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Lived experience, Think Autism Melbourne 2026
Masking whiteness before masking autism, and why racialised children go unseen
In short
Naz Jacobs told Think Autism Melbourne she masked from preschool to avoid racism, long before anyone considered she was autistic, and argued that this makes racialised autistic children easy to miss.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Naz Jacobs began masking in preschool, and autism was not the first reason. “I was heavily masked from the time that I was in preschool”, she told the panel at Think Autism Melbourne, and then she gave the cause. “It was because I wasn’t white.”
Her earliest memories of childhood, she said, are of knowing she was different because she was not white, and of understanding that she needed to shrink herself to avoid racism. She listed what she shrank: her needs, who she was, her culture, her background and the way she presented. She said this began from the time she was in preschool.
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Sources the story draws on
- Students face 'confronting' levels of racism (opens in a new tab), ANU Reporter (The Australian National University)
- Racial, Ethnic, and Sociodemographic Disparities in Diagnosis of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (opens in a new tab), Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 42(8), pp. 682 to 689 (Aylward, Gal-Szabo and Taraman); full text on PubMed Central
- The lived experiences of masking black Autistic girls in UK education: 'Before people see the autism, they see my race.' (opens in a new tab), Educational Psychology in Practice (Taylor and Francis), Nelson and Lichwa; record in the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust repository
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