The (in)visibilisation of 'ethnicity', 'race' and 'culture' as constructs of difference in Global North autism disparities research.
Autism research often treats ethnicity/race as simplistic cultural proxies—expand your cultural lens to include how autism itself is racially constructed to address diagnostic disparities.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kostet (2026) read dozens of autism-disparities papers from the Global North.
The author asked: How do these studies talk about race, culture, and ethnicity?
The paper is a position piece, not an experiment.
What they found
Most studies treat race or ethnicity as simple check-boxes.
They use the words as stand-ins for culture, but never explain what culture means.
This hides the real ways autism itself is racialized and keeps diagnosis gaps alive.
How this fits with other research
Peters et al. (2013) warned that ethics boards in low- and middle-income countries need cultural care. Imane shows the same care is missing inside race labels used in richer countries.
Viljoen et al. (2021) mapped parent views across countries and saw environment matters most in poor areas. Imane says calling those parents simply "Hispanic" or "Black" erases that context.
Kirby et al. (2022) told behavior analysts to swap assumptions with families through cultural reciprocity. Imane extends that idea: question how autism research itself racializes difference.
Bailey (2008) asked for global autism teamwork. Imane updates the call: build teams that see race as built, not born.
Why it matters
If you write intake forms, train staff, or read intake reports, swap check-box race for open questions about lived experience. Ask families how the world sees them and their child. This small shift moves us from labels to real cultural context and helps close the diagnosis gap.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2026 · doi:10.1177/13623613251355247