Family Learns Adult Son Has Autism After He Anonymously Posts About Being Biracial

The tale, shared to the AITA (am I the a–hole) subreddit, started off seeming to be about the complexity of racial identity — “passing” to be more specific — but soon grew to include even more intricate conversations about neurodivergence and privacy.

Read on to see how this story slowly unraveled…

“I (25M) am biracial but pass for white. I have pale skin, B1 dirty blond hair, and overall, don’t look Black at all,” the original post began. “I’ve never spoken about being biracial because it never occurred to me that I need to. It’s not something I ever think about.”

“However, in the 9th grade, I made a Black friend. We’d always been very close, but I never talked about my background or anything because it, again, didn’t occur to me to,” OP (original poster) continued. “So she’d never been over to my house or anything.”

“She was back in town, so I invited her over to catch up,” he explained of a reunion years after high school. “She got along great with my family, but also took me aside and tell me she didn’t ‘see that coming.’ I asked her what she meant, and she said she didn’t know I was Black. I told her I didn’t really think to tell her in advance that I’m Black, and she said, ‘I mean, it’s kind of a weird thing to not tell your best friend.’ I told her that I just don’t tell people a lot of things in general, and she said she’d like if I opened up about myself more and that I could trust her. I said, once again, that I just didn’t think to tell anybody. She said goodbye to all of us, and I asked my family who was in the wrong. They all sided with her, and said that if I consider her my best friend, I need to tell her these things.”

“AITA? I’m an INTJ so I tend to not really talk about myself. I’m not ashamed to be Black,” OP concluded. “I just don’t see the point in talking about my genetics to random people.”

*Editor’s note: INTJ stands of Introversion (I), Intuition (N), Thinking (T), Judgment (J) in the Myers–Briggs personality test and is most often associated with careers in engineering, software development, analytics, and medicine.

Then came a series of updates to the post after OP was very active in the comments section.

The first edit: “My brother found this somehow and had this to say: ‘It doesn’t matter how AITA feels. They don’t know you like we do. You have a big problem with communication and if everybody in the real world thinks you’re in the wrong, it’s because you are. Reddit isn’t real life.'”

Edit 2: “Thank you everybody for your responses. Somebody asked if I have autism. I do, but it’s not something I particularly advertise. If my family asked if I had autism, I’d say yes. If my friend asked if I was Black, I’d say yes. I can understand her being surprised about my background since I have absolutely no Black features despite my DNA test saying I’m about 40% African with the rest being white and a smidge of indigenous.”

Edit 3: “My family has asked me to take down this post, and they say they’re upset that I didn’t tell them I have autism. However, I’m getting very insightful responses so I’ll be keeping this post up. I do agree with the vast majority of comments that I’m not particularly obligated to tell anybody anything about me no matter how close I feel to them. However, it’s not something I do on purpose. I just don’t think to tell people things sometimes.”

Edit 4: “I’ll be heading out now to catch up on a series I read. Thank you everybody for your judgements, aside from the weirdo who said I should call everybody the N word. I’m not sure why that pointless comment is still there.”

Meanwhile, others in the thread were curious if race was ever brought up in conversation with his childhood friend — with one person asking, “Did your friend ever mention her experiences as a Black woman?”

“She does mention her experiences as a Black woman a lot. She’s an anti-racism activist who has met with very influential people,” OP casually revealed.

“And within these talks, you never brought up your background?” another Redditor asked in reply.

“You’re talking to an autistic person who didn’t know to say, ‘I’m good, you?’ until he was maybe 20,” he said in response.

He further explained, elsewhere in the comments when some wondered how his parents did not know he was neurodivergent: “I was diagnosed on my own. They certainly have suspected it, but I always turned down testing because I never felt it mattered at the time.”