TPP 251: Multiracial Autistic Neurodiversity Rights Advocate Ashia Ray on Raising Luminaries and "Smashing the Kyriarchy"
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
39 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 13 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Who is Ashia Ray and what is the Raising Luminaries movement?
You know, growing up multiracial and at the intersection of a bunch of identities that make it kind of difficult to navigate the world. I've always felt strongly that we should build a better society that doesn't just drop people off a cliff. So how do we need to get there? What do I have at my disposal?
Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber. This week, I'm talking with Asia Ray, a neurodiversity rights activist and the founder of the Raising Luminaries Movement and Books for Littles website. Through these combined endeavors, Asia curates lists of engaging children's picture books for parents, teachers, and caregivers to discuss hard topics with kids and aims to empower the next generation of kind and courageous leaders. As an autistic, multiracial person, as well as the parent of both neurodivergent and neurotypical children, Aja's perspective is invaluable and powerful.
I believe that open, vulnerable, and frank discussions can change the conversation around neurodivergence and challenge the cultural power structures that exist. In our conversation, we tackle many hard topics, including the importance of questioning our own biases and assumptions, what it truly means to lift up and support marginalized and targeted members of our communities, why Asia believes some language surrounding neurodivergence, including the phrase I use differently wired, is problematic, and what is the hierarchy and why it needs to be smashed. I appreciate Asia's perspective and the way she is boldly moving forward to shift paradigms. I hope you find our conversation as thought-provoking as I did.
Well, hello, Asia. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, I'm really excited to learn more about your work and to share your work with my community because I feel like I get requests all the time for resources to have really important conversations with our kids. And when I discovered Books for Littles and the work you're doing, I was thrilled. And so I'm really happy that you're joining me today. So I would love if you could just take a few minutes and just introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to be doing this work that you're doing.
Sure. So I run the organization Raising Luminaries, most of which is using children's books as a tool to start talking about difficult conversations with your children, younger children, like zero to eight, because I find that parents get a about talking about topics like race, death, sexuality. And growing up, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, which was very like, don't talk about things kind of,
don't
talk about things kind of time. And we also have parents who have been talking about these things, but they can't talk about them outside of their own families. So making these conversations easier by just, you know, you get the book, you open the book, you start reading this book, and then that naturally kind of flows into a conversation. particularly with neurodivergent kids, because a lot of parents who are neurotypical want to like have like a face to face conversation where they're like, this is how we have conversations. And by kind of doing it's more of like parallel play, you're reading the story together, there's no expectation, no performance when you're reading a story with a child. So you can kind of read these books, use declarative language, like I noticed that this person is being picked on because of the color of their skin.
And it makes it a lot easier, particularly for parents who have never spoken about race, or these kinds of more taboo topics, I guess, in some circles. The other things that we do are the Student Ignition Society, which is creating resources for caregivers and educators to talk about these topics beyond books. We have like toolkits about immigration solidarity, Indigenous Peoples Day, that kind of thing.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Ashia Ray and what is the Raising Luminaries movement?
0:00–5:58
2
How can picture books be used to start tough conversations with young children?
5:58–12:12
3
Why does Ashia critique the term “differently wired” and what language does she recommend?
12:12–17:30
4
What is the “hierarchy” concept and how does smashing it relate to neurodiversity activism?
17:30–22:19
5
How does anti‑bias, anti‑oppression work shape kind and courageous children?
22:19–26:20
6
What resources does Ashia provide for multiply‑marginalized autistic voices?
26:20–30:38
7
Why is leaning into discomfort important for parents and activists?
30:38–35:01
8
What are Ashia’s future plans for Raising Luminaries and how can listeners support her work?
35:01–39:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids