Reading the System: Autism, Power, and the Politics of Knowing
What Happens When Autistic People Begin to Read Power—and Refuse Its Terms?
Autism Awareness Month should centre truth-telling, not corporate spin. This piece calls for a Critical Autism Studies programme—rooted in liberation, care, and narrative sovereignty—as a radical challenge to power.
Introduction
Yes, it’s still Autism Awareness Month, and the algorithms are hard at work. You’ve likely seen the usual fare floating to the top of your feed: pastel infographics, corporate logos overlaid with puzzle pieces, and stories told about us—but not by us. Despite the supposed progress of recent years, the most visible narratives remain sanitised, curated for non-autistic consumption, and filtered through a lens of compliance and commodification.
What’s conspicuously absent—deliberately, perhaps—is autistic truth-telling. The raw, complex, defiant kind. The stories that do surface are often tokenised, stripped of political context, or buried under content warning tags like we’re dangerous just for existing.
But this month, I want to talk about something far more dangerous than any story the algorithm allows. I want to talk about knowledge. Who gets to produce it. Who gets to frame it. And why, when marginalised people begin to tell our own stories on our own terms, we are so often met with fear, suppression, and silencing.
This piece begins in the early 19th century, with a literate Black carpenter in Charleston named Denmark Vesey—a man whose greatest threat to the white power structure wasn’t violence, but literacy. It ends with a proposal for a Critical Autism Studies programme—one that centres autistic voice, community knowledge, and the politics of care. Along the way, we’ll trace the throughline between Vesey’s challenge to empire and today’s right-wing campaign against Critical Studies in schools and universities. The message is the same in every era: if the marginalised learn to read the system too well, they might stop accepting its terms.
The Threat of Literacy: Vesey and the Power of Self-Authorship
Denmark Vesey wasn’t feared because he was violent—he was feared because he was literate. In a time when most enslaved people were denied even the barest tools of education, Vesey could read and write, and he understood exactly what that meant. Literacy, in his hands, wasn’t compliance with the world as it was—it was a blueprint for the world as it might be. He read scripture not to soothe but to sharpen, turning the very words used to justify his people’s enslavement into weapons of critique. He organised quietly, purposefully, with the conviction that what had been made by men could be unmade by them too. That slavery, so often cloaked in inevitability, was in fact a machine of human design—vulnerable, like any machine, to disruption.
Vesey’s plan to lead a revolt in Charleston was discovered before it could be carried out, but the terror it sparked among white elites was revealing. His rebellion didn’t need to happen to be effective—it had already exposed a truth they feared more than open conflict: that the people they had enslaved were thinking, planning, imagining freedom. And not in the abstract. Vesey had maps, names, a strategy. He had read the world around him and dared to rewrite it.
He was not alone. Others would follow—David Walker, with his searing Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, printed and distributed at great personal risk, and Nat Turner, who moved from scripture to action in a blaze of insurrection that rocked the white South to its core. Together, they form a pattern that has repeated across time and place: when those on the margins gain the means to narrate their own lives—and to connect their suffering to systems, not sins—power reacts. Not with dialogue, but with panic. The law tightens, the punishments grow harsher, and every effort is made to sever the connection between knowledge and liberation.
What Vesey understood—and what power has always known—is that literacy isn’t just about reading text. It’s about reading systems. It’s about reading silences, omissions, and the lies told with polished certainty. It’s about recognising that the conditions one is born into are not the natural order but the architecture of domination. And once someone has seen the blueprint, it’s only a matter of time before they begin to imagine how to dismantle it.
That is the threat. Not violence. Not instability. But the capacity for the oppressed to think, know, and remember—and to do so outside the authorised scripts of empire. Vesey’s literacy gave him authorship. And that, in any system built on subjugation, is unforgivable.
Culture Panic, Then and Now: The War on Critical Thought
The panic Vesey provoked has never really gone away. It has only changed shape, finding new objects through which to express an old fear: the fear that the marginalised might not only survive, but understand. That we might begin to name what has happened to us, not in whispers, but in classrooms, on campuses, in public archives, and through frameworks designed to make systems legible. If Vesey’s literacy threatened a slave economy, then today it is Critical Studies—Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Disability Studies—that threaten a broader ideological order built on the same logic of silence and control.
That order is fighting back.
We are living through a new culture panic, though the language is dressed up in euphemism and moral concern. Book bans and curriculum censorship are presented as efforts to protect children from “divisive content” or “inappropriate materials,” but the deeper aim is clear: to prevent the marginalised from telling our own stories, and to stop others from learning how to listen. Across the United States, entire disciplines are under siege—courses defunded, degrees shuttered, educators surveilled or dismissed, and books pulled from shelves for suggesting that history is not neutral and identity is not a crime.
What makes Critical Studies so dangerous to those in power is precisely what makes them necessary. They are not, as opponents claim, about teaching white children to feel guilty or grooming the innocent into ideological confusion. They are about revealing structure—about mapping how race, gender, class, disability, and other axes of experience are shaped by systems, not just by individual will. Critical Theory itself emerged in the 20th century from a group of thinkers in the Frankfurt School who sought to understand how ideology functioned—how power masked itself, how oppression was maintained not just through violence but through culture, media, education, and law. These thinkers—many of them Jewish refugees from fascism—developed tools to interrogate not only what was happening in their time, but why so many people accepted it.
Critical Theory asks uncomfortable questions: Who benefits from the way things are? Whose stories are missing? What meanings are imposed by dominant culture, and how do those meanings shape what we take to be normal, good, or true? It doesn’t tell students what to think—it teaches them how to see.
And that, more than anything, is what’s being policed. Because if students are allowed to see—to really see—the scaffolding of injustice, they might begin to withdraw consent. They might stop aspiring to assimilation and start demanding transformation. They might understand their experience not as personal failure, but as patterned, political, and worthy of resistance. They might even begin to imagine freedom.
Just like Vesey did.
What Are Critical Studies, Really?
To hear the current backlash tell it, Critical Studies are a collection of grievance-fuelled ideologies designed to shame, indoctrinate, and divide. But this distortion only underscores their power. What these disciplines actually do—what they have always done—is offer tools to understand how systems shape experience, and how those on the margins have resisted, survived, and reimagined the world in response.
Critical Race Studies, for example, doesn’t exist to make white people feel bad about being white. It exists because race, as a social construct, has been one of the most enduring mechanisms for structuring inequality—and because the law has never been neutral in how it has applied that construct. From redlining to mass incarceration, from immigration policy to voter suppression, racism is not merely a matter of individual bias but a logic embedded in institutions. Critical Race Theory asks us to trace that logic, to understand its histories, and to examine its ongoing consequences. It doesn't erase progress—it insists we tell the whole story.
Queer Theory is not about corrupting children or dismantling families. It is about questioning why certain identities are framed as natural while others are rendered deviant or disposable. It examines how gender and sexuality have been used as organising tools of control—who gets to belong, who is deemed legible, and who is punished for failing to conform. It challenges the lie of universality, revealing that what is often called “normal” is in fact a carefully maintained fiction, propped up by violence, surveillance, and shame. And it offers something rare in academic discourse: the space to imagine life otherwise.
Ethnic Studies is not an exercise in division—it’s an act of recovery. For centuries, whole communities have been written out of dominant historical narratives, their contributions erased or rewritten through colonial eyes. Ethnic Studies insists that those voices be heard—not as a gesture of inclusion, but as a recognition that you cannot understand history, literature, politics, or culture without them. It restores context. It builds solidarity. And it reminds us that empire did not invent civilisation.
Disability Studies refuses to treat disabled people as problems to be solved. It challenges the medical model that frames difference as defect and asks instead what barriers—physical, social, economic, attitudinal—create disability in the first place. It shifts the focus from cure to justice, from individual pathology to collective responsibility. Disabled lives are not cautionary tales or tragic footnotes. They are knowledge-bearing, world-building, and full of meaning. Disability Studies tells that truth—and demands that the world respond.
Across these fields, a shared current flows: power, narrative, resistance, and liberation. These are not disciplines of despair. They are disciplines of accountability and imagination. They help us see the world clearly, so we can begin to change it. They teach us that the conditions we live under are not inevitable—they are constructed. And anything constructed can be dismantled.
That is why they are feared. Not because they are divisive, but because they are unifying in a different register—across difference, across time, across struggle. Because they offer the one thing oppressive systems cannot abide: the chance to tell our own stories, on our own terms, and to link them to a broader fight for freedom.
Towards a Critical Autism Studies Programme
If the disciplines we’ve explored thus far reclaim narrative and challenge power, then Critical Autism Studies may be the next frontier—one that is long overdue. For too long, autistic people have been studied, spoken over, and pathologised by systems that neither understand nor value our ways of being. The vast majority of autism research has been done on us, not with us—framed by the medical model, driven by a deficit lens, and filtered through the gaze of institutions more interested in compliance than in liberation. A Critical Autism Studies programme would change that completely. It would centre autistic people not as research subjects, but as authors of knowledge, as theorists of our own experience, and as co-constructors of future possibilities.
The foundation of such a programme would reject the notion that autism is a puzzle to be solved or a tragedy to be mourned. Instead, it would begin with the premise that autistic life is meaningful, complex, and worth understanding on its own terms. Courses would engage with the history of how autism has been defined, by whom, and to what end—tracing the shift from early behaviourist theories to the rise of the neurodiversity movement and beyond. Students would examine the legacy of institutionalisation, the politics of diagnosis, and the weaponisation of “functioning labels” that divide our communities and erase those with the highest support needs.
But a Critical Autism Studies programme cannot stop at identity. It must be unapologetically intersectional—grounded in the understanding that race, gender, class, language, and nationality shape how autism is experienced, diagnosed, and responded to. The white, male, cisgender, middle-class archetype of autism has excluded too many for too long. Black autistic children are more likely to be misdiagnosed or criminalised than supported. Autistic girls and gender-diverse youth are often overlooked entirely, their masking mistaken for mental illness or defiance. Bilingual and ELL students are routinely misunderstood by diagnostic tools that assume monolingualism and linear language development. A truly critical programme would centre these intersections, not as add-ons, but as foundational.
Central to this programme would be the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), which asks not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What has happened to you?” and “How have you survived?” It provides a radically different starting point—one that invites narrative, honours context, and treats behaviours not as symptoms but as responses to power and threat. Paired with narrative-based inquiry, PTMF would allow students—especially those who are themselves autistic—to explore their own lived experience as valid data. Scripting, stimming, shutdowns, selective mutism, and echolalia would be reinterpreted not as deficits but as strategies—ways of navigating a hostile world. Research in this context would not extract—it would listen.
And there must be space, too, for the political economy of care. Any honest programme must grapple with the stark realities faced by autistic people with Level 3 support needs—those who require significant care, and who are too often left out of the neurodiversity narrative entirely. What happens when their parents die? When there is no trust fund, no private placement, no state infrastructure worth the name? A CAS programme must examine how capitalism has commodified care and offloaded the burden of survival onto families—mostly mothers—whilst offering nothing in return but bureaucratic cruelty. Students would study mutual aid, co-operative housing models, and abolitionist approaches to support that reject both institutional warehousing and market-based “solutions.” Care is not a cost—it is a shared human responsibility.
And still, this programme would not be confined to critique. It would look forward—into what autistic futurism might offer. What kind of world could we build if sensory needs were met with respect, if communication was understood as diverse and dynamic, if interdependence was seen not as failure but as the basis of society? Autistic artists, poets, philosophers, and technologists would take their rightful place in the curriculum, not as case studies, but as visionaries. There would be room for reclaiming ancestral forms of community, for exploring nonspeaking wisdom, for designing access that isn’t bolted on after the fact but woven in from the beginning.
At every stage, students would be asked not just to read, but to reflect. To co-create. To engage with community, not as subjects of charity or research, but as co-theorisers of liberation. Partnerships with autistic-led organisations would replace top-down placements. The classroom would be designed to honour sensory needs and diverse processing styles. Multimodal expression—art, scripting, AAC, movement—would be welcomed. There would be no expectation to conform to neurotypical norms in order to be taken seriously. The school would adapt to the student, not the other way around.
Such a programme would be a direct threat to the status quo. It would challenge academia’s extractive traditions. It would undermine the authority of researchers who have built careers without ever speaking to the people they claim to study. It would question capitalism’s dismissal of those who cannot—or will not—produce in conventional ways. And most of all, it would give autistic people something we have been so long denied: the space to name ourselves, to hold our truths in common, and to imagine, together, a world we haven’t yet seen.
Why This Is a Threat to Capitalism and Cultural Orthodoxy
A Critical Autism Studies programme like the one described here would be more than inconvenient to the current order—it would be deeply subversive. It would call into question not only how we treat autistic people, but how we define value, intelligence, success, and even what it means to be human. It would dismantle the architecture of capitalist thought where worth is measured by productivity, where care is framed as economic burden, where deviation from the norm is treated as pathology, and where education exists to produce compliant, employable bodies—not questioning, liberated minds.
Under capitalism, interdependence is cast as failure. Dependency is a shameful word. Need is a cost to be minimised. And in this logic, autistic people—especially those with high support needs—are framed as liabilities to be managed, rather than citizens with rights, desires, and deep interior lives. A Critical Autism Studies programme would challenge that fundamentally. It would teach that nonspeaking people are not voiceless. That scripting is not echolalia but story. That shutdowns are not tantrums but boundaries. It would give language and context to experiences capitalism has no patience for—and in doing so, it would disrupt the very foundations of who is allowed to be seen as a person.
This is why the backlash always invokes the mums. Not mothers as individuals—but “the mums” as a rhetorical tool, a moral cudgel wielded to silence critique. The argument goes: “You can’t critique the autism industry—you’ll make the mums feel judged.” “You can’t centre autistic people’s voices—what about the parents?” It is a sleight of hand that shifts attention from systemic failure to individual sacrifice. And whilst there are of course many loving, exhausted parents doing their best in impossible circumstances, the “what about the mums” narrative is not neutral—it’s an ideological strategy. One that funnels public sympathy (and enormous sums of funding) toward corporate autism charities, compliance-based therapies, and university ‘research centres’ that pathologise autism to secure perpetual grants.
This narrative also helps corporations launder their motives. Pharmaceutical companies, behaviourist training empires, and tech firms offering “solutions” for autism often position themselves as allies to struggling families, whilst quietly profiting from the very conditions of exclusion they claim to address. The mum becomes the proxy for the market: always in need, always exhausted, always justifying more control, more intervention, more products, more research that never reaches the people it claims to help.
A truly critical approach would not scapegoat mothers—it would name the system that isolates them. It would ask why parents are left to carry the full burden of care in a wealthy society. Why there are no universal supports. Why respite, housing, education, and healthcare are either inaccessible or contingent on navigating a punitive bureaucracy designed to wear families down. It would demand not just inclusion, but reparative justice for autistic people and their carers alike—outside the logics of pity, charity, or cost-benefit calculation.
That is what makes Critical Autism Studies so threatening. It is not just about reframing autism. It is about refusing the premises of capitalism itself—the premises that say some lives are worth less than others, that the most “efficient” system is the one that excludes the inconvenient, and that care must be earned through suffering. It is about building a world in which every autistic person, regardless of support needs, has the right to be known, heard, and held in community—not because they can be “useful,” but because they are.
This is not just an academic proposal. It is a demand. A vision. A refusal. And a beginning.
Final Thoughts …
And so here we are—Autism Awareness Month again. A time supposedly set aside to understand autistic lives, yet the stories that rise to the surface are rarely the ones that matter. Instead of systemic critique, we get sentimentality. Instead of complexity, clichés. Instead of voices from the margins, the same institutions that have historically silenced us now parade their catchy graphics and corporate allyship, quietly reinforcing the very systems we need to dismantle.
But what if this month were different? What if Autism Awareness Month became a time not just for visibility, but for truth-telling? For reading beyond the slogans and into the histories? For asking what it means to be autistic in a world that commodifies our pain, profits from our suppression, and fears our self-authorship?
That’s why I began this piece with Denmark Vesey—not because he was autistic, but because he understood something that still terrifies those in power: that when the oppressed begin to read the system, to study it, to teach others how to see it, something cracks. And when that reading becomes writing—when those long excluded from authorship begin to craft their own narratives, their own theories, their own visions of care and community—what was once called freedom begins to look suspiciously like control, and what was once dismissed as resistance starts to look like survival.
A Critical Autism Studies programme, imagined in full, would not be welcomed by those who dominate the conversation today. It would threaten research empires, disrupt the charity-industrial complex, and ask uncomfortable questions about capitalism’s dependence on extractive care. But more than that—it would offer hope. It would offer a space where autistic people, especially those multiply marginalised, could study not just our own experiences but the structures that have shaped them. It would let us connect our stories to those of other freedom-seekers—queer people, racialised people, disabled people, migrants—and ask, together: What might it mean to not only imagine liberation, but to study it? To teach it? To build it in common?
This is the kind of conversation we should be having during Autism Awareness Month—not more cheerleading for tech firms who claim to decode our speech, not more PR from research centres who have never sat in a room with us, not more inspirational tales sanitised for able-bodied consumption. We should be talking about power. About narrative. About solidarity. And about the radical potential of study, not as a privilege, but as a tool for emancipation.
We are not a mystery to be solved. We are a people in motion—thinking, theorising, remembering, and reaching. The future is not yet written. But it will be. And this time, we will be holding the pen.