Let's Talk about Black History Month, Neurodiversity, and Systems Change in Canada
Neuroinclusion cannot be credible if it ignores race, intersectionality, and the realities of compounded marginalization in Canada.
Black History Month offers an opportunity not only to recognize history, but to reflect on whose experiences have shaped, and whose experiences have been absent from, the systems that impact our lives as community members, researchers, practitioners, and leaders.
Compounded marginalization exists in Canada. Evidence from public health and equity research demonstrates that racism and other structural determinants of health contribute to inequitable outcomes for racialized populations, and that intersecting identities further compound barriers across healthcare, employment, and justice systems.
Racism and ableism materially deepen and increase barriers to healthcare, legal justice, accurate representation, and leadership for Black Canadians, and these barriers are further intensified for Black neurodivergent individuals. Yet within neurodivergence research, policy, media, and practice, Black neurodivergent adults remain underrepresented. Research and policy shape how systems learn, how professionals are trained, and how services evolve. When groups are missing from that knowledge base, systems inevitably develop incomplete understandings of need, experience, and opportunity.
This absence has implications for recognition, response, learning, and change across the systems that shape people’s lives. It also shapes whose voices continue to be amplified in neurodivergent activism and leadership spaces, influencing who is heard, trusted, and resourced to lead, and in turn what recommendations, ideas, and possibilities are explored.
We have not seen meaningful attention to the role of race in the recent upswing of neuroinclusive employment initiatives. Importantly, there remains limited discussion of intersectionality, systemic marginalization, and discrimination as they pertain to neurodivergent adults. This raises concerns and points to a broader lack of understanding that decolonization, human rights, and social justice are, in fact, central features of neuroinclusion. We draw attention to this during Black History Month.
Through our research on neurodivergent healthcare experiences, we have seen that neurodivergent adults frequently encounter mistrust, misunderstanding, and marginalization within healthcare systems, and experience significant inequities in health outcomes. We have also learned that only a small proportion of funding in areas such as autism research is directed toward improving services, access, and outcomes for adults (under 3%). Within this already limited focus, there remains a significant gap in research and action addressing Black neurodivergent experiences and outcomes. Yet it is well established that race and intersectional identities predict health disparities.
Racialized experiences contextualize outcome disparities across all sectors, including health, employment, and justice. Differences in access, trust, diagnosis, care, understanding, and support cannot be fully understood without acknowledging how race and neurodivergence intersect in real-world environments. Change, participation, and research initiatives cannot proceed effectively without acknowledging and addressing this reality.
Recognizing this is not about adding representation as an afterthought or a box to tick; it is about improving the accuracy and effectiveness of leadership, strengthening decolonizing work, and influencing safer systems. Healthcare, education, legal, and mental health environments function best when they are informed by the full range of lived experience, and when they remain self-critical, dynamic, and oriented toward inclusion, justice, and rights for marginalized groups without silencing Black experience and reality.
At the Neurodiversity Change Foundation (NCF), our work is grounded in the belief that neuroinclusion requires decolonizing systems, including how knowledge is produced, defined, legitimized, and recognized, and how leadership is resourced and supported. This means listening to and learning from diverse lived experiences, questioning the status quo, advocating for change, and expanding whose knowledge informs practice -- and what we believe is even possible. It means creating leadership frameworks, being resourced to do that, and ensuring that these include intersectional analysis.
There remains a clear gap in the visibility and leadership of Black neurodivergent experience across many of the spaces in which neuroinclusion work currently occurs. We have to say it: there continues to be more comfort in centralizing success stories than in creating safety to discuss what is missing, (and the actual implications of that absence for our health, employment, and justice outcomes).
During Black History Month, and indeed every month, we encourage our community to learn from Black leaders, advocates, and creators whose work continues to expand understanding of neurodivergence, disability, culture, and inclusion. Their contributions strengthen both the neurodiversity movement and the broader effort to build systems grounded in dignity, safety, and equity. Expanding whose experiences inform research, policy, and practice helps ensure that healthcare, education, legal, and mental health systems evolve in ways that are safer, more equitable, and responsive.
References
Banks, B. M., Jackson, T., Goodwin, R., & Moore, R. (2025). Autism Is Black Too! Intersectional experiences with service provision for Black autistic individuals and their families. Journal of Social Issues, 81(3), e70024. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.70024
Davis, A. (2025). The intersection of race and disability. Autism Research Institute. https://autism.org/disability-and-race/
Jones, D. R., Botha, M., et al. (2025). “I’m kind of stuck in the middle, I don’t know where to go”: Race, autism, and intersectional stigma among Black and White autistic adults. Autism in Adulthood. https://doi.org/10.1177/25739581251374440
Jones, D. R., Nicolaidis, C., Ellwood, L. J., Garcia, A., Johnson, K. R., Lopez, K., & Waisman, T. C. (2020). An expert discussion on structural racism in autism research and practice. Autism in Adulthood, 2(4), 273–281. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.29015.drj
Malone, K. M., Pearson, J. N., Palazzo, K. N., Manns, L. D., Rivera, A. Q., & Mason Martin, D. L. (2022). The scholarly neglect of Black autistic adults in autism research. Autism in Adulthood, 4(4), 271–280. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2021.0086
Statistics Canada. (2024). Experiences of discrimination among the Black population in Canada. Government of Canada. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240516/dq240516b-eng.html
