“For Nothing:" Baldwin, Buckley, and the Autistic Question

Rewriting the Dream: On Baldwin, Buckley, and the Cost of Autistic Survival in a Nation That Wasn’t Built for Us.

What if Baldwin wasn’t only speaking of race, but of all those cast as obstacles to empire? This essay re-reads his 1965 debate through an autistic lens—uncovering echoes, indictments, and blueprints for refusal.

Introduction: Echoes Across Time

There are moments in history so precise, so finely etched into the collective unconscious, that they return not as memory, but as mirror. The 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. is one such moment. It should be required viewing for every American, and heavily suggested for all in the Global North. Not for the sake of nostalgia or rhetorical performance, but because it lays bare—with surgical clarity—the moral architecture of empire, and the excuses it tells itself to endure.

The motion was simple:
“The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

Fifty-nine years later, the language is dated, but the question is not. In fact, it demands renewal.

Replace Negro with any marginalised identity, with autistic person, and the structure still holds.
“The American Dream is at the expense of the autistic person.”

Not in symbolic terms. Not metaphorically. Structurally.

Baldwin’s indictment of a nation built on the exploitation, containment, and erasure of Black life speaks across time because the system he confronted did not vanish—it diversified. It multiplied its targets. It refined its euphemisms. The plantation became the institution, the whip became the behaviour chart, the overseer became the diagnostician.

To read or watch Baldwin now, through the lens of autism, is to feel the full weight of structural continuity. A child born into a world that sees their nervous system as deviance, their movement as symptom, their language as delay, is not offered a dream—but a prescription. They are measured not by their humanity, but by their proximity to the norm.

This is not to collapse race and neurodivergence into the same experience. To do so would be to erase the very real and ongoing violence enacted specifically through white supremacy. But it is to recognise how both are framed as obstacles to the dominant order’s self-image. How both must be managed, explained, disciplined, or corrected for the Dream to function undisturbed.

And when Baldwin stands before that room of white, male Cambridge undergraduates—those future barristers, civil servants, and empire-maintainers—and says, “It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace... has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you,” the shock still reverberates.

It reverberates in classrooms where autistic children are physically restrained for stimming.
In psychiatric wards where non-speaking is read as non-feeling.
In legislative halls where early intervention is funded, but adult autonomy is not.
In the quiet exhaustion of the autistic adult who has learned to speak neurotypical fluently, only to find that fluency still earns them suspicion.

The system of reality has no place for us. That is the point.

It is not metaphor. It is structure.

And it is time we say so—clearly, collectively, and without apology.

Baldwin’s System of Reality

“It depends on what your system of reality is.”

Baldwin doesn’t ease into this observation—he slices with it. It is a statement not of opinion, but of paradigm. A warning. What counts as moral, rational, civilised, even real, is determined not by some neutral consensus, but by power. And power names its own perception truth.

The system of reality Baldwin describes—the one that insists it is universal—is, in fact, partial. Fabricated. It is upheld by repetition and force, not justice or clarity. And when it encounters a person who lives outside its coordinates—whether Black, queer, colonised, or neurodivergent—it reacts not with humility, but with hostility. It cannot tolerate contradiction. It must instead pathologise the perceiver.

This, too, is how autistic people are treated.

Our perception is rendered suspect. Our language is rewritten as delay. Our pain is doubted until a neurotypical voice confirms it. We are told we are irrational for sensing what others refuse to name. We are told our difference is dangerous, our clarity disruptive. The system of reality was not built for us—and it insists we reshape ourselves until we no longer threaten it.

In that 1965 debate, Baldwin names this violence with devastating simplicity.

“It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance... has not pledged allegiance to you.”

It is the same moment so many autistic children experience when their hand is slapped away from stimming, when their silence is misread as incompetence, when they are told—gently, but persistently—that they are not “ready for mainstream.” That they must work harder. Smile more. Speak less honestly.

And then, later—perhaps in adolescence, perhaps much later—they begin to see it happening in someone else.

“By the time you are thirty... nothing you have done has helped you to escape the trap. But what is worse than that is that nothing you have done... will save your son or your daughter... from meeting the same disaster.”

Here is the gut punch: we are not just navigating a system of reality—we are passing through one designed to perpetuate itself. Schools reproduce the diagnostic gaze. Parents, however loving, are often trained to interpret autistic traits as deficits. Professionals write reports that flatten nuance into pathology. And so many autistic adults are silenced altogether—our wisdom buried under the same systems that once buried our speech.

This is how intergenerational trauma takes shape within the neurodivergent community—not only through what was done to us, but through what we were taught to do to ourselves. How we were praised for masking. Rewarded for suppressing. Told we were doing well only when we disappeared.

The dominant system of reality demands not only that we comply, but that we forget the cost of doing so. That we believe its version of us is more accurate than our own. That we raise our children to be palatable rather than powerful.

But some of us remember.
Some of us break the cycle.

And once the illusion cracks—once you begin to see the system for what it is, not what it claims to be—you cannot unsee it. That is the moment Baldwin was describing. And that is the moment more and more autistic people are entering now.

We are not confused. We are not naïve. We are not broken.
We are perceiving. And that, to the dominant system, is the real threat.

Labour, Containment, and the American Dream

“I picked the cotton. I carried it to market. I built the railroads—under someone else’s whip—for nothing.”

There is a moment in Baldwin’s speech when the cadence shifts—when history stops being abstract and begins to speak in the first person. And when it does, the weight of unpaid, unacknowledged labour becomes undeniable.

Baldwin isn’t just reciting facts. He is reclaiming authorship. Reasserting that the American Dream is not self-made—it is scaffolded by stolen time, stolen bodies, stolen futures.

The same scaffolding exists today.

Autistic people, too, are asked to carry out immense labour. But not the kind that gets recorded in economic ledgers or commemorated with plaques. No—ours is the labour of containment, of translation, of survival in systems that were never meant to hold us.

We mask. We decode. We anticipate.
We study neurotypical behaviour as if our lives depend on it—because often, they do.
We spend entire school days performing regulation whilst being offered none.
We spend entire work weeks deciphering the politics of tone and posture, just to avoid being called difficult.

This labour is constant.
And it is for nothing.

It is not seen as work—it is seen as progress. As evidence that we are “improving,” becoming more “functional,” learning how to “cope.” But it is the kind of improvement that costs everything. The kind of coping that slowly hollows you out.

And even when we succeed—when we do what they ask, and more—they use us as cautionary tales.

“If she can do it, why can’t you?”
As though our exhaustion were a virtue. As though our proximity to their norms should be a shared aspiration.

We are held up as proof that the system works—whilst those it fails are cast aside, their needs too great, their resistance too inconvenient.
This is not inclusion. This is performance. And like all performance, it demands a script written by someone else.

And still—we build.
We build informal support networks and mutual aid groups.
We write the toolkits, start the collectives, hold space for the newly diagnosed, speak back against the institutional scripts.
We build the access that does not yet exist, because we know what it is to be locked out.

But rarely are we paid. Rarely are we cited.
We are the infrastructure of care, and still we are framed as burdens.
We are the labour behind “neurodiversity awareness,” and still we are erased by it.

This is not a glitch in the Dream. It is its maintenance protocol.

And this is perhaps why the Baldwin-Buckley debate could not have happened in the United States. Not then. Not on those terms.
Because it is one thing to challenge injustice abstractly—through editorial, through vote, through polite reform. It is another thing entirely to name the system itself as illegitimate.
To say: I built this country, and it was never meant for me.
To say: You do not own the moral high ground. You own the illusion.
To say: This Dream has always been a cost someone else paid.

That truth could not be spoken, then or now, in the halls of American power.
It had to cross the ocean to be heard.
It had to be witnessed by those who inherited empire’s grammar but not its guilt—so they might listen long enough to recognise its rhythm in themselves.

And now, it has returned.
The Dream still demands a price.
And autistic people, too, are being billed.

Buckley’s Banality: The Voice of Institutional Narcissism

If Baldwin entered the Cambridge Union as a moral firebrand, Buckley entered as its extinguisher—smirking, articulate, draped in pedigree. His aim was not to win hearts, but to reassert dominion. To remind the room, gently but firmly, that the world Baldwin described must remain beneath consideration. Not because it wasn’t real, but because to acknowledge its reality would threaten the institutions Buckley existed to defend.

His method was simple, and sinister in its familiarity:
Dilute the collective indictment into a personal grievance.
Reframe structural violence as anecdotal discomfort.
Elevate statistical distraction over moral reckoning.

Again and again, Buckley leaned on the rhetoric of effort.
Negroes must exert themselves.
Negroes must emulate “successful” minorities.
Negroes must not be radicalised by truth, but pacified by opportunity.

It’s the same song played now in autistic contexts.
Try harder. Use your tools. Sit still. Make eye contact.
Stop focusing on what the system denies you, and focus on what it offers—if only you’d work for it.

He cited income comparisons, upward mobility, even the number of Black millionaires. Not unlike today’s insistence that autistic people can become coders, TikTok influencers, or mascots for inclusion campaigns—provided they are the right kind of autistic: verbal, industrious, grateful, and marketable. Buckley didn’t reject injustice—he simply relocated responsibility for it.

This is the voice of institutional narcissism.
It cannot apologise, only justify.
It cannot dismantle, only preserve.
It cannot see the people it harms, only the threat they pose to its self-image.

And Buckley believed, with deep conviction, that he won that night.

“I am so proud of my performance,” he later wrote, “because I did not give them one [bleep] inch.”

That wasn’t an admission of failure—it was a declaration of intent.
His role, then and after, was never to persuade. It was to stonewall. To dress elite contempt in the language of intellectual decorum. To make inequality sound like reason, and resistance like impoliteness.

And it worked. The seeds of that performance—respectable reactionaryism—flourished.

A generation later, Reagan would end the Fairness Doctrine, clearing the airwaves for the rise of right-wing radio. Buckley’s genteel supremacism morphed into Rush Limbaugh’s bombast, which birthed a thousand angry sons. Not only did these figures reject critique—they monetised resentment. They turned Baldwin’s clarity into a threat, a caricature, a punchline.

Today, their ideological descendants sit on school boards banning neurodivergent-authored books. They slash Medicaid waivers for autistic adults, whilst proposing surveillance regimes masked as “intervention.” They sneer at behaviour as deviance, then wonder why the “self-advocates” are so angry.

And still, they believe they are winning.

Because to them, the system itself is neutral.
Its brutality is justified.
Its defenders are civilised.
Its victims, if they wish to be heard, must learn how to speak more softly.

But Baldwin taught us otherwise.
He refused the premise.
He refused the politeness of power.
And we must refuse it too.

The Dream Is Still at Our Expense

“Until we accept our history, there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream.”

Baldwin didn’t speak these words hypothetically. He spoke them with the full weight of a history denied—denied in textbooks, in courtrooms, in legislative halls, in the moral conscience of a nation trained to forget. And he was right: the Dream cannot be reformed until it is reckoned with. But reckoning is precisely what the Dream resists.

What Baldwin demanded in 1965—a confrontation with the truth of foundational harm—remains unmet. Because Buckley’s generation did not lose that debate in any structural sense. They simply repositioned. They rebranded. And they ensured that the machinery of the state—its schools, its clinics, its elections, its media—would continue to function without ever having to account for the human cost of its function.

That system endures. And autistic people are now among its casualties.

The American Dream, still today, demands erasure for entry.
It grants inclusion only on condition.
It prizes potential, but only as defined by productivity.
And it builds its metrics not on human flourishing, but on behavioural compliance.

To this day, institutions refuse to reckon with their eugenic origins. The legacy of Kanner, Asperger, and Lovaas is buried beneath layers of clinical jargon and PR campaigns. ABA is repackaged as “compassionate care.” Autism registries are reframed as “safety measures.” State surveillance of disabled children is sold as “early detection.”

The language has changed. The logic has not.

We are told that progress is being made—that awareness is spreading, that acceptance is growing. But what kind of acceptance demands silence? What kind of awareness insists we perform it back, politely, for funding?

Until support is rooted in relational justice—consent, dignity, co-created care—there is no real progress. There is only expansion of the same medical-industrial apparatus that once sought to normalise us into invisibility.

And until this nation accepts that autistic people are not failed neurotypicals—but sovereign, embodied minds with systems of meaning, perception, and expression that differ from the dominant script—then the Dream remains closed to us. Not simply by neglect, but by design.

And let us be clear: then, as now, both major political parties stood in opposition to meaningful civil rights reforms.

In Baldwin’s time, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act—but only under massive pressure, and whilst continuing to escalate war abroad. The Voting Rights Act was gutted within a generation. Democrats pandered, Republicans resisted, and neither asked the deeper question Baldwin posed: What if the system isn’t broken, but working exactly as intended?

And now? Autistic children are still institutionalised for being inconvenient. Medicaid services are rationed by zip code. The IDEA is underfunded. Neurodivergent adults are criminalised for the sensory impact of poverty. And every presidential administration—red, blue, or otherwise—has refused to dismantle the systems that allow this to continue.

Because Buckley’s generation did its job.
They preserved the empire.
They trained their successors to speak the language of reform whilst maintaining the architecture of control.
They taught respectability, not accountability.
They built a future where the system could point to a handful of “included” neurodivergent people and say: Look. It works.

But the Dream is still at our expense.
It has simply learned to smile while billing us.

And Baldwin’s warning still holds: “There is scarcely any hope”—not until we confront the full truth of how power sustains itself, and who it continues to consume.

What Does It Mean to Belong to a Country That Has Defined Itself in Opposition to Your Existence?

It means that your very presence disrupts the narrative.
That your survival is not the intended outcome—but the unintended consequence of systems designed to contain, convert, or erase you.
It means walking through institutions that were built atop your absence—schools, clinics, courthouses, census forms—all calibrated to make you disappear.

It means that inclusion becomes a performance, not a practice.
That every accommodation is framed as generosity, not justice.
That you're invited in on condition—as long as you’re quiet, compliant, grateful, or translated.

It means you learn to speak a second language:
Not Spanish or French or ASL—but the coded idiom of the dominant order.
Eye contact. Small talk. Behaviour charts.
The choreography of belonging without being.

It means your difference is medicalised, pathologised, institutionalised.
You’re told you lack insight. You’re told you're too emotional, too literal, too much.
But your feelings are accurate. Your insights are dangerous.
Because they see the thing that’s not supposed to be seen.

It means that your country builds policies on prevention, not presence.
That the state funds “early intervention,” not adult support.
That it prizes “outcomes” over autonomy.
And measures “progress” in proximity to normativity.

It means your grief is illegible unless a neurotypical person says it first.
That you must narrate your pain in their language
And even then, they’ll ask: “But have you tried masking harder?”

It means your existence is reframed as tragedy unless you overcome.
And if you do overcome, they take your story from you
To use it against the others—
To say, See? She did it. Why can't you?

It means that even your resistance is absorbed into the machine:
Neurodiversity becomes branding.
Pride becomes pageantry.
And self-advocacy becomes permission-seeking.

But still—you remain.
In the cracks. In the kinship. In the echo that doesn’t go away.
You belong, not because the nation allowed it,
But because you carry a different kind of memory—
A longer arc. A deeper rhythm. A circuit that loops and returns.

You belong to the breath between sentences,
To the stories not yet written.
To the future you are already building
With every refusal to disappear.

Conclusion: Refusal and Reclamation

“I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country.”

With these words, Baldwin refused containment. He refused pity. He refused the gaze of empire disguised as benevolence. And in that refusal, he reclaimed not only his dignity, but his authorship. His place—not granted by the state, but already earned through centuries of stolen labour, ancestral survival, and unacknowledged genius.

So too must we, as autistic people, refuse.

We are not anomalies to be managed. We are not puzzles to be solved. We are not footnotes in someone else’s study. We are not the tragic cost of someone else’s dream.

We are builders.
Of kinship. Of clarity. Of alternative futures.
We are the cartographers of care systems no state was willing to map.
We are the pattern-finders who notice what institutions were designed to ignore.
We are the storytellers who speak in metaphor, echolalia, silence, rhythm—
And we are done apologising for it.

This future we speak of—this refusal to disappear—is not a revision of the old Dream. It is a rejection of its terms. We are not interested in access to systems that only welcome us when we play by rules designed to erase us. We are not here to be included in empire.

We are here to write otherwise.

We do not ask to be seen as equal.
We ask to be seen as real.
And in that reality, we are rewriting the dream.

Not for permission.
Not for assimilation.
But for the ones yet to come.

For the autistic child who stims openly and is met with joy.
For the nonspeaking adult whose silence is not corrected, but honoured.
For the ones who will never have to choose between being understood and being whole.

We remember Baldwin because he made visible what was never meant to be seen.
Now, it is our turn.

The Dream was built at our expense.
Let it crumble.

We are already building something better.