🎙️ Lov(ette) or Leave It

About 🎙️ Lov(ette) or Leave It

The Lovette Jallow Perspective aka Lov(ette) or Leave It is a podcast that challenges societal norms and digs into the realities of neurodivergence, racial identity, and systemic bias in Sweden and beyond. Hosted by award-winning DEI speaker and neurodiversity consultant Lovette Jallow, each episode offers authentic insights from lived experience, tackling workplace inclusion, intersectionality, and the challenges faced by neurodivergent individuals in a world built for neurotypicals. Bold truths, real conversations, and actionable change—this is the space where no topic is off-limits. lovettejallow.substack.com (https://lovettejallow.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Unfiltered insights grounded in lived experience and deep expertise.

Category

health & fitness · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

27 Jan 2025

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

36 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   Du kan inte meditera bort diskriminering i Sverige

   Minoritetsstress börjar innan något har hänt När en vit klasskamrat gjorde ett misstag var det bara ett misstag. När jag gjorde ett misstag blev det ett bevis för att människor som jag inte hörde hemma där. Så jag lärde mig tidigt att prestera dubbelt så bra för att få samma erkännande. Jag hade inget ord för det då, inga begrepp och inga forskningsrapporter att peka på, men jag kände vad det gjorde med mig att alltid behöva förbereda mig på andras bedömningar samtidigt som jag skulle lära mig samma saker som alla andra. Jag minns lärare som förväntade sig mindre av mig och blev förvånade när jag fick MVG, och människor som berömde min svenska som om den var en överraskning. Jag lärde mig svenska på tre månader; så svårt var det inte. Andra tog i mitt hår, kallade det exotiskt och rörde det utan att fråga. Varje sådan situation krävde ett beslut om hur jag skulle reagera, hur mycket jag skulle förklara och vad det kunde kosta mig att säga ifrån, och när samma bedömningar återkommer år efter år blir det svårt att slappna av även i stunder då ingen har sagt något alls. Det är här jag vill börja min svenska Substack. Välkommen, och tack för att du läser. Jag heter Lovette Jallow och är författare till Black Vogue och Främling i vita rum, föreläsare och grundare av Action for Humanity. Här kommer jag att skriva om rasism, autism, ADHD, relationer och de villkor i samhället som avgör vem som får vara sig själv och vem som förväntas anpassa sig. Jag fortsätter också att skriva på engelska (https://lovettejallow.substack.com/), eftersom rasismen i Sverige behöver kunna förstås även av dem som inte läser svenska. Här vill jag ha de längre samtalen på svenska, med er som lever med de här frågorna, arbetar med dem eller behöver förstå hur ert eget agerande påverkar andra. I videon som hör till den här texten pratar jag om minoritetsstress, hur den märks i vardagen och vad vi kan göra åt villkoren som skapar den. Vi kan inte meditera bort diskriminering och andra människors fördomar, och därför vill jag här utveckla varför varje råd om återhämtning behöver följas av frågan om vem som har ansvar för det vi behöver återhämta oss från. Vad är minoritetsstress? Minoritetsstress är den extra belastning som fördomar, diskriminering och förväntan att bli avvisad kan skapa. Den lägger sig ovanpå allt annat som redan kräver vår uppmärksamhet, som arbete, ekonomi och relationer. Du går in i en situation med erfarenheten av hur liknande möten har slutat tidigare, och den erfarenheten påverkar vad du förbereder dig på innan något ens har hänt. Forskaren Ilan Meyer utvecklade en inflytelserik modell för minoritetsstress i studier av homosexuella män 1995 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7738327/) och av homo- och bisexuella personer 2003 (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2072932/). Modellen beskriver bland annat utsatthet för fördomar, förväntan att bli avvisad, behovet av att dölja sin identitet och hur omgivningens negativa föreställningar kan bli en del av den egna självbilden. Den hjälper oss att förstå hur sociala villkor skapar stress, även om varje grupps erfarenheter behöver förstås i sitt eget sammanhang. Det jag beskriver här handlar om rasism och exkludering i Sverige. Hur märks minoritetsstress i vardagen? Du kanske går in på ICA eller Hemköp och har redan innan du kliver in genom dörren en plan för hur du ska bevisa att du inte är en tjuv. Du håller händerna synliga, låter telefonen ligga kvar i fickan så att ingen tror att du filmar för att snatta och ler lite extra mot personalen för att visa att du är vänlig. Medan du handlar försöker du alltså också styra hur någon annan tolkar din närvaro. Samma beredskap följer med till arbetsintervjun, till den nya läkaren och till mötet med myndigheten. Den som aldrig har behövt göra de här avvägningarna kan uppfatta dem som överdrivna. För den som redan har blivit misstänkliggjord finns ett minne av vad som händer när andra får definiera situationen. Minoritetsstress kan också kännas som små nålstick varje dag: blickar, kroppsspråk, att någon pratar över dig i mötet men låter dina vita kollegor tala klart, att folk blir förvånade över att du talar flytande svenska fast du är född här, eller att du aldrig ser någon som ser ut som du i ledande positioner. Var för sig kan de verka små, men tillsammans bygger de en belastning som följer med hem. Rasism på jobbet: när du förväntas tala för alla På en arbetsplats märks den extra belastningen ofta i vem som förväntas förklara rasism när ämnet kommer upp. Säger någon något okunnigt om islam vänder sig blickarna mot dig, och handlar samtalet om mångfald blir du plötsligt ambassadör för hela din identitet, oavsett om frågan ligger långt utanför din yrkesroll och om du har kunskap i ämnet eller inte. Du får bedöma om du orkar svara, om ett ärligt svar kommer att uppfattas som obekvämt och om tystnaden i sin tur kommer att tolkas som att du håller med. En kollega kan röra ditt hår eller din kropp utan att fråga och sedan göra din reaktion till problemet. Då behöver du försvara en gräns som andra får ha utan diskussion. När sådana situationer återkommer går energi åt till att förutse dem, samtidigt som ditt ordinarie arbete fortfarande ska utföras och bedömas. För mig som svart och autistisk kvinna går de här förväntningarna inte att hålla isär. Hur rakt jag uttrycker mig bedöms både genom rasistiska föreställningar och genom normer för hur människor förväntas kommunicera, och samma tydlighet som kallas effektiv hos vissa kan kallas besvärlig hos andra. Därför behöver arbetsplatser undersöka vem som får vara tydlig och vems sätt att fungera de är beredda att anpassa sig till. Jag har skrivit mer om kommunikationens energikostnad i min engelska essä om småprat, autism och ADHD (https://lovettejallow.substack.com/p/small-talk-autistic-adhd-vagueness-clarity). Varför döljer människor sin identitet? Ibland blir anpassningen så omfattande att du börjar välja bort delar av dig själv. Du nämner inte din partner, din bakgrund eller en erfarenhet som du vet kan förändra stämningen. Du väger varje ord och försöker förutse följdfrågorna. Det kan vara ett genomtänkt sätt att skydda sig i en miljö där öppenhet får konsekvenser, och det tar ändå kraft att ständigt hålla isär den du är och den du visar. En rapport från Malmö universitet och Romskt informations- och kunskapscenter från 2024 (https://malmo.se/Aktuellt/Artiklar-Malmo-stad/2024-05-29-Rapport-om-romskt-liv-i-Malmo-ger-rekommendationer-for-stadens-fortsatta-arbete.html) bygger på intervjuer med 28 romska Malmöbor och tio tjänstepersoner. Deltagarna beskriver både stolthet över sin romska identitet och situationer där de döljer den på grund av antiziganism, rasism mot romer, i skolan, i arbetslivet och i kontakter med myndigheter. Intervjuerna visar hur människor resonerar om när det känns tryggt att berätta vilka de är. En organisation som säger sig välkomna alla behöver därför fråga vad människor upplever att de måste undanhålla för att bli väl behandlade. Ett lugnt rum kan rymma många erfarenheter som ingen längre vågar ta upp. Vad visar svensk forskning om diskriminering? Den som uppmanas att anstränga sig mer har rätt att fråga hur ansträngningen faktiskt bedöms. Svensk forskning om rekrytering, bostäder, betyg och vård gör det möjligt att granska besluten som påverkar människors möjligheter, även när diskrimineringen förnekas i det enskilda mötet. I Anni Erlandssons avhandlingsarbete från 2022 vid Institutet för social forskning, Stockholms universitet (https://www.su.se/enheter/institutet-for-social-forskning/nyheter/nyhetsartiklar/2022-06-08-man-loper-storre-risk-for-etnisk-diskriminering-pa-arbetsmarknaden) skickades jobbansökningar med likvärdiga meriter för att undersöka diskriminering vid rekrytering. Sökande med utländskt klingande namn fick färre positiva svar, och nackdelen var särskilt tydlig för män. När meriterna är likvärdiga ligger ansvaret hos arbetsgivaren som väljer. Ett svenskt bostadsexperiment från 2022 av Molla, Rhawi och Lampi (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0268840) skickade likvärdiga ansökningar från fiktiva manliga sökande till den privata hyresmarknaden. Namn förknippade med den svenska majoriteten fick flest svar, medan det arabisk-muslimskt klingande namnet fick minst. Eftersom bara manliga sökande testades säger studien inget om skillnader mellan kvinnor och män. I skolan jämförde Hinnerich, Höglin och Johannesson 2015 (https://research.hhs.se/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/Discrimination-against-students-with-foreign-backgrounds/991001480454206056) lärarens egen rättning av nationella prov i svenska på gymnasiet med anonym rättning av samma prov. Elever med svensk bakgrund fick ett större lyft när den egna läraren rättade än elever med utländsk bakgrund. Att granska hur bedömningen går till blir då en konkret del av arbetet för likvärdiga villkor. Inom vården granskade Esscher och kollegor 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24725307/) mödradödsfall i Sverige mellan 1988 och 2010. I de granskade fallen förekom bristfällig vård oftare bland kvinnor födda i låg- och medelinkomstländer än bland svenskfödda kvinnor, och kommunikationsproblem och brister i användningen av professionell tolk hörde till det som identifierades. Det är en historisk granskning av just mödradödsfall och behöver beskrivas inom den ramen. Studierna undersöker olika grupper och olika beslut, och ingen av dem mäter minoritetsstress direkt. Tillsammans visar de hur bemötande och bedömning kan påverka tillgången till arbete, bostad, rättvisa betyg och vård. Det är ingen slump. Det är inbyggda systemfel, och den som redan har mött dem har goda skäl att förbereda sig inför nästa kontakt. Hur påverkar minoritetsstress hälsan? När du hela tiden måste tänka på hur du uppfattas, och aldrig får chansen att bara vara, tär det på både kropp och psyke. Det kan märkas i sömnen, i spänningar, i utmattning och i den psykiska hälsan. Fortes kunskapsöversikt om unga hbtq-personers hälsa i Sverige från 2018 (https://forte.se/en/news/publications/the-health-and-situation-of-young-lgbtq-people-in-sweden) beskriver en högre risk för psykisk ohälsa och stressrelaterade symtom i den gruppen, där diskriminering, våld och oro för att bli avvisad är viktiga delar av förklaringen. Den gäller just den gruppen, men den visar hur sociala villkor kan sätta sig i kroppen. Det värsta är ofta när man äntligen söker hjälp. Vi möts av frågor som ”Är det verkligen så illa?” och ”Är du säker på att du inte överreagerar?”. Som svarta kvinnor förväntas vi dessutom vara starka, och jag har själv många gånger sökt vård med ont och fått höra att det nog inte var något allvarligt och att vi kunde ta det vid nästa besök. När vården avfärdar den som berättar om sin smärta lägger den ytterligare en börda på samma person som redan bär den. Hur kan man hantera minoritetsstress? Jag pratar själv om vila och återhämtning i videon, och det betyder mycket att få en paus, hitta stöd och känna gemenskap. Att existera som minoritet i ett samhälle präglat av rasism är utmattande, och du har all rätt i världen att vila utan att känna skuld. Söker du terapi kan det vara värt att leta efter någon med intersektionell förståelse. Samtidigt väntar nästa arbetsdag med samma chef, samma kollegor och samma osäkerhet om vad som händer om du berättar, och därför behöver dina egna strategier få stöd av verkliga förändringar omkring dig. Gemenskap ger en plats där mindre behöver förklaras. Hitta dina människor, i föreningar, nätverk eller vänskapskretsar, där du kan äta jollof rice utan att först förklara vad jollof rice är. Minoritetsstress blir starkare i isolering och svagare i gemenskap. Även i våra egna gemenskaper behöver omsorgen vara ömsesidig och gränserna respekteras, något jag utvecklar i min engelska text om gemenskap för svarta, queera kvinnor med funktionsnedsättning (https://lovettejallow.substack.com/p/community-is-not-transactional-for). Du måste inte heller utbilda alla. Du får frågor som ”Kan jag säga n-ordet om det är i en låt?”, ”Är det verkligen rasism i Sverige?” och ”Kan du utbilda mig om islam?”, och det tar energi att alltid behöva vara pedagogisk. Det är okej att bara säga ”Det där är inte okej” eller ”Jag är inte här för att lära ut”. Man kan också säga att Google finns. Använd det. Och sluta mäta dig mot en norm som inte var byggd för dig. Min mormor har alltid sagt till mig: ”Det är inte mitt problem hur någon annans ögon ser på mig.” Andras blickar sitter i deras huvuden, och hur de ser dig speglar ofta deras egna fördomar mer än vem du är. Vad behöver arbetsplatser, skolor och vården göra? Individuella strategier räcker inte, eftersom det är systemet och inte vi som ska ändras. En arbetsgivare kan granska vilka som kallas till intervju, vilka som befordras och vad som händer med den som anmäler diskriminering. Det behöver finnas tydliga kriterier, beslut som går att följa upp och en ansvarig person som ser till att åtgärderna faktiskt genomförs. Mångfald kan inte vara en punkt i en policy medan medarbetaren fortfarande förväntas tåla beteendet för att få behålla sin plats. Skolor behöver undersöka hur förväntningar påverkar bedömningen och hur elevers berättelser om rasism tas emot, så att inget barn behöver förklara sin existens för vuxna. Inom vården behöver kommunikation, tolkning och bemötande behandlas som en del av vårdens ansvar, så att patienten inte måste kompensera för verksamhetens brister samtidigt som hen försöker få hjälp. Vi har också ett ansvar i våra egna relationer. För dig som tillhör majoriteten handlar det om att lyssna, läsa och utbilda dig själv, eftersom det inte är de utsattas jobb att alltid förklara. Säg ifrån när en kollega, vän eller familjemedlem säger något rasistiskt, homofobiskt eller transfobiskt, så att den som utsätts slipper göra det själv. Fråga hur någon mår och mena det, och svara inte ”Jag också” när någon berättar om sin erfarenhet. När någon säger att något vi har sagt var rasistiskt, homofobiskt eller transfobiskt behöver vi undersöka vad vi sa och vilka föreställningar vi förde vidare. Det arbetet gäller mig också. Att själv vara utsatt för vissa former av förtryck gör mig inte färdiglärd om andras erfarenheter, och min avsikt avgör inte ensam vad mitt agerande får för konsekvenser. Innan någon ger ännu ett råd om motståndskraft behöver det bli tydligt vad de ansvariga själva är beredda att förändra. Den som håller i rekryteringen, betygsättningen eller hanteringen av en anmälan har andra möjligheter och skyldigheter än den som försöker ta sig igenom dagen. Det är sådana samtal jag vill föra här. Om du känner igen dig hoppas jag att texten och videon ger språk åt något du har burit. Om du har ansvar för andras arbetsmiljö, utbildning eller vård hoppas jag att du använder dem för att granska dina egna beslut. Prenumerera gärna på min svenska Substack och dela texten med någon som behöver förstå sambandet mellan vardagens erfarenheter och samhällets ansvar. Föreläsningar, utbildningar och workshops om antirasism, minoritetsstress och inkludering i arbetslivet: lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/). Mer från The Lovette Jallow Perspective These essays go deeper into the questions this piece opens. If you read one, start with the one that unsettles you most. Vem är Lovette Jallow? Lovette Jallow är författare, föreläsare och inkluderingsstrateg baserad i Stockholm, med uppdrag i Sverige, Europa och MENA-regionen. Hon har tilldelats nio priser för sitt arbete mot rasism och för mänskliga rättigheter, är författare till *Främling i vita rum* och *Black Vogue* och grundare av Action for Humanity. Hon föreläser och utbildar om antirasism, minoritetsstress, intersektionalitet samt autism och ADHD i arbetslivet för företag, universitet, myndigheter och organisationer, och talar sju språk. Läs mer och boka en föreläsning på lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/). Följ Lovette Jallow 🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/)🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow (https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow)🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow (https://instagram.com/lovettejallow)🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette (https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette)🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow (https://twitter.com/lovettejallow)🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social (https://bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe (https://lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   21 Sept 2026

   When Autistic Masking Teaches You to Distrust Yourself

   This morning, I was sitting with my coffee thinking about how much quieter and peaceful my life has become since I started paying attention to my own autistic unmasking journey. When unmasked I spend far less time arguing myself out of things I have already noticed, far less time trying to make contradictory information behave simply because somebody else seems comfortable with the contradiction. Somewhere in that ordinary little morning thought, I realised I had been approaching the question of autism and abuse from the wrong direction. I keep seeing autistic people say that we are too literal, too pattern-driven, too direct, too resistant to inconsistency to be successfully manipulated. Sometimes the claim goes further: autistic people are “too autistic for narcissists.” I understand why that idea can feel reassuring, especially when it comes from survivors trying to make sense of what happened to them and searching for something in themselves that feels protective. The problem is what the claim implies for everyone else. If autism supposedly protects us from manipulation, then an autistic person who was gaslit, coerced, controlled or abused is left carrying another accusation on top of the harm itself: perhaps they failed to recognise the pattern, failed to trust their autism, failed somehow to be autistic correctly. People also forget that Neurodivergence is an umbrella, not a moral category. Autistic people can also have NPD, and people with NPD can be autistic. Abuse is not a diagnostic criterion for NPD, and the diagnosis alone does not tell you whether someone is abusive. That does not fit what we know about autistic people and abuse. Autistic adults experience sexual, physical and emotional violence at rates far above the general population, with autistic women facing particularly high levels of victimisation. And yet something genuinely did change for me when I stopped suppressing so much of the way my brain naturally processes information. I became less willing to smooth over contradictions, less likely to assume that confusion automatically meant I had misunderstood, and more comfortable leaving a question unresolved until the information made sense. Those two things can exist together. Autism does not make us immune to abuse, and some autistic traits can still affect how certain abusive tactics work once we stop automatically suppressing them. That tension is where my essay begins. Why Are Autistic People Vulnerable to Abuse? It requires only that the cost of pursuing the question stays higher than the cost of dropping it. Autistic adults report sexual harassment, sexual violence and physical violence at substantially higher rates than non-autistic adults, and the vulnerability grows through isolation, dependency, stigma, constrained access to support and years of being taught that our interpretation of other people is less reliable than theirs. The comparison matters because it cuts through the idea that autism somehow makes us unusually difficult to manipulate. In a cross-sectional study by Vicki Gibbs, Jennie Hudson and Elizabeth Pellicano, 118 autistic adults were compared with 110 non-autistic adults. Sexual harassment was reported by 75.4 percent of the autistic group and 56.4 percent of the non-autistic group. Sexual violence was reported by 56.8 percent of autistic participants and 28.2 percent of non-autistic participants. Physical violence showed the same pattern, 58.5 percent compared with 36.4 percent. Among women, 61 percent of autistic women reported sexual violence compared with 34.5 percent of non-autistic women, while 54.5 percent reported physical violence compared with 28.6 percent of non-autistic women. Those figures need methodological context, and I would rather give it myself than have somebody else supply it for me. The study used an online survey and recruited autistic participants through autism organisations, Facebook groups, personal networks and snowball sampling, so selection bias is possible and the sample cannot be treated as a population prevalence estimate. A systematic review published in 2024 found wide variation across sixteen studies because researchers used different definitions, measures, populations and time periods.2 (#user-content-fn-2) Even with that variation, five of the seven studies that directly compared autistic and non-autistic adults found significantly higher rates of at least one form of violence among autistic participants. The other two did not, which is worth saying plainly because whilst the direction of the evidence is consistent. Its precision is not. The more interesting question is why. Research in this area remains thinner than the scale of the problem warrants, and the systematic review itself criticises how often studies focus on the autistic person’s traits while giving far less attention to negative stereotyping, institutional neglect and the absence of meaningful protection. Social isolation can reduce witnesses and routes out. Financial or care dependency can make leaving materially dangerous. Communication differences can make ambiguous behaviour harder to resolve. Repeated correction teaches many autistic people to examine themselves first when something feels wrong. Add the experience of being told throughout childhood, school, healthcare and work that your tone was wrong, your reaction was excessive, your interpretation was too literal or your discomfort was inappropriate, and self-doubt acquires a history long before an abusive person arrives. It is worth saying plainly what the person on the other side of this arrangement is getting, because an essay that stays inside the experience of the person being harmed can make abuse sound like weather. Somebody who can keep you explaining yourself gets several things at once. They get to carry on behaving exactly as they have been behaving, because a conversation about whether you understood correctly is a conversation that never arrives at what they did. They get your labour, the hours spent reconstructing timelines, rehearsing how to raise something without provoking a reaction, and managing their mood so that the subject can be approached at all. They get to decide which version of events stands. And where money, housing, immigration status, medication, care or access to children runs through them, all of that is backed by the knowledge that leaving is expensive. None of it requires a diagnosis, a personality type or a plan. It requires only that the cost of pursuing the question stays higher than the cost of dropping it. Vulnerability here describes exposure, power and restricted options, which is why it belongs in a sentence about what perpetrators select for rather than in a sentence about what autistic people lack. This is also why I have become increasingly wary of the commercial recovery culture that overlaps with neurodivergent spaces. The structure is consistent enough to describe without naming anybody. A piece of content tells autistic people that our pattern recognition, our rigidity, our directness make us unusually resistant to manipulation. The claim lands as recognition for many, because many of us have spent our lives being told those same traits are defects. What follows the claim is a quiz, a coaching package, a membership on identifying the people we have supposedly already been equipped to identify. What is being sold is certainty. The immunity story works commercially because it flatters the buyer’s cognition and then, in the same breath, creates the anxiety only the seller can settle: if your perception is that good, why did this happen to you, and how will you know next time? Somebody who feels certain does not need a subscription. Somebody who is scanning does. The cost of that arrangement is not evenly distributed. Some versions of it build a hierarchy where autistic people become unusually perceptive, people with narcissistic personality disorder become a ready-made category of perpetrators, and survivors whose autism did not protect them are left holding a second question on top of the first one. This is where Aspie supremacy enters the conversation. It turns neurological difference into evidence of superior perception or morality and constructs an opposing category out of somebody else’s diagnosis. I have written about the diagnostic version of this problem before, and the commercial version runs on the same engine. I reject that hierarchy. I know and get along with people who have NPD. A clinical diagnosis tells me something about a person’s diagnostic presentation; their behaviour tells me whether they are harming somebody. Autistic people can abuse other people, people with NPD can experience abuse, and neither diagnosis gives us a moral category into which we can sort human beings. Survivors deserve language for what happened to them without an entire diagnostic group becoming shorthand for perpetrator. If this is our baseline risk, then the next question is what masking has taught many of us to do inside those environments. What Does Autistic Masking Do to Your Self-Trust? You can become very skilled at treating your own discomfort as a communication problem that you need to solve. Masking reaches far beyond a set of social skills, because it can teach you to suppress visible autistic responses and, over time, to treat your own first reading of a situation as the one most likely to be wrong. Researchers often use camouflaging as the broader term. It includes masking, such as suppressing stimming, changing eye contact or hiding other visibly autistic behaviour, alongside compensation, where you learn scripts, imitate expected social behaviour and consciously work around differences in communication. More recent work describes autistic masking as consciously or unconsciously hiding autistic traits, responses, identity or diagnosis, including attempts to mimic non-autistic ways of behaving and communicating. People learn to do this because visible autism gets punished. Sometimes the punishment is obvious. Sometimes it is losing a job opportunity, being treated as difficult in a workplace, having a doctor take you less seriously, becoming the problem in a family conflict, or discovering that the safest way through an institution is to make yourself easier for that institution to understand. Masking can buy employment, medical credibility, privacy, family peace and physical safety. For Black autistic people especially, there are situations where changing how we present ourselves is a rational response to systems that already read Blackness, directness and disability through suspicion. The problem begins when managing how other people experience you turns into managing yourself out of what you already perceived. I know this process intimately. I remember dealing with doctors while my stomach was bleeding and I kept losing my balance. During that period, when I was also struggling badly with insomnia, I was told verbatim to “go home and rest.” I questioned it because my body was telling me something was wrong and I wanted tests. When my condition worsened and I later raised what had happened, I was told that nobody had said that to me and that they were sorry I was emotional. Dear reader, I was not emotional. I was in pain. I was also coherent and calm. What interests me now is what happened inside me before I eventually made formal complaints. I had already noticed that something was wrong. I had already asked questions. Yet dismissal created another layer of work where I began checking myself against their certainty. Had I explained the symptoms badly? Was I making too much of the bleeding? Had I misunderstood what they meant by rest? By the time I escalated the case, I had a recorded conversation and a timeline, because I had stopped assuming that institutional confidence made their version more accurate than mine. That is the self-monitoring loop masking can reinforce. Am I overreacting? Did I misunderstand? Am I being difficult? You watch yourself more closely than the person in front of you. You rehearse the acceptable response before you speak. You suppress visible confusion. You remain inside an interaction that feels wrong while trying to work out which version of yourself would make it go more smoothly. Eventually, you can become very skilled at treating your own discomfort as a communication problem that you need to solve. The research on the costs of camouflaging has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Laura Hull and colleagues found exhaustion and threats to self-perception in their early qualitative work with 92 autistic adults. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 5,897 autistic participants found that greater camouflaging was associated with more anxiety, depression and social anxiety, alongside lower psychological wellbeing. Sarah Cassidy and colleagues also found an association between camouflaging, thwarted belongingness and lifetime suicidality in an undergraduate sample with varying levels of autistic traits.5 (#user-content-fn-5) The authors were careful about what that study could establish, and so should we be, although the relationship between sustained self-suppression and psychological cost appears repeatedly across this literature. The finding most relevant to this essay comes from Joshua Evans, Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso and Steven Rouse. Their study of 342 autistic adults found that higher self-reported masking was associated with greater reports of past interpersonal trauma, including experiences connected to emotional and physical abuse, as well as greater anxiety and depression, lower self-esteem and lower authenticity. It is unusually relevant because it brings masking and interpersonal trauma into the same dataset, which is exactly the relationship I am examining here. It still cannot tell us which came first. The study is correlational. Abuse and social punishment may teach autistic people to mask more heavily, and heavier masking may also reinforce habits of self-doubt that become exploitable later. Both processes may be happening in the same person. My argument is narrower than causation: masking can repeatedly rehearse the act of distrusting your first response, and abusive dynamics often benefit when that habit is already familiar. That distinction matters enough for me to name clearly. Masking your behaviour means managing how you present yourself. You change your face, tone, posture, timing or phrasing because the environment requires it, and that choice can protect your access or your safety. Overriding your perception means revising what you believe happened because somebody else’s interpretation has been given more authority than your own. The first can be strategic, while the second accumulates quietly until you stop recognising yourself as a reliable witness to your own life. If you have spent years learning that your first interpretation is probably the wrong one, gaslighting does not arrive in an empty room. How Do Gaslighting, Coercive Control and DARVO Create Self-Doubt for Autistic People? Many abuse tactics repeat because sophistication is unnecessary when exhaustion works. All three tactics need the same thing in order to work, which is a person who becomes confused, tired, ashamed of asking again and eventually willing to let the question go, and that is precisely the state a lifetime of masking has already rehearsed in many autistic people. The terms describe related processes, although they are not interchangeable. Coercive control concerns the cumulative pattern of monitoring, isolation, rules, threats and restriction that gradually reduces another person’s freedom. A single argument, cruel remark or controlling demand tells us much less than repeated behaviour that narrows somebody’s choices, access to money, relationships, movement, privacy or ability to disagree without consequences. Research on coercive control has repeatedly stressed that the meaning and impact of the pattern matter, because individual incidents can look ordinary when separated from the context in which they occur. Gaslighting works more directly on a person’s relationship with reality. Events are denied. Previous conversations are rewritten. Feelings become evidence that the person is irrational. A factual disagreement turns into a discussion about their stability, memory, sensitivity or character. Paige Sweet’s sociological analysis is useful to my work because she places gaslighting inside relationships of power and shows how perpetrators can use existing inequalities and stereotypes to undermine another person’s credibility. For autistic people, that matters enormously. Autism and gaslighting meet at a particularly dangerous point when somebody has already spent years being told that their interpretation of social situations is unreliable. DARVO describes another recognisable move. Jennifer Freyd developed the term for the sequence deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. The person confronted with an allegation denies the behaviour, attacks the credibility or character of the person raising it, then presents themselves as the injured party. Later research has found that exposure to DARVO can affect how observers judge the credibility of both parties, which helps explain why the tactic matters well beyond the private argument itself. In practice, these patterns overlap. Somebody asks a factual question and receives an attack on their character. An agreement is rewritten once it becomes inconvenient. The story changes, then the person noticing the change becomes the problem for noticing it. Information is withheld. Conversations become circular. The original question disappears beneath arguments about tone, timing, memory or intention. A person can spend hours defending why they asked the question while the question itself remains unanswered. This is where I think abuse becomes remarkably boring. The methods repeat because sophistication is unnecessary when exhaustion works. Confusion works. Shame works. Fear of seeming difficult works. If somebody can keep you explaining yourself long enough, they may never have to explain the contradiction you originally raised. Eventually, peace can become more attractive than another circular conversation, and accepting an explanation that does not make sense can feel cheaper than continuing to challenge it. That mechanism matters for autistic people who have learned to mask through constant self-monitoring. The internal questions from the previous section already sound familiar: Did I misunderstand? Am I overreacting? Am I being difficult? Gaslighting can turn the first question against you. Coercive control can make asking again increasingly costly. DARVO can turn the third question into the entire conversation. One of the most difficult questions an autistic person can end up asking is painfully simple: how do I know whether I misunderstood because I am autistic or whether somebody lied to me? That question deserves more than reassurance. Autistic communication differences are real. Misunderstandings happen. Memory is imperfect for everyone. None of those facts require you to accept an explanation simply because another person delivers it with greater confidence. The useful question becomes whether the account can survive clarification. Does it answer what you actually asked? Does it remain consistent over time? Can the other person explain a contradiction without making your character the subject of the conversation? Those questions matter because abusive tactics often depend on the original question eventually disappearing. The tactics repeat. What is less predictable is what happens when an autistic person stops automatically correcting their own mind to fit them. This essay stays free. The citation notes behind it, the practitioner edition written for social services and domestic abuse support, and the Swedish version are for paid subscribers. How Autistic Unmasking Can Change the Way You Respond to Contradictions Somebody could tell me two materially different things and I would work harder at repairing my understanding than they worked at explaining the difference. Autistic unmasking changes what happens after you notice that something does not make sense, because you spend less time correcting your own reaction, smoothing over the inconsistency or forcing contradictory information into coherence simply because everyone else seems ready to move on. One of the autistic traits I have spent years being encouraged to manage is what clinicians often call inflexible thinking. In practice, mine looks like returning to the original information, comparing what somebody said before with what they are saying now, checking whether the chronology still holds and leaving a contradiction unresolved when the available explanations do not resolve it. I have lived a lifetime in the west being told that this persistence was something I needed to suppress. I worried about being difficult, repetitive, obsessive or socially inappropriate. Masking taught me that keeping a conversation comfortable was often more important than continuing to ask a question everyone else had decided was finished, and I would mask my way through my twenties before reverting to what my brain knows best in the end. Living more unmasked has changed that relationship with my own cognition. I allow the question to remain open. My follow-up questions do not expire. Something somebody said in March can still be sitting in my brain in June because time passing has not supplied the missing logic. I may hear something months later that immediately pulls the earlier conversation back into focus, and then my brain starts comparing. What was originally said? What is being said now? What changed between those two versions? Does the newer explanation actually account for the earlier information? Sometimes there is a perfectly ordinary answer. Memory changes. People misspeak. New information appears. Circumstances change. A person can simply say, “I remembered that wrong,” or “I explained that badly,” and suddenly the pieces fit. The difficulty begins when the pieces repeatedly fail to fit and the problem keeps being relocated into the person asking why. I have experienced this in friendships where serious allegations were being discussed and I wanted clarification before deciding what I thought. I would ask a question, receive an explanation and initially accept it because I assumed the confusion belonged to me. Later, another conversation would introduce information that did not fit the first account. I would return to the original question, listen again, try to reconcile the versions and spend far too much time searching for the interpretation that allowed everything to coexist. Sometimes there simply was no interpretation that made everything coexist. That was one of the strangest things to realise about how heavily I had masked. I could recognise the contradiction and still distrust myself for recognising it. Somebody could tell me two materially different things and I would work harder at repairing my understanding than they worked at explaining the difference. In final conversations with people I have known, I have been told that I simply did not understand what they were explaining. Years ago, that sentence would have sent me straight back into myself. I would replay the conversation, interrogate my tone, question whether autism had made me too literal and consider whether I had missed some invisible social meaning that everybody else would have understood. Now I ask a different question: what exactly am I failing to understand? If somebody said one thing previously and is saying something materially different now, asking how those two accounts fit together preserves the original question. It prevents the earlier version from quietly disappearing simply because enough time has passed, and it makes narrative drift easier to see because both versions have to occupy the same conversation. This is why clarification matters so much to me. People who rely on abusive tactics tend to dislike it. Remember that a dislike of being questioned tells us very little about somebody’s character on its own. Plenty of people become defensive, embarrassed, overwhelmed or irritated for entirely ordinary reasons, and plenty of people occupy positions where they have simply never expected to be asked. What matters is the pattern that follows. * Can the person answer the question? Can they acknowledge uncertainty? * Can they say that they remembered something incorrectly or changed their mind? * Can they explain what changed without turning your character into the subject of the conversation? A very different dynamic appears when every attempt to clarify the original issue produces another attack, another diversion, another rewritten account or another explanation of why asking the question proves something is wrong with you. “How does that fit with what you told me before?” is an extraordinarily simple question. It is also remarkably inconvenient when an account depends on the earlier version disappearing. This is where so-called autistic inflexibility can have a useful function. Returning to the original information keeps the chronology available. Persistent questioning keeps the unresolved issue visible. A reluctance to accept contradiction purely for social comfort can interrupt the expectation that enough emotional pressure, confusion or exhaustion will eventually make the question disappear. None of this requires autistic people to possess superior pattern recognition. The change I am describing happens after the inconsistency has already been noticed. Unmasking gives me more permission to stay with what I noticed instead of immediately treating my persistence as the problem. There is an important safety caution I want to give you here, dear reader. Clarification can help somebody understand a pattern, and in coercive relationships it can also provoke escalation. If asking questions leads to intimidation, threats, withdrawal of money, housing or care, interference with access to children, destruction of property or fear for your physical safety, continuing to press the contradiction can increase danger. That response is information in itself, and these are situations where masking can help you survive. What comes next belongs with specialist domestic abuse support and safety planning rather than with another attempt to extract a coherent explanation. Nothing in this analysis means somebody could have prevented their abuse by thinking more clearly, asking better questions or masking less. Manipulation, coercive control and gaslighting work on people whose memory, judgement and reasoning are entirely intact. The shift I am describing is smaller and, for me, far more useful. I have stopped treating every unresolved contradiction as evidence that I failed to understand. Sometimes I misunderstood. Sometimes the other person explained themselves badly. Sometimes new information genuinely changes the story. And sometimes the story keeps changing because the story keeps changing. Autistic unmasking has made it easier for me to leave that final possibility on the table long enough to examine it. Masking still protects me in many environments, and I would be reckless to pretend otherwise. The harder question is learning when masking is helping me navigate the world and when it is teaching me to distrust information I have already perceived. How Do You Know When to Mask and When to Unmask? There is no universal rule for when an autistic person should mask or unmask, and anyone selling one is selling certainty that real life does not provide. What helps me far more is asking what the environment requires, what I am protecting, and whether I am changing how I present myself or changing what I believe happened. Masking has protected me. I have used it deliberately in medical settings, professional spaces, institutions and situations where being read accurately was never guaranteed. As a Black autistic woman in Sweden, I do not move through those environments with the same margin for social difference that much of the English-language conversation about unmasking quietly assumes. Directness can be read as aggression. Flat affect can become indifference. Asking repeated questions can become hostility. Visible distress can undermine credibility. Being highly articulate can create the opposite problem, where disability disappears because somebody has decided that competence in one area proves competence everywhere. Sometimes I know exactly what I am doing when I adjust. I soften my phrasing. I change my tone. I explain something in the order I know an institution expects to hear it. I make more eye contact than feels natural. I remove information that will distract someone from the point I need them to understand. I rehearse before a meeting. I write an email instead of speaking because written language gives me more control over how my communication will be interpreted. I would make some of those choices again tomorrow. Those are all examples of masking my behaviour, and the cost of them is exhaustion, which is sometimes a price worth paying when the alternative affects healthcare, employment, housing, safety or access to something I need. Overriding my perception goes somewhere else entirely. It happens when I begin revising what I believe happened because another person appears more certain than I am. I noticed discomfort, then decided I was probably too sensitive. I heard a contradiction, then assumed I misunderstood. I remembered what was said, then gave somebody else’s recollection more authority because they spoke with confidence. I asked a reasonable question, received irritation instead of an answer and concluded that my question must have been unreasonable. That cost compounds, because eventually the performance leaves the outside world and starts happening internally. This is why I resist uncomplicated celebrations of unmasking. Some environments are safer when people know less about you, some systems punish visible disability, some workplaces reward conformity while claiming to value authenticity, and some families have already shown you exactly what they do with vulnerability. Racism changes the stakes again, because there are situations where withholding, translating, rehearsing and strategically presenting yourself are intelligent responses to power. The question becomes whether the strategy is helping you move through the environment or teaching you to abandon information you already have. These are the questions I find more useful than asking whether masking itself is good or bad: * Does masking increase my safety here in a concrete way, or does it mainly increase somebody else’s comfort? * Am I changing how I communicate, or am I changing what I believe happened? * When I ask for clarification, do I receive an answer or a consequence? * Does the explanation become clearer as more information appears, or does it require more and more work to make it coherent? * Am I being asked to set aside something I already know in order to preserve this relationship, job, family dynamic or institutional interaction? * Is there anybody in this environment around whom I do not need to perform this level of self-monitoring? Those questions have changed how I understand masking because they move the decision away from morality. I do not need to prove that I am bravely unmasked. I do not need to prove that I can survive every environment without adapting. I need to know what I am doing, why I am doing it and what the adaptation is costing me. The questions above are the short version. On Monday 12 October at 20:00 CEST, I’m teaching a live session on autistic masking, gaslighting and self-trust. We will work through what masking can teach us to suppress, how gaslighting and coercive control interact with self-doubt, and how to distinguish changing the way you communicate from abandoning what you actually perceived. Your place includes The Autistic Masking and Self-Trust Workbook, the live Q&A, an anonymous question form before the session, the recording, captions and transcript, plus the citation and resources sheet behind the lecture. The workbook gives you a structured way to examine one environment, relationship or unresolved contradiction at a time and track patterns across time. There are environments where I deliberately mask because I understand the power arrangement clearly. I know the person assessing me can affect access to care. I know the institution has a preferred communication style. I know that racialised assumptions may already be active before I open my mouth. In those situations, masking can be strategic. There are other situations where I have realised that what I called masking was actually a much deeper surrender of authority. I was translating another person’s contradictions for them. I was supplying explanations they had never given. I was deciding that my discomfort must be an autistic misunderstanding because accepting that possibility felt socially safer than accepting what the information itself suggested. Unmasking in those moments did not magically make the situation safe. It gave me a more accurate account of what I was experiencing, because I stopped automatically editing the evidence before I allowed myself to examine it. Unmasking itself does not provide structural protection. Self-knowledge cannot substitute for secure housing, financial independence, accessible healthcare, legal protection, workplace safeguards, domestic abuse services or people who will believe you when something is wrong. In coercive or violent situations, strategic masking may remain part of staying safe, and specialist support matters more than any ideal of authenticity. The work is learning to recognise the difference between adapting yourself to survive an environment and allowing that environment to become the authority on your own perception. These questions are part of rebuilding self-trust after years of translating yourself for other people, and that work runs into institutions long before it runs into peace. How Can Autistic People Rebuild Self-Trust After Masking? Self-trust after masking is rebuilt through records, written clarification, patterns tracked across time and specialist support where coercive control or violence is present. It also requires understanding that the systems autistic survivors turn to for help may reproduce the same doubt they have spent years learning to direct at themselves. That matters because disclosure rarely arrives in the tidy form institutions prefer. An autistic survivor may speak with flat affect while describing something terrifying. They may laugh at the wrong moment because their nervous system is overloaded. They may remember a conversation almost word for word while struggling to place it on an exact date. They may disclose something months after it happened because they needed that long to process what occurred, work out what it meant or find language for it. Under stress, chronology can fragment. A literal answer may respond precisely to the words used while missing the intention behind the question. Somebody who has spent years masking may also appear exceptionally composed, because composure is what they learned to produce when they were least safe. None of those presentations tells you whether the abuse happened. Yet this is where autistic survivors can lose credibility inside the very systems they approach for protection. Attention shifts from the behaviour being reported to whether the survivor communicated it convincingly enough. Their affect is examined. Their timeline is scrutinised. Their delayed disclosure becomes suspicious. Their communication becomes the problem requiring explanation while the other person’s pattern of behaviour receives less attention. For clinicians, social workers, police, domestic violence advocates and anyone assessing disclosure, this distinction matters. Autistic communication can look unusual under ordinary circumstances and become even less conventionally legible under trauma and stress. A credible account does not need to arrive with the facial expression, emotional cadence or perfectly ordered chronology somebody has been trained to expect. This is also why I have become so deliberate about records. When something matters, I write down what happened while the wording is still available to me: dates, messages, exact phrases, what was agreed, what changed. I do this because later conversations can alter how an event sits in memory, especially when the event itself becomes the subject of repeated disagreement. A contemporaneous record preserves something closer to the original information before weeks of explanation, denial and reinterpretation accumulate around it. Written clarification serves a similar purpose. If something important does not make sense, I prefer asking the question in writing where possible. Writing slows the exchange down. It preserves the wording of the original question. It gives both people time to answer without relying on memory of what was supposedly said later. Most importantly, it leaves the question where it was asked, so nobody has to reconstruct it from the residue of an argument. I also pay more attention to behaviour across time than I once did. One confusing conversation can mean almost anything, because people become defensive, communicate badly, forget details and contradict themselves. A pattern emerging over months tells you more. What happens repeatedly when you ask a factual question? Does the explanation become clearer as more information appears? Do agreements keep changing? Does every disagreement eventually become a conversation about your character, your memory or your tone? Looking across time reduces the pressure to make a final judgement from one moment while still allowing repeated behaviour to remain visible. Documentation needs its own safety planning. If you share a home, phone, device, cloud account, browser history, family plan or password access with the person you are documenting, discovery of those records can increase danger. Records should never be treated as automatically safe simply because they are useful, and digital safety belongs inside the documentation plan from the beginning, particularly where coercive control, stalking or violence is already present. The same applies to leaving, confronting or reporting. Self-trust can help you understand what you are experiencing, and it cannot replace specialist safety planning. If somebody controls money, housing, transport, immigration status, medication, access to children or your communication with other people, the practical risks of challenging that control need to be assessed with someone trained in domestic abuse and coercive control. Unmasking does not create an escape route. The environment audit, clarification log and rigidity sort I use for working through these questions in more detail are in The Autistic Masking and Self-Trust Workbook (https://tidycal.com/lovettejallow/autistic-masking-self-trust). Autistic people are taught how to mask long before anyone teaches us how to decide when masking serves us. I do not think that gap is incidental. Masking frequently makes institutions easier to run, classrooms easier to manage, workplaces easier to standardise, families easier to keep comfortable and healthcare encounters faster to process. The person doing the masking absorbs the cost while the environment receives the convenience. That is why rebuilding self-trust cannot simply mean telling autistic people to believe themselves harder. We need environments where disagreement does not automatically become pathology, where delayed processing is understood, where written communication is accepted, where unusual affect does not become evidence against credibility, and where professionals know how coercive control can interact with disability, dependence and communication differences. I keep returning to that morning with my coffee because the change I noticed was surprisingly ordinary. My life had become quieter. I was spending less time trying to force my own observations into explanations that did not fit them. The difference is that somebody else’s certainty no longer automatically outranks what I saw, heard or understood. Sometimes safety requires translation, and sometimes safety requires noticing that you have been translating yourself so thoroughly that somebody else’s version of events has begun replacing your own. Live on Monday 12 October at 20:00 CEST: Autistic Masking, Gaslighting and Self-Trust Join me for 90 minutes exploring the ideas in this essay in greater depth, with time for questions. Your place includes The Autistic Masking and Self-Trust Workbook, an anonymous pre-session question form, the recording, captions and transcript, and a downloadable citation and resources sheet. Share this essay with the autistic person who keeps wondering whether they misunderstood, or send it to the social worker, psychologist, clinician or domestic abuse practitioner who needs to understand how masking can shape self-trust, disclosure and credibility. More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective These essays go deeper into the questions this piece opens. If you read one, start with the one that unsettles you most. Bio Lovette Jallow is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, and inclusion strategist working across Sweden, Europe, and the MENA region. She is the founder of Action for Humanity. Read more at lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com). Follow: LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow) · Instagram (https://instagram.com/lovettejallow) · YouTube (https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette) Who is Lovette Jallow? Lovette Jallow is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, and inclusion strategist working across Sweden, Europe, and the MENA region. She is the founder of Action for Humanity. Read more at lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/). Stay Connected ➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments. 🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/)🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow (https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow)🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow (https://instagram.com/lovettejallow)🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette (https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette)🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow (https://twitter.com/lovettejallow)🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social (https://bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social) This is a public episode. 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3. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Why Black Women Don’t Need White Women’s Allyship

   I do not in my work teach Black women to seek allies, and I am not waiting for white women to decide whether my life belongs inside their feminism. Allyship as a label tells me very little; the choices people make when solidarity costs them access, comfort, status or belonging tell me far more. This essay examines why intersectional and Global Majority people should stop seeking allyship from those closer to power, and start paying attention to whose liberation is materially tied to ours. A recent conversation about white access to a closed Black spiritual tradition made the pattern clear: a boundary existed, whiteness encountered it, and an exception quickly appeared. The same mechanism runs through white feminism, institutions and political coalition, solidarity ends the moment the struggle moves beyond the one identity we happen to share Why White Women’s Allyship Fails Black Women Black women do not need solidarity from white women whose feminism ends where race, disability, class and accountability begin. A white woman recently explained that some white people may have legitimate access to closed Black diasporic spiritual traditions because they were initiated in previous lives. The claim treated reincarnation as an authority that could override living people, lineages and communities. A person with no present-life initiation that could be traced, no elder prepared to confirm her standing and no community relationship through which her responsibilities could be examined had found a credential that depended entirely on her own account of herself. I have encountered versions of this argument more times than I can count from white people who tell me they were Black, Indigenous or Asian in a previous life. What fascinates me is the precision of the inheritance: reincarnation preserves access, initiation, spiritual authority and the memory of having belonged somewhere, while every obligation attached to that belonging appears to have been misplaced between lives. White people who remain remarkably uncertain about the racial position they occupy in this life can become extraordinarily certain that they were Black, Indigenous, Asian, Egyptian, Yoruba, a priestess, a medicine woman or somebody spiritually important in a previous one. If you genuinely believe you once belonged to a Black spiritual tradition, that belief should produce responsibilities toward the living people carrying it now. It should strengthen your respect for their boundaries, deepen your political understanding of what enslavement, colonialism, extraction and religious suppression did to their practices, and make you less willing to place your individual desire above communal authority. Instead, the former life is summoned as permission. The claimant remembers the deity and forgets the people. Past-life claims do not confer present-life access. Whatever somebody believes about reincarnation, she is living inside the racial and political arrangements of this life, receiving the social meaning attached to her present body and carrying the responsibilities created by her present position. A supposed Black identity in another incarnation does not suspend present whiteness, and a spiritual feeling cannot consent on behalf of the living community whose boundary is being challenged. The exchange interested me because the mechanism extends far beyond spirituality. A Black community establishes a boundary that exists independently of white desire. A white person encounters it and begins producing an explanation for why the boundary may be legitimate in principle but should contain an exception for her. The language may come from spirituality, feminism, academia, wellness, activism or friendship, but the expectation remains recognisable: another community may possess authority until that authority limits white access. This is where my argument about allyship begins. Black women are routinely told that white women are our natural political partners because we all experience misogyny, even when those women cannot recognise the racial power they exercise, follow an analysis beyond their own injury or accept a boundary without looking for the loophole that restores them to the centre. I am expected to understand that as solidarity. I do not. Why White People Turn Spiritual Belief Into Access? I was raised with an understanding of spiritual life in which access came with protocol, preparation, protection, initiation and responsibility. Feeling drawn to a practice did not make somebody ready for it, and intensity of belief did not place a person above those entrusted with guarding it. The gate was part of the tradition because the gate helped determine whether somebody understood what entry required. This principle does not disappear among Black people. Blackness does not grant me automatic access to every Black diasporic ceremony, lineage or spiritual office. Ethnicity matters. Community recognition matters. Initiation, invitation and responsibility matter. I would not approach an Indigenous community, announce that I belonged to them in a former life and expect that unverifiable claim to outrank the authority of the people alive in front of me. My interest, respect or sense of affinity would not make their refusal less complete. I remember a white Swedish woman entering a Fulani spiritual ceremony in The Gambia without the preparation, protection, initiation or invitation that I had been taught such participation required. What followed frightened me, but I will not turn a spiritually serious memory into spectacle in order to persuade people who already believe every boundary must justify itself before they respect it. What stayed with me was the danger of treating access as a personal adventure when everybody around you understands it as a relationship carrying communal obligations. That memory also taught me why contemporary contempt for “gatekeeping” is politically shallow. A gate can preserve knowledge, protect participants, establish responsibility and prevent a sacred practice from being reduced to material for somebody else’s self-discovery. Communities that kept traditions alive through enslavement, colonial occupation, forced conversion and attempted erasure may have reasons for controlling access that exceed the feelings of the person standing outside. Their survival is evidence that stewardship mattered. The past-life credential is especially useful because nobody can audit it. There is no living elder who can confirm the initiation, no lineage that can examine the claimant’s conduct and no community relationship through which authority and responsibility can be tested. The person making the claim becomes the witness, archive and credentialing body at once. Ambiguity grants her a form of self-authorisation that a living tradition might refuse. The problem is also internal. Black people who invite white people and override inherited protocols to make whiteness comfortable deserve scrutiny, particularly where granting white access brings social approval, money or the status of being considered more reasonable than the community maintaining the boundary. A Black intermediary cannot make every contested act harmless merely by participating in it. Proximity to a gate does not automatically settle whether opening it preserves the people behind it or rewards the person who enjoys being praised for letting others through. I can respect a tradition, study its history, defend its custodians and recognise points of connection without turning affinity into ownership. The inability to do this reveals a miscalculated main-character syndrome in which someone arrives after generations of people have carried knowledge and survival, then assumes that confidence should place her above them. When correction arrives, she lowers the standard rather than raising her understanding, leaving everybody else to accommodate the delusion, soothe the sensitivity and pretend the hierarchy she invented makes sense. Within the teachings I grew up around, incarnation carries responsibility. The position a person inhabits now contains something to understand, protect, repair or accomplish. If someone is preoccupied with the status she supposedly held in another life while refusing the lessons attached to her present one, perhaps reincarnation keeps returning the homework. At this rate, some people may come back as dung beetles and still insist they were Yoruba priestesses before breakfast. Humour aside, the political question remains: if whiteness has given you access to doors other people cannot open, why are you consumed by the few doors deliberately closed to you instead of examining what your existing access requires you to do for everyone else? Why White Women Are Not Natural Allies to Black Women I have never understood why white women are routinely positioned as the natural allies of Black women, Indigenous women, racialised women, migrant women, Black trans women and everybody else expected to gather beneath the enormous political umbrella called “women.” No demographic is another demographic’s natural ally. Shared oppression may create common interests, but it cannot produce political solidarity on its own because experiencing harm through one structure does not automatically teach somebody to recognise the structures from which she benefits. Women can experience misogyny and reproduce racism. Black people can internalise anti-Blackness. Disabled people can reproduce ableism, and queer people can reproduce transphobia. These realities do not cancel anyone’s experience of oppression. They show that identity cannot do the political work of analysis, accountability and choice. A person may understand intimately what it means to be harmed and remain committed to the hierarchy that grants her relative power over somebody else. White women occupy a particularly revealing position because they can be subordinated through patriarchy while receiving racial advantage through white supremacy. A white woman may recognise immediately that a male colleague dismissing her expertise belongs to a wider pattern of misogyny, then individualise the same workplace’s treatment of a Black woman by asking whether her communication style contributed to the problem. Her capacity to recognise structure has not vanished. It has reached the edge of the experience she considers politically legible. This is why declarations of allyship tell me so little. “I am an ally” is autobiographical information about how somebody wants to understand herself. It says nothing about whether the people she claims to support trust her, whether she accepts their authority when it limits her behaviour, or what she chooses when solidarity threatens her money, reputation, access or standing among other white people. I am more interested in whether she challenges another white woman when no Black person is present, defends a Black colleague when doing so changes how the institution sees her, and recognises transphobia when the person expressing it calls herself a feminist. I pay attention to what happens when a Black woman says no, identifies racism or refuses to provide reassurance after causing discomfort. People reveal their alliances when power offers them something in exchange for abandoning somebody else. There are white women whose political conduct I trust. That trust was built through what they repeatedly chose and support, including the choices nobody applauded, rather than through the language they used to describe themselves. Their existence does not oblige me to soften a structural argument about white womanhood, any more than one ethical man invalidates an analysis of patriarchy. It simply confirms that racial position influences what a person is encouraged to see without determining what she is capable of choosing. Now please remember dear reader that I do not care whether a white reader experiences this analysis as insufficiently reassuring. A reader determined to mistake structural criticism for biological condemnation will do so regardless of how many paragraphs I sacrifice to managing her feelings. Precision still matters to me, but precision is not appeasement. My claim is that white womanhood does not produce automatic alliance, that self-description cannot establish political trust, and that Black women are not responsible for manufacturing the moral courage of people who expect recognition for standing beside us. Why Shared Womanhood Cannot Explain Black Women’s Lives How Far Can Shared Womanhood Carry Us? I understand what it means to stand shoulder to shoulder with white women in a fight, and I also know how quickly shared womanhood reaches its limit when the violence acting on me cannot be explained through gender alone. I do not become a woman on Monday, Black on Tuesday, disabled on Wednesday and queer when the political conversation finds that identity convenient. These realities occupy the same body, and the structures acting upon that body do not politely take turns. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality examined how single-axis frameworks could make Black women disappear by treating white women as representative of gender discrimination and Black men as representative of racial discrimination. The problem was never that Black women had accumulated too many separate identities for law and politics to process. The frameworks were inadequate because they could not recognise how racism and sexism shaped one another in the lives of people experiencing both. Shared womanhood can create a meeting place, but it cannot contain the entirety of our political lives. Race, disability, class, sexuality, transness, religion, body size, migration and citizenship shape whose womanhood is recognised, protected, doubted, sexualised, punished or considered legitimate. A coalition organised around the experience of its least intersectional members will repeatedly abandon everybody whose life requires a wider analysis. I often think about hierarchy as a Hydra. Misogyny, racism, transphobia, ableism, class exploitation, fatphobia, homophobia and colonialism carry different histories and produce different consequences, but they frequently feed the same organism. A movement can become highly articulate about the head biting its own members while protecting the body that allows the others to keep growing. A feminism that confronts misogyny while tolerating racism cuts one head and celebrates while the Hydra remains alive. An antiracist movement that reproduces misogyny does the same, as does a disability movement that treats whiteness as neutral or a queer movement that ignores race and class. People may spend decades fighting the injury that reaches them while preserving the arrangement that directs other forms of violence elsewhere. That is why shared oppression and shared liberation are not interchangeable. The Hydra matters because intersectional politics asks us to understand the relationship between the heads and the body. Racism changes how misogyny operates. Disability changes access to employment, safety and medical credibility. Immigration status can determine whether reporting abuse appears survivable, while class determines whether somebody can leave. A Black trans woman does not stop being trans while experiencing racism, and a disabled migrant woman cannot schedule each part of her oppression into separate appointments so that every movement can address only the category it understands. The body arrives whole. Our politics must become capable of meeting people that way. The pink pussyhat associated with the 2017 Women’s March offered a visible example of how quickly a presumed universal woman is built around a particular relationship to sex, anatomy and white cisgender womanhood. The criticism was never merely about a knitted hat. It concerned what happens when a movement chooses a symbol based on the body its centre recognises most easily and then treats everybody excluded by that symbol as an additional consideration. Black women, trans women, disabled women, Muslim women, migrant women and working-class women receive adjectives while white womanhood remains simply “womanhood.” That is how the centre travels into a movement without announcing itself. It enters through whose language becomes common language, whose fear changes the agenda, whose anger represents women’s anger and whose advancement is reported as progress for women generally. A room may contain many kinds of bodies while continuing to organise knowledge, urgency and participation around one of them. Representation changes the invitation; it does not necessarily alter the architecture. When people outside that centre ask for structural change, they are accused of creating division by introducing race, transness or disability into what was supposedly a unified women’s issue. The issue was already complex. Some participants were protected from having to notice. White feminism calls that protection universality and then treats everybody else’s reality as a complication. The political question for any liberation movement is whether it intends to dismantle hierarchy or negotiate a more favourable position for some of its members within it. Liberation cannot be achieved by cutting off the one head of the Hydra that happens to be biting you while preserving the body for use against everybody else. Why Black Feminist Analysis Matters to White Women Why Do the Margins Understand the Centre? One of hierarchy’s most reliable arrangements is that people furthest from its centre must understand those closest to it far better than the reverse. If somebody has institutional power over you, misunderstanding that person can carry consequences. You learn the employer, teacher, doctor, police officer, immigration official, social worker and white colleague. You learn the neurotypical and able-bodied expectations built into the room, the form of femininity considered respectable rather than threatening, the tone that will be rewarded and the degree of clarity that will be reclassified as aggression. People protected by the centre rarely need equivalent literacy about everybody else. They can know very little about Black women and still supervise us, misunderstand disabled people while assessing our capacity, or remain ignorant of trans lives while writing policy that determines access to care. Ignorance becomes easier to preserve when your survival does not depend on understanding those over whom you exercise power. Patricia Hill Collins described the “outsider within” as a position from which Black women could observe institutions closely while remaining excluded from their presumed centre, producing a particular form of critical knowledge. I recognise that position. I have spent much of my life learning how systems understand themselves while simultaneously experiencing how those systems understand me. I have needed to know how whiteness reads Blackness, how neurotypical institutions interpret autistic communication and how able-bodied structures construct disability. The people who benefit from those norms have rarely needed equivalent knowledge of me. Instead of gathering new information about the person in front of them, they reach for stereotypes: Black women as angry, aggressive, difficult, intimidating, many of them inherited from white pseudoscience. It is intellectual laziness, which is why I find the tactics of white supremacy as boring as abusive tactics. Once you understand the pattern, the behaviour becomes painfully predictable. This asymmetry matters when coalitions pretend everybody has arrived carrying the same political information. Some of us have spent our lives translating because there were consequences for getting the translation wrong. Others have mistaken the absence of those consequences for objectivity and experienced their own position as the unmarked human perspective from which everybody else acquires race, gender, culture, disability, an accent or an agenda. The centre protects itself by remaining invisible to the people occupying it. Naming somebody as white, cisgender, heterosexual or able-bodied can therefore feel accusatory because the adjective reveals that the supposedly universal person had a position all along. She was never standing outside the system neutrally observing everybody else. Her location shaped what she could easily see, what she was permitted to ignore and how institutions responded to her when she was wrong. Black women are treated as applicants for white allyship even though many of us have had to develop the wider political literacy that white women need in order to understand systems harming them too. Black feminist traditions developed because existing racial and gender politics could not adequately explain Black women’s lives. The analysis had to travel across institutions and hold several structures in view at once because our lives already did. This knowledge does not make every Black woman politically infallible, and internalised anti-Blackness makes that impossible to claim. It does mean that intellectual traditions developed at the crossroads should not be treated as requests for inclusion in a less complete white feminist framework. Black women were not waiting beneath white women for somebody to lift us into political relevance. Many were studying the structure while the people closer to its centre were being trained to identify with it. This is why the usual question about how white women can become allies to Black women has always felt incomplete. It assumes Black women are waiting to be assisted and white women are deciding whether to offer help. A more useful question asks why white women so often fail to seek meaningful coalition with Black women whose intersectional analysis can explain forms of power that also constrain white women, even as racial hierarchy gives those white women a comparatively favourable position. Coalition does not require Black women to become political caretakers for white women. It requires white women to reconsider whom they have been taught to recognise as knowledgeable, including whether proximity to institutional power has been confused with understanding it. The people who survive several rooms often know more about the building than the people who have never been required to find the exits. More than 9,000 people subscribe to this publication. Fewer than 140 pay for the labour that produces it. I have written throughout this essay about the difference between admiring Black women’s knowledge and materially supporting the people who create it. That distinction applies here too. I keep much of this work freely available because access matters to me. Its continued availability depends on readers who can pay choosing to support the research, time and political labour behind it. If you are one of them, upgrade today More than 9,000 people now receive this publication, and fewer than 140 sustain it through paid subscriptions. Paid readers make it possible for me to research and publish this work independently while keeping important essays accessible to people who cannot pay. If that is something you want to help sustain, please consider upgrading today. Why Black Women Should Not Have to Train Their Allies I do not teach people how to be allies because the framing already positions the person experiencing harm as responsible for developing the political literacy of the person who wants recognition for opposing it. I can teach history, analyse power and explain how racism, ableism, misogyny, colonialism and class reproduce themselves through institutions. I will not manufacture another adult’s moral courage. If I have to identify the structure, explain why it matters, locate you inside it, demonstrate the harm, manage your defensiveness, provide the correct response and monitor whether you continue once I leave the room, I am already carrying most of the alliance. Political education has value. Permanent dependency on the people you claim to support turns their liberation into your supervised learning exercise. Imagine we are travelling together beneath the same sky. I can see that it is blue and understand how the weather developing above us will affect where we are going. You insist that the sky is yellow, or perhaps only blue on Mondays according to a rule you invented after we set out. The journey stops because I must persuade you to look, explain colour, provide evidence that the sky exists and reassure you that being wrong does not make you irredeemable. After all of that, I am expected to thank you for becoming willing to acknowledge what was above us the entire time. At what point are we walking together? This is how conversations about oppression are redirected into performances of intention. “I did not mean it that way,” “I am a good person,” “I support Black women” and “I have trans friends” tell me how somebody understands herself. They do not establish what happened or what another person experienced because of her behaviour. Systems reproduce themselves through habits, assumptions, institutional rewards and differential credibility without requiring anybody to wake up and consciously announce a commitment to white supremacy. A person invested in proving her goodness may become incapable of examining what she actually did because correction threatens the identity she has built around being safe, progressive or kind. The original harm is displaced by her distress at being associated with it, and the person she harmed must either abandon the issue or build a legal case for her own experience while reassuring the accused that one act has not permanently defined her character. Human beings absorb racist, ableist, transphobic, misogynistic and classed ideas from the environments that form us. We misunderstand people, reproduce patterns and cause harm without becoming irredeemable. Accountability becomes possible when correction stops functioning as an existential threat to identity and begins functioning as information about behaviour, consequence and what must change. I do not need somebody else’s exact experience before I can recognise her humanity or understand that the power acting upon her matters. I can oppose transphobia without being trans, recognise children’s vulnerability without being a child and understand ableism without sharing every disability. Identical experience is unnecessary. Solidarity requires enough cognitive flexibility to accept that my life is not the measurement against which everybody else’s reality becomes credible. When white women insist that Black people must repeatedly explain racism before they can oppose it, they are admitting that another person’s reality becomes politically legible only after the affected person has performed sufficient labour. I refuse that arrangement. I will share knowledge with people capable of doing something with it, but I will not spend my life persuading another adult that people outside her own experience are fully human. Allyship cannot be self-certified because alliance requires another person. I would rather hear from the people somebody claims to support, including whether they trust her when the room changes and whether they have seen what she does when something is at stake. Vocabulary may reveal what a person has read. Choice reveals what she is prepared to protect. What Is White Feminism Costing White Women? Discussions of white supremacy correctly examine the material, institutional and psychological advantages white people receive from racial hierarchy. The violence required to create and preserve those advantages is real, and the person dominated by a hierarchy bears harms that cannot be equated with the costs experienced by someone receiving relative benefit from it. A serious analysis does not need false equivalence in order to ask what the arrangement demands from the people positioned closer to its centre. Whiteness can offer white women comparative racial credibility and a greater likelihood of being treated as individuals before being treated as a racial category. It allows white womanhood to remain “womanhood” while somebody else becomes a Black woman, an immigrant mother, a Muslim professional or demographic information. The comfort of that position comes partly from not having to experience it as a position at all. Yet whiteness does not abolish misogyny, prevent sexual violence, guarantee bodily autonomy, end economic exploitation or make patriarchy safe for white women. It offers relative racial position inside structures that continue to subordinate them through other means. Maintaining that position may require refusing coalition with people who understand several parts of the hierarchy at once, including the parts white women experience as gendered harm. White supremacy teaches people to look upward for legitimacy, identify with those holding greater power and measure safety through distance from those positioned below. Relative proximity becomes confused with power itself, and the arrangement is defended because losing one’s place inside the hierarchy feels more threatening than asking why freedom remains conditional within it. I come from cultural traditions that make me suspicious of vertical power. Any structure requiring somebody to remain beneath you in order for you to experience yourself as elevated has already damaged the possibility of reciprocal human relationship. People at the bottom are made disposable while people at the top become entitled to that disposability, reducing both to positions even though the material violence distributed between them remains profoundly unequal. This is also why I personally hate being placed on a pedestal. A pedestal appears flattering from a distance, but elevation can remove humanity as effectively as degradation. People standing below do not have to know you properly. They can admire, project, use and assign meaning to you, then punish you when ordinary contradiction interrupts the figure they created. Being elevated into a symbol can become another way of being denied relationship. White supremacy offers white women a comparable form of relative elevation while discouraging them from examining what the pedestal is attached to. The cost can include political imagination, the ability to tolerate being decentered, the willingness to learn from somebody the hierarchy instructed them to underestimate and the capacity to recognise authority that does not resemble the authority they were taught to trust. Most importantly, it can cost coalition. I am not asking this question because I am concerned with rescuing white women from the bargain they continue to make. They are responsible for examining it themselves. I am asking because Black women are repeatedly positioned as dependent on white women’s political goodwill even when white women’s investment in relative racial status prevents them from building the coalition they also need. Black women have spent generations explaining why feminism must account for race, why antiracist movements must account for gender, why disability politics cannot treat whiteness as neutral and why queer liberation cannot organise itself around a body imagined without race, class or disability. We have been required to prove our relevance to frameworks already incomplete without us. I am no longer interested in auditioning for a supporting role in somebody else’s inadequate politics. Why Black Women Do Not Need White Women’s Solidarity The woman claiming initiation in another life believed she needed a sufficiently spiritual reason to enter a closed Black tradition. She had already received the relevant information from living people with a relationship to that tradition: the boundary existed. Its authority did not weaken because she found it disappointing, and her desire to understand herself through the tradition did not create a duty for anybody else to admit her. The closed door was part of the education. It offered an opportunity to encounter something sacred without possessing it, to respect authority without becoming the authority and to understand that another community’s autonomy does not become oppression merely because it prevents your participation. A person capable of coalition must be able to approach a boundary without making her feelings the measure of whether the boundary is legitimate. That choice appears far beyond spiritual spaces. It appears when a Black colleague identifies racism, when a trans woman describes exclusion inside a feminist movement, when a disabled person explains that an event was designed around able-bodied participation, and when an opportunity benefits a white woman because somebody else was overlooked. Each situation reveals whether she can receive information without reorganising the story around her innocence and whether she will relinquish an advantage that her politics claims to oppose. I have become less interested in who calls herself an ally because power already provides the test. I watch what happens at the boundary, after correction and when solidarity becomes inconvenient. I watch what somebody protects when preserving her position requires abandoning another person. Her choices tell me where the alliance exists. Keep Your Allyship Black women do not need to wait at the door of white feminism while white women decide whether our lives resemble theirs closely enough to deserve solidarity. We bring intellectual, cultural and political traditions capable of explaining forms of power that single-axis feminism repeatedly misses. We bring knowledge formed through surviving institutions that required us to understand several systems at once. We bring coalitions, communities, lineages and relationships that do not begin with the assumption that white women are the natural centre from which everybody else must request recognition. White women are free to study that knowledge, approach it with humility and demonstrate through their conduct what they have understood. They can challenge one another, surrender unfair advantage, accept correction, respect boundaries and build political relationships in which they are neither saviours nor the people being saved. None of this requires Black women to remain permanently available as teachers, regulators, moral witnesses or proof of somebody else’s goodness. I know what I bring to any coalition, which is why I refuse to audition for one. If your feminism loses coherence when race enters the room, if your solidarity depends on being comfortable, and if supporting you requires Black women to carry your education alongside our own survival, keep your allyship. The door is not waiting for a better argument. It is closed, and we have work to do on the other side. If this essay gave you language for something you have witnessed but struggled to name, share it with the people who need to enter this conversation. I chose Harmonia Rosales’s work for this essay because she reimagines familiar religious and mythological imagery through Black women’s bodies, histories and power. Her paintings create a visual language for questioning who is represented as sacred, authoritative and central, questions that run through this essay. Harmonia Rosales’s work (https://www.harmoniarosales.art/). More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective These essays go deeper into the questions this piece opens. If you read one, start with the one that unsettles you most. Bio Lovette Jallow is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, and inclusion strategist working across Sweden, Europe, and the MENA region. She is the founder of Action for Humanity. Read more at lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com). Follow: LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow) · Instagram (https://instagram.com/lovettejallow) · YouTube (https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette) Who is Lovette Jallow? Lovette Jallow is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, and inclusion strategist working across Sweden, Europe, and the MENA region. She is the founder of Action for Humanity. Read more at lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/). Stay Connected ➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments. 🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com (https://lovettejallow.com/)🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow (https://linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow)🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow (https://instagram.com/lovettejallow)🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette (https://youtube.com/@jallowlovette)🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow (https://twitter.com/lovettejallow)🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social (https://bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe (https://lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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