After Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood before a crowd last week and called autism an “epidemic” and “disease” — a term the scientific community abandoned decades ago — experts and advocates nationwide called him out for stigmatizing people with autism and spreading falsehoods about the neurodevelopmental disorder.
Kennedy’s remarks came on the heels of a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that shows an increase in autism diagnoses nationwide. Advocates like Maria Davis-Pierre, a Florida-based mental-health counselor and the founder/CEO of Autism in Black, worry Kennedy’s rhetoric will not only play out in classrooms — where Black students with autism are misunderstood, labeled, and put on the school-to-prison pipeline — but also promote the false idea that we’re experiencing an autism epidemic in the Black community.
“It’s not a true increase in prevalence,” Davis-Pierre tells Word In Black. “It’s the consequence of decades of system neglect. Now, thanks to advocacy and cultural awareness, the system is finally catching up.”
For decades, autism was considered a condition that disproportionately affected white children — not because it was truly less common among Black children, but because Black families faced a labyrinth of subjective assessments, cultural biases, and medical distrust that kept diagnoses out of reach.
Then, in 2020, something unprecedented happened:...
EXCLUSIVE: Two USA Fencing board of directors members are suing the other six members, alleging chair Damien Lehfeldt made false statements to congress at a May 7 Department of Government Efficien...