Autistic People of Color are Right Here!

Announcing the Autistic People of Color Fund

The Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network in partnership with Lydia X. Z. Brown, with seed funding from the American Association of People with Disabilities Hearne Award, is proud and excited to announce the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment!

On the one-year anniversary of publishing All the Weight of Our Dreams, we are excited to share that autistic people of color worldwide can now apply for funds for direct support, mutual aid, and community reparations — unrestricted.

Learn more about how to apply or donate here

We matter. We invite you to support us in amplifying the voices of autistic people of color.

For those of us who are autistic and racialized, we often struggle to find representation in mass media, academic work about autism or race, and the activist and advocacy movements that focus on autism, neurodiversity, disability rights, or racial justice. Most autism and autistic organizations, publications about autism, and broader neurodiversity campaigns are predominantly white. Yet disabled Black and Brown students are most likely to be impacted by the school to prison pipeline; the vast majority of U.S. prisoners are disabled and Black or Brown; racialized people are a global majority (which means that autistic people of color far outnumber white autistic people in the world); and the combined impact of race and disability severely increase likelihood for hate crimes, police violence, all other forms of abuse, and repeated retraumatization.

Our stories matter and must be told. We hope that this collection will not only speak sharply against our constant erasure and invisibility as (at least) doubly impacted, but will also provide solace and familiarity for our own out there waiting for stories like theirs to be told.

What is this?

All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism

In summer 2014, we announced a new project to compile the first ever anthology of art and writings by autistics of color about our lives, our experiences, our histories, our communities, our struggles, our passions, and our resilience. Our stories deserve to be told both for us and for future generations that will come after us. They are stories of segregation in education; police brutality; families of birth, adoption, and choosing; ableism connected to racism; finding community, making home, survival, and resilience. They are stories of being autistic in a neurotypical world and stories of being racialized in a white-dominant world. Now, we are ready to shake up some foundations.

Who are we?

Project Leads

Lydia X. Z. Brown
E. Ashkenazy
Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

The Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network

The mission of Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN) is to provide community, support, and resources for Autistic women, girls, transfeminine and transmasculine nonbinary people, trans people of all genders, Two Spirit people, and all others of marginalized genders. AWN Network is dedicated to building a supportive community where we can share our experiences in an understanding, diverse and inclusive environment. AWN is committed to recognizing and celebrating diversity and the many intersectional experiences in our community. We welcome all women, transgender and cisgender, transfeminine and transmasculine non-binary and genderqueer people, Two-Spirit people, trans people of all genders, and all other people of marginalized genders or of no gender. AWN recognizes and affirms all people’s gender identities and expressions, as well as choices about disclosure, transition, and going stealth. Our goal is to dispel stereotypes and misinformation which perpetuate unnecessary fears surrounding an autism diagnosis. We seek to share information which works to build acceptance and understanding of disability.

Learn more about us

Whose work?

Artists, Bloggers, Writers

All the Weight of Our Dreams features work from over sixty contributors from seven different countries.

The collection features new and classic work from activists and community leaders like Kassiane A. Asasumasu, N.I. Nicholson (from the Teselacta Multiverse), Timotheus Gordon Jr., Finn Gardiner, and Emma Rosenthal, alongside desperately needed work from newer voices like kiran foster, Emily Pate, Lucas Vizeu, Jennifer Msumba, and Daniel Au Valencia.

We are also proud to highlight fantastic fiction and poetry from writers like Bijhan Valibeigi, Angel A. McCorkle, Emily Pate, Helene Fischer, Kaijaii Gomez Wick, and Mikael Lee, among many others!

Meet our contributors

You can support autistic people of color, too.

You can donate to the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment. The Fund practices redistributive justice and mutual aid by returning and sharing money directly to and with autistic people of color. We provide microgrants to Black, Brown, Native, Asian, and mixed-race people in the autistic community for survival, organizing, leisure, and pleasure. We are committed to the principles of Disability Justice, including leadership by those most impacted, intersectionality, anti-capitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation. Our work is grounded in commitment to ending extractive economies and building and sustaining generative economies.

Donate to the Autistic People of Color Fund

Around the Web

All the Weight of Our Dreams features work from over 60 vital voices, but our work (by writers and artists already included in the collection as well as many not in this inaugural volume) exists in many spaces.

Here is just a small selection of the phenomenal work we're doing:

Talila A. Lewis (TL)	Timotheus J. Gordon (Pharaoh Inkabuss)	Finn Gardiner, Manuel Díaz, & Lydia X. Z. Brown

Bridget Liang	Cyrée Jarelle Johnson	N.I. (Ian) Nicholson

Sara María Acevedo	Anita Cameron	Michón Neal

Elly Wong	Malisha Dewalt	Jennifer Msumba