The (in)visibilisation of ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’ as constructs of difference in Global North autism disparities research.

Publication date: Jul 08, 2025

Research evidences significant ethnic and racial disparities in the identification and diagnosis of autism in Global North contexts, sparking interest in how cultural factors contribute to these disparities. Despite this interest, however, the concept of ‘culture’ remains underdeveloped in autism research, where ethnic, racial, and other social categories are also often conflated. This has led to selective and limited explanations of how ‘culture’ influences the observed disparities. This commentary article discusses how autism research on the observed disparities in Global North contexts tends to hyper-visibilise ethnicity and race as proxies for ‘differences’, perpetuating cultural essentialist explanations for inequalities in diagnostics and social services. At the same time, research exploring autism as a constructed and negotiated ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ nearly renders ethnicity and race invisible. Consequently, little is known about how autism is initially shaped in intersection with ethnicity and race, how we collectively envision autistic individuals, and the extent to which our collective images are ethnically or racially diverse. This article advocates for a broader definition of culture in autism scholarship, emphasising how autism disparities also result from how autism is constructed and negotiated through processes of meaning-making. Lay abstractResearch shows that people from ethnic and racial minority groups in North America and Europe are confronted with major inequalities in the identification and diagnosis of autism. This has led to growing interest in autism research in how cultural factors might contribute to these differences. However, the way ‘culture’ is understood in autism research is still limited. Often, ethnic, racial and national backgrounds are mixed together, leading to narrow explanations for why these disparities exist. Concretely, this article explores how autism research often highlights ethnicity and race as markers of ‘difference’, which can reinforce oversimplified ideas about why these diagnostic inequalities occur. On the contrary, when autism is studied as a social identity or culture, ethnicity and race are almost ignored. Because of this, we know very little about how society imagines autistic people, and how diverse these images actually are in ethnic or racial terms. This study argues for a broader understanding of ‘culture’ in autism research, urging scholars to consider how autism is often viewed as primarily a ‘white’ condition through cultural and social interpretations. This approach could help better understand and address the disparities in autism diagnosis.

Semantics

Original Article