The intersection of racism or implicit bias and developmental disability remains largely unexplored. A 2015 National Institute of Health report on the topic says that previous studies on the issue have remained inconclusive. Damian Stanley, who co-authored the report, says researchers found that implicit social biases “remained intact in high-functioning adults with autism.”
For those on the spectrum of autism, “there’s more of an adherence to rules and sort of black and white, there’s a discomfort with uncertainty,” he told the Daily Dot in a phone interview. “So there’s a need for things to be clear.”
In other words, one of the ways in which Nick Starr-Street’s claim that “he doesn’t see race” was bullshit is that this alleged autistic morality itself isn’t somehow immune from the implicit biases of being a white man in America, and in fact one’s sense of what is “right and wrong” very well could be informed by those implicit biases. That one study referenced above plainly suggests that being autistic isn’t some sort of magic cloak that prevents the autistic person from carrying the racial biases of the society around them.
I’ve never been especially comfortable with the pro-autism mythology that we actually autistic people have some sort of higher sense of morality than neurotypicals; it doesn’t make any sense. What many of us have is cognitive rigidity, and if we also happen to have a productive sense of morality then we can be fairly committed to it and perhaps the rigidity also makes us louder about it.
The autism itself? Sorry, but that doesn’t make us more moral. It certainly doesn’t make us less racist.