Ableism as a Colonial Condition: A Reframing

Why Unlearning Ableism Requires More Than Affirmation—It Demands the Decolonisation of Thought, Language, and Self.

Internalised ableism isn't just personal shame—it's a form of colonisation. This piece traces how dominant systems overwrite autistic minds and argues that true healing requires decolonising meaning, narrative, and self.

Introduction: Not a Metaphor, But a Mechanism

It started, as these things often do, with a phrase I didn’t fully understand. “Internalised ableism.” Then: “the colonised mind.” Both turning up more and more in the online spaces I move through, often shared as if their meanings were self-evident. The kind of phrases people nod along with, maybe re-share with a raised fist or a knowing emoji. But I didn’t know. Not in the way I need to know. Not in the way that allows me to build coherence.

Because the truth is: I don’t learn through slogans. Never have. As an autistic gestalt processor working in a second, foreign, language, I don’t absorb meaning in pieces. I need depth. I need resonance. I need the slow work of rooting a concept in place, tracing its pathways, feeling it settle into my body. So when I began to see these phrases — internalised ableism, colonised mind — passed around like shorthand for something I was clearly meant to grasp, I did what I always do. I followed the dissonance.

That dissonance — the unease of partial understanding, the sense of something important lying just out of reach — is my signal. It’s the start of the pattern I now recognise as my own learning process. I don’t start with clarity. I start with tension. With a bodily sense of wrongness, with a phrase that catches in my chest. And from there, I begin to dig.

What I’ve found, in this case, is that these two terms — so often treated as distinct — are not really separate at all. Internalised ableism is not a standalone phenomenon. It is the psychic residue of colonisation. Not the kind that arrives with gunships or treaties, but the kind that settles inside the self. The kind that teaches you, quietly and thoroughly, to see your own needs as deviant. To mistrust your instincts. To believe that your way of thinking, speaking, moving, being — is not just different, but wrong.

The colonisation of the mind is not just about land or language. It’s about the forced internalisation of other people’s frameworks for meaning. Clinical models of autism. Statistical norms. Productivity logic. All of it. These aren’t just bad ideas. They’re settler logics — tools of control dressed up as care. And once you’ve been trained to believe in their truth, you begin to regulate yourself on their behalf.

This is the mechanism. The same one Frantz Fanon described as the epidermalisation of inferiority — the moment when external domination becomes internal conviction. When you no longer need someone to tell you you’re broken, because you’ve already started organising your life around fixing yourself. In disability justice spaces, we sometimes say “the call is coming from inside the house.” It’s not a metaphor. It’s a diagnosis.

And if the mind being colonised is already marked — already seen as unruly, unproductive, too sensitive, too much — then that colonisation hits even deeper. In a society built on white supremacy, capitalism, and ableism, neurodivergent people are already seen as failures of design. Our bodies, our rhythms, our languages are not just inconvenient — they are liabilities. Which means the colonisation isn’t secondary. It’s foundational.

To rid oneself of internalised ableism, then, isn’t just a matter of affirmations or visibility. It’s not about “loving your disabled self,” as if that self were a stable, knowable entity untouched by empire. No — to dismantle internalised ableism, you must first understand that it is colonisation. That the logics which frame you as a problem are the same ones that framed your ancestors as primitive, your language as noise, your gestures as pathology. You have to see it not as a personal failing, but as a structural implant.

And then — only then — can you begin the work of decolonising the mind. Not by reaching for some imagined purity, but by refusing the frameworks that were never yours to begin with. Reclaiming your sense-making. Rewriting your metaphors. Restoring your timelines. Refusing the silence.

This piece is the result of that process. Not a finished map, but a trace of where I’ve been. A gesture toward what’s possible when we stop treating internalised ableism as a glitch in the individual, and start recognising it as a feature of the system. Colonisation didn’t stop at the border. It got inside. But so did we. And we remember the way out.

Shared Machinery: How Power Implants Itself

What I began to see, once the language had settled and the research had been sifted through, was that internalised ableism and the colonised mind don’t just share a surface similarity — they run on the same machinery. They are both strategies of power. Not the overt kind, but the kind that works by shaping what gets to count as normal, real, good. Power here doesn’t always arrive as punishment. Sometimes it arrives as permission. As professional tone. As “best practice.” As data.

And what power wants — what it always wants — is to convince you it was never constructed. That its way of seeing is the only way to see. That its truth is the truth. That its values are neutral, its metrics objective, its systems inevitable. So you don’t notice, at first, that what you’re adapting to isn’t some universal human norm, but a deeply specific cultural framework — one designed by and for those already positioned as superior.

Here’s how the mechanism works:

The dominant culture makes itself seem normal, inevitable, and superior.
You learn to see yourself through its eyes.
You begin to regulate yourself on its behalf.

It’s insidious because it doesn’t need to enforce anything directly. You do the enforcing yourself. You adjust your tone, your posture, your pace. You rehearse your masking. You shave off the parts of you that don’t fit the standard, and you try to call that growth. And the longer you do it, the harder it becomes to tell where the mask ends and the self begins.

Frantz Fanon had a word for this. He called it l’épiderme de l’infériorité — the epidermalisation of inferiority. It’s the process by which systemic devaluation becomes embodied. The system says you are less than, and that belief seeps into your skin, your breath, your bloodstream. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008), he writes:

“I begin to suffer from not being a white man. … I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance. I discover my blackness through the eyes of the other.”
(Fanon, 1952/2008, p. 90)

In disability justice spaces, we might phrase it differently: “The call is coming from inside the house.” But the meaning is the same. What begins as external discipline — surveillance, categorisation, control — eventually becomes internal regulation. You don’t just behave. You believe. You become fluent in the language of your own erasure.

And if you’re autistic — especially if you’re also racialised, queer, poor, or otherwise marginalised — that erasure doesn’t feel abstract. It feels like the everyday effort of trying to “pass.” The contortion of needing to be readable, speakable, acceptable to systems that were never built with your voice or body in mind. It’s not just a cognitive pressure. It’s a sensory one. It’s a narrative one. It’s a theft of coherence — and it’s mistaken, again and again, for progress.

But it’s not progress. It’s domestication. It’s empire in the bloodstream. And the only way out is to stop trying to be good according to its terms. To name the system, name the wound, and begin the slower, stranger work of becoming whole on your own terms — not theirs.

The Mind It Colonises Is Already Disabled by Design

By the time I started to understand that what I’d been calling “internalised ableism” was in fact a form of colonisation, I had already begun to see the deeper layer beneath it: the mind being colonised was never neutral to begin with. In a white supremacist, capitalist, ableist society, minds like ours — neurodivergent, disabled, queer, dissident — are always already othered. We are born into a world that doesn’t merely misunderstand us. It actively disciplines us. And it does so under the guise of care, of progress, of science.

This is not metaphor. It’s policy. It’s pedagogy. It’s peer-reviewed.

Take the way neurodivergence is medicalised. Autism, ADHD, and other ways of processing the world are routinely framed not as valid variations in human cognition, but as disorders — pathologies to be managed, corrected, or cured. From the moment a difference is noted, the process begins: referrals, assessments, labels, interventions. Language becomes a tool of containment. Entire systems are built not to support us, but to make us legible to those in power.

Movement is pathologised too. Stimming becomes a symptom. Fidgeting becomes a disruption. Rocking, pacing, flapping — all behaviours with meaning and function within the body — are redefined as problems, stripped of context, and subjected to behaviour plans. The assumption is not that these movements have purpose, but that they are obstacles to be extinguished.

And then there’s communication. The way we speak — or don’t. The silences we inhabit. The echolalia, the scripting, the metaphors, the long pauses that carry more truth than quick answers ever could. These are not only misunderstood. They are erased. We are taught that fluency means speed, that clarity means conformity, that expression must always conform to a neurotypical model of coherence.

None of this is accidental. These aren’t neutral misunderstandings or growing pains on the path to inclusion. They are active, ongoing colonisations of cognition and perception.

The research confirms this. Rupchand and Kormann (2024) show how internalised ableism is passed between generations — not just in overt messaging, but in the subtle, relational ways families absorb and reproduce dominant narratives of deficiency. It is not only the child who is pathologised; the parent, too, is often held hostage by the same scripts.

Bottema‐Beutel and colleagues (2021, 2023) expose how even autism research — the supposed “gold standard” of understanding — is laced with ableist language that distorts reality. Terms like “deficits” and “impairments” aren’t neutral descriptors; they are acts of framing that shape how we see ourselves and how others treat us. Their work makes clear that rejecting ableist language is not a threat to scientific rigour — it is a necessary condition for it.

Other scholars go further still. Smukler (2005) critiques the theory of mind model not only as inaccurate, but as a form of epistemological colonisation — a theory that denies autistic people our own subjectivity by defining us through what we supposedly lack. Rousselle (2013) echoes this, pointing to poetic and lived expressions of autistic experience that defy clinical classification. And Duffy & Dorner (2011) unpack how even the emotional language used to describe autism — words like “tragedy,” “loss,” “lack” — performs a kind of narrative violence, reinforcing the idea that autistic lives are inherently diminished.

What all of this shows is that we’re not simply living in a society that misunderstands neurodivergence. We’re living in one that needs to misunderstand it in order to preserve its own norms. Because if autistic ways of being were understood as valid — if we were seen not as broken, but as different — then the whole machinery of normative culture would begin to break down.

Which is why the colonisation of the mind must be understood not as something that happens to us in a vacuum, but as something built into the very structures that surround us. These systems — educational, medical, social — do not simply ignore us. They rewrite us. They overwrite us. And if we’re going to reclaim our narratives, we have to name that process for what it is: an act of erasure, disguised as care. A colonisation, disguised as support. A theft of meaning, disguised as science.

Internalised Ableism as Epistemic Capture

If internalised ableism were just about self-esteem, it might be easier to unlearn. If it were just about confidence or shame, we could perhaps approach it with affirmations, with role models, with visibility campaigns. But it isn’t. Not really. Internalised ableism is deeper than that. It’s not simply a story we believe about ourselves. It’s the capture of narrative, of belonging, of sense-making itself.

It’s the moment when the story being told about you becomes the only one you know how to tell.

For autistic people — especially those growing up without language to describe their experience, or within systems that constantly name them as broken — the process begins early. Jóhannsdóttir et al. (2022) found that internalised ableism significantly harms the health and identity of disabled youth. What stands out in their findings is not just the presence of harm, but the way it seeps into how young people come to understand who they are. Their very frameworks for selfhood are shaped by a world that has already decided their worth. Without access to alternative narratives, they often absorb the only ones on offer — the ones that frame difference as failure.

But this isn’t just a youth issue. The damage doesn’t fade with age; it evolves. Tsang (2024) documents how even within autism advocacy spaces, autistic adults are routinely excluded, especially those who don’t conform to dominant scripts around what advocacy is meant to look like. Those who dissent — who speak in complex ways, who resist binary framings, who refuse to either wholly condemn or wholly embrace institutional models — are often pushed out. Silenced not by clinicians or parents this time, but by peers who have internalised the same symbolic power structures, now disguised as community norms.

And at the most extreme end, we see what happens when this internalised violence turns outward. Gheorghe and Clement (2023) examine how some autistic individuals within “incel spaces” deploy their diagnosis as both justification and weapon. Here, internalised ableism doesn’t manifest as withdrawal — it curdles into entitlement, into misogyny, into nihilism. Autism becomes a badge not of solidarity, but of grievance, fuelling violent ideologies that seek to reclaim power through domination.

What unites these examples is not their surface content, but their structure. These are not isolated pathologies. They are colonial residues embedded in the self. Each one reflects a distorted reflection of autistic experience, refracted through the dominant culture’s lens. They show us what happens when the frameworks for understanding our own minds have been built by people who never imagined we’d be reading them.

This is why the term “internalised ableism” often feels too soft. It suggests something passive, even natural — a quiet sadness tucked inside. But this isn’t just about hurt feelings. It’s about epistemic capture: the deliberate foreclosure of other ways of knowing, naming, and being. It’s about having your own language taken from you before you ever had a chance to speak.

And once that capture occurs, the recovery isn’t a matter of “finding confidence.” It’s a matter of rewriting the archive. Of unlearning what was never yours. Of refusing the logic that says your story only counts if it aligns with theirs. It’s not just about healing. It’s about liberation. And that liberation has to begin in the realm of meaning — because that’s where the theft happened first.

From Cure to Liberation: Why Decolonisation Is Essential

By the time I reached the heart of this work — the part where I had to ask not just what’s happening but what now — it became clear that “getting rid of internalised ableism” isn’t enough. That phrase, whilst well-intentioned, is still working within the grammar of pathology. It implies that the harm is in us. That it’s a kind of toxin to be expelled, a defect to be corrected. But what if the real harm isn’t inside us at all? What if the problem is the very framework that told us we were broken in the first place?

This is where I began to understand the necessity of epistemic disobedience — a term that has become central to my own process of rethinking what healing actually means. It’s not about tweaking the current system. It’s about refusing to think with the tools that wounded us. It’s about walking away from the master’s grammar entirely.

Fiona Kumari Campbell (2008) puts it plainly: internalised ableism cannot be fully understood without engaging critical race theory. Her work shows how both racism and ableism operate as internalised systems that colonise the self through language, power, and surveillance. She argues that internalised ableism doesn’t merely diminish the self; it reshapes the very terrain of thought. To challenge it, we must also challenge the intellectual structures that produced it — structures rooted in white, colonial, able-bodied norms.

Hutcheon and Lashewicz (2020) take this further, tracing how ableism functions not just as prejudice but as a colonial tool. In their Canadian context, they show how the pathologisation of Indigenous and disabled bodies was used to justify confinement, sterilisation, and institutional control. Ableism wasn’t an unfortunate byproduct of colonialism. It was one of its instruments — a means of organising society around productivity, docility, and control. And it still is.

Arneil (2024) adds another layer, showing how statistical practices — things we often take as neutral — were explicitly developed to sort, rank, and contain populations deemed undesirable. Statistics, under the guise of objectivity, became a eugenic-colonial mechanism. And today, those same statistical logics still shape how autism is studied, diagnosed, and responded to — as if numbers alone could speak for us. As if our truths could be contained in bell curves and deficit charts.

These scholars confirmed what my body already knew: the violence wasn’t incidental. It was architectural.

And so for me, the work of “healing” — if I even want to use that word — has looked less like repair and more like reclamation. Reclaiming metaphors that make sense to me. Reclaiming nonlinear timelines. Reclaiming the right to communicate in rhythm, in image, in pause. Refusing to translate my experience into language that was never meant to hold me. Refusing, too, to apologise for the slowness of that process, or for its density, or for its refusal to become a soundbite.

This is why I don’t believe in cure. Not just because I don’t need to be cured — but because cure is a colonial project. It seeks to erase the difference rather than understand it. To restore a fantasy of normal that never included people like me. Liberation, on the other hand, asks a different question. Not how do we fix you — but how do we undo the world that said you needed fixing?

And that, I think, is the beginning of something real. Not easy. Not clean. But real. A project of decolonisation, not just of land or institution, but of self. Of story. Of sense-making. Of soul.

Final thoughts …

So here we are, back where we began — with a phrase that didn’t sit right, and a mind that refused to take it at face value. What I’ve come to understand through this long, slow unfurling is that there’s no meaningful way to “unlearn” internalised ableism without confronting the colonial architecture it lives in. The models of normality we are measured against. The frameworks of science and schooling that define what counts as intelligence, as value, as voice. The stories we’ve been handed, and told to repeat, even when they erase us.

Decolonising the mind isn’t a metaphor for better self-esteem. It’s a process of unlearning the conditions that taught us our minds were wrong in the first place. It’s refusing the premise that our worth depends on proximity to normativity. It’s interrupting the scripts. It’s breathing space into the silences where something older, slower, more resonant might emerge.

If you’re reading this and feeling that familiar pull — the sense that something here is true, even if it’s not tidy or conclusive — I want to offer a few paths, not as instructions, but as invitations:

Reclaim disabled time. Let your pacing be sacred. Let slowness be a kind of defiance.

Re-centre story and metaphor. You don’t owe anyone a diagnosis-shaped explanation. Speak in images. Speak in loops. Speak in ways that make sense to your nervous system, not to their spreadsheets.

Seek kinship, not conformity. Find those who resonate, not just those who agree. Belonging doesn’t require sameness. It requires recognition.

And maybe most of all: write new grammars. Not just new affirmations that make you feel better about the old rules. But whole new ways of speaking and sensing and structuring truth. Grammars that hold your complexity, your dissonance, your nonlinear knowing.

Because that’s what decolonising the mind is, in the end. Not just an act of refusal — but a return. A re-rooting. A remembering of what was always there, beneath the noise.

I began to heal not when I learned to love myself — but when I realised the self I was taught to hate was never mine to begin with.