well, yes and no. I think part of what I'm doing is excavational work. For me, thinking about all this started almost 20 years ago. So, yeah there wasn't Prahlad's memoir, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie, or the co-edited volume, All the Weight of Our Dreams. I had to think in terms of finding blogs or personal articles or short pieces. I had to look for short films, which are really hard to find. YouTube has been my friend! I've been collecting bits from a wide variety of sources, like Autism: the Musical—there's a young biracial boy, whose mother is very insistent on his ability to play the cello, and their family dynamics are also part of this, and there are also these twin boys who are African American who aren't [End Page 121] really featured, but they're sort of in the background of this production. I'm also still considering this, but in The Secret Life of Bees, there's a sister, May, one of the members of the family. She writes little notes and bits of poetry. And, to me, she reads as autistic. It's like she's too fragile for this world they're in, and she can't stand the racialized violence, and she escapes by drowning herself. I'm thinking about these spaces, asking how this character fits. What is it that she's representing that's unnamable, that fits into a longer trajectory of neurodivergence that kind of gets glossed over? I do see these flashes, these excerpts of culture, as an archive that is just being built. So, the project is excavational in that it's looking at stagings of autism and representations of Blackness. I can't ignore the historical disparities in diagnoses among people of color. JMR: This kind of excavation, building this kind of archive is already a vital piece of scholarship, but you're saying this is only part of the work? DRP: Yeah. I also want to focus on this underexplored intersection. For example, when autism is racialized as white, it's often seen as a puzzle or something that's inscrutable. And, there are all these ways in which those same characteristics invoke pathologies applied to Blackness historically. The same tropes that get used to erase white autism have also been used to render Blackness invisible, because Blackness was always pathologized, or it was constructed as inscrutable, or it was seen as a blank space on which you infuse meaning. JMR: So, Blackness and autism both...
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