In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a Black woman with ADHD. I’ve been putting off talking about this, because the moment you mention race, some people get super sensitive, but I felt that, in honor of Black history month, I’d share a little bit about my experience. About how I think it differs from the White experience, about where I think they intersect, and about how I think we can do a bit better for everyone. As always, you can watch me talk about here, or you can listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts.
First, a bit of background
I am actually a mixed kid, from a Puerto Rican and Cuban father and a Black mom. That said, I’m brown and I grew up in a mostly-white area in the United States, so except for when I hung around my Latino family, I’ve always been Black.
I didn’t know I had ADHD; I’ve mentioned before that this didn’t come to light until 2021. I did, though, always know that I was different. And I’ve talked about how I was different mentally. I have not, however, talked about how it was always also made obvious to me that I was different physically. We’ll get into that in a second.
Just understand that, as you read this, I was financially privileged: I grew up in the suburbs, I went to good schools and was later able to be homeschooled by my stay-at-home mother. I was a gifted and talented kid and had no real learning disabilities to speak of. So this is just one of the experiences you’ll hear. Black people are not a monolith.
Anyway.
Rejection Sensitivity ran rampant
People hate hearing that racism still exists, and so I’m sure that many out there will insist that I felt rejected for other reasons. And, to be sure, I had a slew: I was tiny for my age my middle school; my feelings were hurt easily; I wore glasses that were almost the size of my face; I was clingy and preferred writing stories to hanging out with other kids. I was, to put it bluntly, shark bait. That, in itself, isn’t too different for most ADHD kids.
But oh, when you’re rejected by society, too, in multiple little ways, how that feeling escalates.
It could be felt just going to the store with my white friends to look for hair products. They’d wander down the aisles, gawking at the many, many options they had to choose from. They’d complain about which of the five types of conditioners they should try, and which shampoo was most likely to make their hair silky smooth. I, on the other hand, would have to split off from them to look at the “Ethnic Section,” a one-column setup complete with two different types of boxed texturizer, one haircare line, and a couple mismatched bottles of shampoo and conditioner that I could possibly choose from.
When I finally decided to get my hair chemically straightened, my friends and boyfriends’ eyes would light up at how much “better” I looked.
When I spoke at the same level as the white girls in my class, I was “loud.”
If a group of us were doing something we shouldn’t, nine times out of ten, I was the one who grabbed the teacher’s attention and wound up in trouble. Because, see, I stuck out, but not in a good way.
Even now, I’ve had people say they were “surprised” to see me with my white husband, been told that my natural hair makes me look “scary,” and have often had to tell people that my olive-skinned son is mine and that I’m not his nanny. A lot of minds have been trained to believe that, if I’m not surrounded by people who look like me, then I do not belong there, and it’s been this way my entire life.
See, ADHDers are already generally struggling with feelings of being “weird,” or “different.” It’s only amplified when you’re weird or different just for being the person you were born to be.
People pleasing and masking, party of 2
I learned really quickly that people liked me more when I was “one of the good ones.”
By the way, that’s not an exaggerated term; someone actually told me once that they didn’t mind me because I was “one of the good ones,” and I “didn’t talk like the ignorant Black people.” And I, being an 11-year-old kid who really just wanted to be liked, took that as a compliment. I mean, it was meant as a compliment, but that was part of the problem. Not that I saw it that way, because that would involve looking too closely at things. And when you looked too closely at things, you didn’t get to have friends.
When you’re Black, speaking up gets you labeled all sorts of things that guarantee ostracization: Troublemaker, Sensitive, Whiny, and even Racist, which cracks me up because racism may be the only thing I’ve ever heard of where calling it out supposedly makes you guilty of that thing.
“My husband is beating me.”
“Why are you bringing that up and making people uncomfortable? Don’t be an abuser, Jennifer.”
And yet…I was very deeply ensconced in the undercover mission that is Growing Up Black in a White Area. I knew how to code switch, to speak one way when I was talking to my friends, and another when I was talking with other people of color, which wasn’t often. I was great at waving away things that were hugely fucked up, things that shouldn’t have been okay in the first place. Hell, when people threw out that n-word in my presence, I could nod like like the best of ‘em when people would turn to me to tell me that it really wasn’t that bad to use that word, because see, it meant someone who’s lazy and dirty, not just Black people.
And what I didn’t realize then, that I see now, is that I was really tired because I was working double time. I was masking my disgust and my loneliness and my frustration just as I was masking my wild imagination, or my need to talk fast, or my emotions. Maybe I couldn’t be the perfect color, but I could make people forget about it by being perfect in every other way.
In my situation, there was a little more of this, because I was Too Black for the white kids, and Too White for the black kids, so I was often having to work double time to ensure I didn’t say anything that would get me banished. Don’t snap at this friend for called AAVE ignorant, but also don’t you dare mention to this guy that you’re obsessed with Sugarcult. Tell the girl wearing the Confederate flag shirt that you’re “mixed, so not actually Black,” but also argue with your cousin about how you’re just as Black as anyone else.
When you have ADHD, you already feel like you can’t be yourself. When you’re Black and ADHD, it’s even easier to forget who that is.
You’re just lazy
Listen: the Black community is getting better at talking about mental health, but there’s still a lot to be desired there. To this day, here, in the-year-of-our-lord-2024, I still run into folks who’ll insist that their son or daughter or whoever is just “strangely lazy” or “weird” or “always in their head.”
“I mean…I thought I was lazy too for quite some time, and then I found out that I had ADHD.” I’ll offer gently.
“Everyone has ADHD.” They’ll counter. “Ain’t nothing wrong with him. He can focus on cartoons just fine. He just needs to try harder.”
And if you heard this and said “okay but people of all races say this?”
Sure. But in many communities, including the Black community, this is still said with a rather troubling amount of regularity.
And don’t get me wrong: it ain’t all us. Some of it is social or cultural, sure, but some of it is due to medical bias (studies show that doctors are still more responsive to white and English-speaking families than not, and are more likely to attribute behavioral issues to violent tendencies when the child is of Black or Latino heritage), and some of it is due to the fact that the US has a crazy discrepancy when it comes to the earnings of non-white families versus white families. And see…when you need money for ADHD medication, it suddenly seems a lot easier to label your kid lazy and leave it at that.
My mother and father were always a bit more progressive in this arena, but they weren’t immune to this one either. If grades fell, I wasn’t studying hard enough. If I sat and stared at my vacuum for 50 minutes rather than simply vacuuming the tiny square of carpet I’d been tasked with, I was being disobedient. And, yes, if things were forgotten or not done, I was lazy.
I’d suspected something was up with me, too, multiple times. But my parents are boomers who grew up during a time where mental illness or “behavioral disorders” like ADHD were seen as a sign that they’d failed. Plus, I was gifted so like…I couldn’t possibly have a problem child disease. And I was a girl. Girls don’t have ADHD.
So I went on being lazy, and flighty, and dramatic for many, many years.
Don’t white kids go through this?
I can’t speak to all that white ADHD kids go through, because I’m not white. I can absolutely promise you that those children do have their own fights to fight, because life can be a fucking trash heap sometimes, especially towards those who are different.
But.
What I can tell you is that Black ADHD kids hear different insults, are given different exclusions, and then those exclusions continue throughout their lives. A Black boy is often treated as violent, even when he isn’t, and then he grows into a man and is Ahmaud Arbery’d in the middle of the street because he “looked” dangerous. A Black girl’s complaints of bullying are disregarded, and then in adulthood, she’s struggling to get doctors to listen to her – be it because she’s a woman or because she’s Black or both, no one really knows. A number of Black kids learn that they can’t be taken seriously unless they mask their voices to sound “more white.” And these behaviors are so ingrained, so taught, that it’s just something they’ll come to expect, something they’ll hear every day.
Imagine that those damaging lessons you heard as a child – that you’re too loud, too lazy, too “weird” – continued forever. That you saw them on billboards, saw it in movies, heard it in everyday language, saw these opinions in the very history of the country you live in. AND you bring these things up sometimes, only to be gaslit and told that what you see doesn’t exist.
And then imagine that you’re trying to get better at focusing, emotional regulation, rejection sensitivity, and a host of other ADHD symptoms. Not the easiest thing, y’know?
Moving forward
I could keep going, but I won’t. Because what matters now is how we improve.
I’m not going to pretend that I have all the answers, but I know that there are things that can only make a positive difference.
Like, at its very base, checking those racial biases. A Black 7-year-old with ADHD is just as deserving of acknowledgement and support as anyone else. They’re not more violent, more rude, or more likely to fail, especially not with the right resources.
We also need to watch how we speak to ADHD kids of color. As it is, calling an ADHD kid lazy, weird, or stupid is fucking vile. I think we all can agree to that. But when you’re praising a Black ADHD kid for speaking softer when they don’t have to; when you’re reacting more harshly to them speaking up for themselves than you do other children; or when you enforce a Eurocentric image on them, you’re teaching them that literally nothing about them is acceptable. Their brain is weird, their skin is weird, and they either need to change or get out. No child deserves to feel that way.
I’m working pretty hard every day to undo some of the cycles that were started when I was a kid, but the things you “learn” about yourself as a Black person in the US are hard to unlearn. I still have to adjust how I think when I look at myself in the mirror every morning, have to stop wishing my eyes were gray or blue, or that I had long, flowing hair. I have to stop shaming myself for speaking with my regular voice, tell myself that I don’t necessarily sound “loud.” I have to keep reminding myself that I have just as much of a right to exist as anyone else, and that’s something that I think most of us can relate to.
It takes work. It all does. But the things that are most worth it always do. And if setting all people up to believe in themselves in best way–regardless of color, creed, size, or gender –isn’t “worth it” to you, then I don’t think I can help you.
Thanks for listening. That’s the first step.
If you’d like to see more of my writing, you can see that here. If you want to work together, you can check out your options and reach out to me here.
