The Colonial Demand for Speech Nonspeaking autistic children in Black families are often treated as risks rather than as people communicating differently. When Black families raise nonverbal autistic children, silence is treated as danger rather than communication, and fear becomes the engine of discipline, secrecy, and forced speech. - Lovette Jallow Š Lovette Jallow. All rights reserved.This section is part of a protected and copyrighted body of work. It may not be reproduced, excerpted, adapted, or cited in academic, commercial, or derivative work without explicit permission. This is living, ancestral research rooted in lineage, not labs. I keep returning to the same image when diaspora parents call me about their nonverbal autistic childrenâa conversation I have had hundreds of times across four continents since 2019, sitting with precolonial Africa as a living archive, not a museum. In my research, I sit with societies where memory was held in bodies, where knowledge moved through rhythm, ritual, repetition, and apprenticeship. Where people learned each other slowly. Where language was never only about mouths. It was eyes and silence and gesture and timing, and a communityâs ability to read what was present without demanding performance. I picture an older compound at dusk. The air heavy with cooking smoke. Children moving in and out of each otherâs space. Someone humming while they work. Someone else quiet, observing everything, taking in the whole scene without comment. Nobody rushing them. Nobody demanding a greeting on command. Nobody dragging them into the centre to prove they are âokay.â Then I answer the phone in 2026 and the first question is almost always the same. How do I make them talk? The parent usually starts with care. They found my lectures, my training, a post that went viral, a clip where I said out loud what many of us feel but have not yet found language for. They tell me they are tired. They tell me they are scared. They tell me they love their child. Then they say the sentence with a weight behind it: my child is nonverbal. What that word carries is not just a diagnosis. It is a judgment wrapped in institutional language, a way of naming what the parent fears most: invisibility. Sometimes they whisper it like it is contraband. Sometimes they admit they are hiding it from their larger family. Sometimes they have already been pushed toward methods that promise quick results, less stimming, more sitting still, more eye contact, more obedience. The language of âprogressâ arrives early in the call, and it always sounds the same: make the child easier to manage, make the child easier to read, make the child easier for other people to tolerate. That is where my research and my reality collide. Because I hear grief, and the grief is real. But I also hear something louder than grief. I hear fear of judgment. Fear of elders. Fear of teachers. Fear of being blamed. Fear of being seen as careless, cursed, weak. Fear of a child who cannot perform respectability on demand. And once fear becomes the driver, speech stops being communication. Speech becomes evidence. It becomes a receipt you can hold up to the world to prove your child is âin there,â to prove you are doing parenting correctly, to prove your family should be spared humiliation. This is the quiet violence beneath so many diaspora stories. We come from cultures that speak through the body, then we raise our autistic children as if body language is meaningless unless it becomes speech. We can read a room with a glance. We can correct a child with a look. We can communicate refusal with teeth-sucking, disappointment with silence, warning with timing. We do whole conversations without words. Yet when a childâs autism makes speech difficult or unavailable, many families are pressured to treat that child as unreachable, then hand the child over to compliance systems that promise to make them âfunctional.â I want to name what is happening here, without romanticising the past and without excusing the harm of the present. Precolonial frames did not require a child to perform neurotypical communication to be recognised as a full human. Diaspora pressure often does. And when recognition depends on performance, the child pays for the adultâs fear with their nervous system. That is why these calls keep repeating themselves. They start with love. They end with a demand. And somewhere in the middle, the childâs actual language gets lost under everyone elseâs panic. Please note my whole life up to now: when I meet nonverbal autistic children before anyone tells me they do not speak, I rarely register their silence as absence. We communicate without effort. Often the adults watching us react with visible astonishment, as if something impossible is happening in front of them. I recognise that reaction because I lived it from the other side. I was intermittently non-speaking as a child and today. I understood everything around me, but there were periods when my body would not produce speech. Adults treated that gap as confusion or defiance, and their insistence on making me talk was exhausting. They were exhausting especially in Swedish schools. What they could not see was that comprehension was never the issue. Access was. I want to be clear about scope and language here. Black families are not a monolith, and neither is Africa. The patterns I describe emerge across different diaspora contexts shaped by migration, racial surveillance, religious pressure, and institutional scrutiny. My references to precolonial African communication draw from specific West and Central African lineages and contemporary continuities, not from an imagined uniform past. When I use terms like nonverbal or non-speaking, I am naming access to speech rather than absence of understanding. Communication remains present, relational, and responsive, even when words are not. Why Parents Hide an Autism Diagnosis from Black Extended Families Secrecy turns the child into a risk management exercise. Every meltdown becomes something to control before somebody sees. - Lovette Jallow Then comes the second pattern, the one parents confess after they trust me enough to say it out loud. They are hiding the autism. They are hiding it from grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, the wider family WhatsApp, the church circleâthe people who will frame everything as shame, punishment, or spiritual failure. Sometimes they hide it because the family will blame the mother. Sometimes because the family will treat the child like a problem that has embarrassed the lineage. Sometimes because they fear the child will be excluded from family gatherings, spoken about like they are not in the room, or disciplined harder because relatives interpret autism as disrespect. When a parent hides a diagnosis, they often tell themselves they are protecting the child. In practice, secrecy turns the child into a risk management exercise. The child becomes a public relations issue. Every meltdown becomes something to control before somebody sees. Every sensory reaction becomes something to correct before somebody comments. Every difference becomes an emergency because the family cannot know, and the parent cannot be questioned, and the child cannot be allowed to make visible what the adults are trying to conceal. This is where diaspora parenting starts parenting the audience. The family secret becomes the climate the child grows up breathing. The child learns early that their needs cause tension. The child learns early that adults tighten up around them. The child learns early that the room changes when they enter it. That is a form of violence, even when nobody throws a hand. It teaches the child that belonging depends on appearing acceptable. It teaches the parent that their love must be managed in private. It keeps everyone performing, and performance always has a cost. In my research across hundreds of diaspora families, I keep returning to the role of collective interpretation. Griots and oral historians carried genealogies and social memory through attention, rhythm, repetition, and nuance. Communities knew how to listen for what was being expressed beyond direct speech. That kind of listening is not soft. It is disciplined. It is a communal skill. Secrecy interrupts that. Secrecy isolates the parent. Secrecy isolates the child. Secrecy hands power to the loudest, most punitive voices in the family because the parent starts acting from fear. Once autism becomes a secret, every behavior turns into evidence, and parents start parenting the audience, not the child. This is the part where I slow the conversation down, because ânonverbalâ gets used in ways that quietly erase the child. A parent says ânonverbalâ and what they often mean is unreachable. They mean: I cannot get confirmation. I cannot get reassurance. I do not know what they think of me. I cannot show the family that my child understands. I cannot prove to doctors and teachers that my child is intelligent. I cannot stop strangers from treating my child like they are empty. That word becomes a label for adult helplessness, not a description of the Autistic childâs actual communication. - Lovette Jallow Many non-speaking autistic people communicate clearly through bodies, patterns, devices, and relational cues. Some communicate through gesture, hand leading, eye direction, pacing, stillness, sound, humming, scripting, repetition, rhythm. Some communicate through AAC. Some of us myself included communicate intermittently. Some speak in certain contexts and lose speech under stress. Some speak in ways that do not match what adults expect, and adults treat that mismatch as failure. We already understand this as Black people. We can read a glance across the room and know we are being warned. We can hear a long pause and know someone is displeased. We can tell when someoneâs breathing changes and know somethi
