The Diagnostic Turn: Empire’s Bluewashing

neurodivergence as virtue, dissent as disorder, and performative guilt as control

In the 9th century, a man named Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī sat in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, writing a book that would alter the way we interact with reality. He called it كتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة—Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābala—The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. In it, he laid out الجبر (al-jabr), the process of restoring and balancing equations. This would later become what we know as algebra today.

His influence did not end with mathematics. His name, الخوارزمي (al-Khwārizmī), would be Latinized by European scholars into Algoritmi, from which we derive the word algorithm.¹

At the time, the Islamic world was the center of global knowledge. Arab, Persian, and African scholars preserved, synthesized, and expanded upon the mathematics of the Greeks and the Indians, developing the decimal system, spherical trigonometry, and medical advancements centuries ahead of Europe. Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba—these were cities of translation, innovation, and refinement.

Meanwhile, Europe was unraveling. The era that would later be self-described by Europeans as the Dark Ages was one of feudal isolation, religious superstition, intellectual stagnation. But knowledge does not remain in a vacuum. Ideas travel. Empires fall and rise again.

Then came the Crusades, and later, the Reconquista—wars that were not just about land, but about knowledge and translation, about what would be remembered and what would be erased. The West, encountering the intellectual legacy of the Arab world, did not merely borrow these ideas—it stole them, stripped them of origin, and claimed them as its own.

By the time of the Renaissance, the theft had been completed. Fibonacci introduced Arabic numerals as if they were his own discovery.² Copernicus built on the astronomical calculations of Islamic scholars but erased their names.³ Descartes wrote Cogito, ergo sum as if no one before him had ever asked what it meant to be.⁴ A sleight of hand. The very tools of what the West would call the Enlightenment were Islamic in origin, but their history had been rewritten.

This was no accident. The ongoing colonial project is an ideological mechanism that uses the same playbook on repeat. To frame itself as the seat of reason and civilization, Europe had to erase its sources. In its rewritten narrative, Greece led to Rome, Rome led to the Renaissance, and the Islamic Golden Age simply never happened. The same process that erased the Arab origins of mathematics would later erase African contributions to civilization, Indigenous knowledge systems, the labor of the colonized—all while presenting the West as the singular beacon of progress.

Colonialism has never ended; it has only shifted form. The very notion of post-colonialism suggests a clean break, as if history can be neatly divided into precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial phases. This framing is flawed—power does not operate in discrete epochs but through fluid, evolving processes. Structures become visible only when we name them, yet naming is precisely what power seeks to evade. The moment it is exposed, it loses the advantage of opacity. This is why tyrants have always sought to erase knowledge—because the unseen is far more potent than the named.

The Library of Alexandria didn’t just burn—it was erased, piece by piece, by those who could not tolerate a world where knowledge thrived beyond their control. The conquerors, drowned in their own superstition and envy, saw in Alexandria a rival: a beacon of learning where Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Persian scholars exchanged ideas centuries ahead of their time. Whether through neglect, conquest, or deliberate destruction, they ensured history would remember them as the torchbearers of civilization—when in fact, they were its greatest arsonists.

The Hitler Youth burned 'anti-German' books with fervor. The image captures not just destruction, but the ideological ecstasy behind it.

The algorithm is one iteration of control. Algorithms do not just calculate; they curate. It shapes. It predicts. It determines what you see, what you believe, and how you define yourself. Social media feeds, predictive policing, and financial markets do not function just as tools. They are engines of influence.

The levers of the algorithm are not open-source, and the governance is not democratic. It is a black box, controlled by those who have always controlled such things—by those who decide what will be remembered and what will be erased.

Like its historical counterpart, the modern algorithm operates under the illusion of neutrality. It presents itself as a reflection of reality when, in truth, it is a mechanism of power, reinforcing existing hierarchies and shaping the conditions of thought. It does not just track your interests—it manufactures them, curates them, and feeds them back to you in a hall of digital mirrors.

But, as history has always shown, not all vulnerabilities are created equal. Just as greenwashing reframes corporate negligence—oil companies inventing recycling to shift blame from industrial spillage to individual guilt—or pinkwashing weaponizes liberal ideals, painting the targets of settler colonialism as backward and despotic to obscure the violence of occupation, vulnerability itself is often a tool of power, selectively granted, strategically denied.

Among the identities shaped by this feedback loop, one of the latest iterations of corporate washing is emerging with a particular force: Autism.

Not autism as a neurological condition but autism as a cultural identity—an identity corporatized, commodified, and flattened into something palatable, something marketable.

This would fall under the umbrella of bluewashing: the rebranding of autism (as well as any other pathologization) as a safe harbor for moral evasion, a language of avoidance, and a preemptive excuse for disengagement. It is the transformation of a complex neurological reality into a badge of corporate virtue; an identity embraced when it is convenient and discarded when it is not.⁵

The same so-called Global North that once demonized neurodivergence as deviance now selectively rebrands it as innocence—when it serves the hegemony. Companies that once fired autistic employees for failing to meet arbitrary social expectations now parade their “neurodiversity hiring initiatives” while doing little to address workplace discrimination. Institutions that pathologized autistic traits as disorders now weaponize them as shields, turning any critique of privilege into “ableism.” Bluewashing allows corporations, elites, and even entire states to sidestep accountability by cloaking themselves in vulnerability. Because, as history has always shown, not all vulnerabilities are created equal.

Psychiatry does not arbitrate morality. It classifies, disciplines, and absorbs, policing the boundaries of legibility. The mental health industrial complex, shaped by corporate incentives and the architecture of control, does not heal—it manages. It decides whose suffering is acknowledged, who holds influence, who shall be influenced, who is inconvenient, and, ultimately, who is marked for elimination. The economy of pathology—who is granted rationality, who is marked as excessive, who is rendered disposable—structures not just psychiatric discourse but the entire governance of racial capitalism.

Systems of classification rely on a foundational hierarchy: whose deviations from the norm are reframed as innovation, whose disorder is softened into eccentricity, and whose existence is reduced to a problem to be solved. Some are placed at the center, those whose actions are judged by intent rather than consequence, whose missteps are framed as temporary departures from an otherwise coherent authority. Others function as intermediaries—granted a space of moral urgency, a sanctioned fragility that allows them to navigate power.

Beyond this perimeter, however, are those whose presence is made conditional. Some are valued only insofar as they can be contained, turned into spectacle or product, recognized just enough to be consumed but never enough to be fully understood. Others remain within the system yet are never central to it, positioned as competent but rarely authoritative, seen when needed, and otherwise set aside. Some exist at the threshold of visibility, assigned a role that is both hyper-present and structurally excluded—spoken about but rarely heard, seen, but not recognized as subjects with complexity.

Bluewashing, the corporatization of psychiatry, produces and maintains these divisions. It reinforces identity politics. It decides whose suffering is profitable, whose disorder can be turned into an aesthetic, and whose pathology must be controlled. Expanding diagnostic categories does not follow an arc of progress; it follows demand. Where compliance is necessary, disorder is named. Where harm is inconvenient, fragility is emphasized. Where power must be preserved, systems of care are repurposed into tools of governance.

This is why psychiatry has never been a moral authority—because it functions as the high priest of secular Christendom. Its history is marked not by steady improvement but by adaptation: treatments discarded not because they were wrong but because they were no longer useful, classifications redefined not because they were inaccurate but because they require stronger doses of domination upon its subjects. A system built to diagnose will always seek more inmates to contain. A system built to enforce normality white supremacy will always fear those who refuse to comply.

The Diagnostic Turn

The Diagnostic Turn⁶ is not about care, not about healing. It is about deciding who gets to be seen, who gets to be understood, and who gets erased. Those placed at the center will always be granted complexity; those on the margins will always be categorized in ways that foreclose their full participation. Some will be allowed their contradictions, their moments of deviation framed as brilliance. Others will find that deviation is itself a verdict, proof not of depth but of instability.

The Diagnostic Turn is psychiatry’s final function: to pathologize those who challenge power while leaving power itself untreated.

These hierarchies dictate how transgressions are framed.

When Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute on stage, the event was largely dismissed—his intentions, not his actions, were debated. He was humanized, afforded the ambiguity of irony, misunderstanding, or just not that deep. His position as an ingroup male meant that his perceived intelligence, power, and influence overrode any real consequences.

Contrast this artist Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, a diagnosed bipolar individual, an outgroup male, whose antisemitic remarks resulted in immediate financial and social exile. There was no ambiguity, no path to redemption—only an immediate collapse into forced hospitalization and economic punishment.

Both engaged in actions deemed politically and ethically unacceptable. But one was an error, an unfortunate lapse in judgment. The other was proof of pathology, a fundamental defect that must be excised from public life.

This dynamic is not new. Historically, the pathologization of the outgroup male was used as a tool of control. In the 19th century, enslaved Africans who attempted to escape captivity were diagnosed with drapetomania, a fabricated mental disorder coined by Samuel Cartwright. The diagnosis reframed the desire for freedom as an illness, suggesting that only through enslavement could the Black body exist in a state of “health.”

The same structure persists. Those who challenge the dominant order from within the ingroup can be awkward, eccentric, or even misunderstood geniuses. Those who challenge it from the outside are unstable, dangerous, and in need of discipline or exile.

This is where Bluewashing thrives. Autism, particularly when framed as “high-functioning” or linked to “genius,” allows certain privileged subjects to sidestep accountability while maintaining control. Neurodivergence, when attached to the ingroup male, is repackaged as innovation, not dysfunction. Social awkwardness becomes an endearing quirk, not a professional liability.

Meanwhile, neurodivergence with more distance from patriarchal whiteness remains a mark of deviance—biologically determined criminality, unfitness, a disorder to be managed rather than accommodated. This asymmetry is the essence of Bluewashing: a carefully curated vulnerability, a shield that only works when wielded by those already close to power.

The taxonomy of suffering is as racialized as every other dimension of power. An in-group person diagnosed with autism is afforded a different kind of empathy than a racialized, disabled Other navigating the same neurodivergence.

A young, abled, white person’s social awkwardness is endearing, an invitation to understanding. A racialized autistic person is a problem to be managed and a subject to be disciplined.

The neurodivergent racialized body is read not as vulnerable but as deviant—aggressive, unassimilable, incapable of being recuperated into the fantasy structures of white legibility.

The same process extends to queerness. The queerness of an ingroup is not the same as the queerness of an outgroup. A protected race can be neurodivergent and still maintain an approximation to whiteness, ableness, and the privilege of complexity.
An outgroup queer autistic person is not afforded the same buffer of interpretation—there is no comfortable language for their difference, no safe conceptual space in the polite discourse of inclusion.

The autistic body, when racialized, undergoes an entirely different calculus. The metrics of judgment shift, weighted by societal prejudices and blind spots. Some valences are deprioritized, others erased altogether. In Europe—particularly within so-called liberal circles—racism as a metric is not merely overlooked but actively repressed, disavowed, or foreclosed. This makes it far more difficult to articulate, let alone reconcile, the intersection of race and neurodivergence in any meaningful way.

The Manufacturing of Moral Authority: How Ingroup Women Become Gatekeepers of Changing Norms

At the apex of moral legibility sits the ingroup male, a figure given infinite ideological elasticity. He can be a transgressor, but only temporarily. He can make mistakes, but they are reframed as growth. His deviations from the norm are treated as eccentricities, even necessary disruptions, that move society forward rather than proof of deviance that must be punished.

The ingroup male is not just excused; he is mythologized. He embodies the Great Man Theory, in which innovation, rebellion, and even harm are forgiven because they are the cost of genius. The self-destructive artist, the unfiltered CEO, the volatile yet brilliant tech founder—his errors are mere bumps along a trajectory of greatness.

But ideological control cannot rest solely on this untouchable figure. The ingroup female, particularly in liberal-progressive spaces, emerges as the intermediary, the teacher, the figure of soft enforcement. She does not invent the rules; she interperts them. She enforces them.

Good Cop, Bad Cop: The Role of the Ingroup Female

The ingroup female functions as the moral middle manager, positioned between the elite ingroup male and the unstable outgroup male. She softens the blow of changing norms, repackaging them in a way that is digestible to the masses.

Take white feminism—a movement that consistently appropriates radical ideas initiated by outgroup women but filters them through a framework that maintains existing power structures. Intersectionality, first theorized by Black feminists, became a buzzword in corporate spaces, stripped of its critiques of capitalism and colonialism. The same pattern applies to LGBTQ+ activism, decolonization discourse, and even neurodivergence advocacy: what begins as an outgroup struggle is laundered through the ingroup female, who presents it as newly discovered wisdom.

This laundering allows the ingroup male to remain dominant while presenting progress as inevitable, as if change happens through a natural process rather than struggle. The ingroup female is given influence—not to dismantle power but to regulate its optics.

The Influencer Class: Ingroup Women as Thought Leaders of Manufactured Progress

Social media has amplified this function. The influencer sphere is where ingroup women thrive as new thought leaders, particularly in shaping narratives around “acceptable” progress. These figures do not challenge the fundamental power structures; they curate them.

• In tech spaces, women become the palatable face of AI ethics or “responsible innovation,” ensuring that conversations about algorithmic bias never implicate the foundational logic of capitalism itself.

• In DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) spaces, corporate feminism positions ingroup women as the ideal leaders of “progressive” initiatives, even though the struggles they platform originated in outgroup communities.

• In mental health advocacy, a wave of ingroup women influencers have rebranded anxiety, depression, and autism as quirky and relatable, while more severe forms of neurodivergence remain stigmatized.

This carefully curated “progress” acts as a cultural pressure valve. The illusion of social change is presented, but the ingroup male remains dominant, and the outgroup male remains dangerous.

Shifting Norms, Same Gatekeepers

The greatest irony is that outgroups often lead the way in cultural transformation, yet they are rarely credited for it. By the time a radical idea becomes mainstream, it has been reformulated, rebranded, and resold through ingroup voices.

The pattern is cyclical:

1. The outgroup introduces a disruptive idea (abolition, queer theory, intersectionality, climate justice, neurodiversity advocacy).

2. The outgroup is met with backlash, exile, or pathologization.

3. The ingroup female adopts a softened version of the idea, sanitizing its radical potential.

4. The ingroup male adopts the concept now that it has been made safe.

5. The idea is mainstreamed but stripped of its original intent.

This is how the rules keep changing while power stays the same.

Take Greta Thunberg. As a climate activist operating within a framework that posed no real threat to power—one focused on individual responsibility, corporate greenwashing, and the vague imperative to “listen to the science”—she was celebrated. She was the acceptable face of dissent, much like recycling: a symbolic gesture that pacifies urgency without forcing structural change.

But the moment she spoke on racial capitalism, the moment she addressed Palestine, she was no longer a prodigy but a problem. Institutions that once platformed her as the voice of the future suddenly lost interest. She was cast aside, not because she changed, but because she crossed the line from moral performance to structural critique.

And yet, it is only now that she has become dangerous. It is only now that she has matured into real power, because real power is not bestowed by institutions—it is revealed when they turn against you. The moment she became redundant in their eyes was the moment she became truly relevant.

The Algorithmic Function of Pathology

Much like the algorithm, psychiatric and social taxonomies do not merely reflect the world; they shape it. The same way a recommendation engine nudges a user toward predefined categories—wellness, fitness, productivity—the world of diagnostic labels sorts individuals into predetermined boxes. And, like a badly programmed neural network, these labels reinforce existing biases: Whiteness grants dimensionality to suffering, while Blackness or foreignness is flattened into pathology, danger, or disorder.

If we were to describe this process mathematically, we could introduce a pathologization function:

\( P(x) = \frac{\text{Deviation from Whiteness}}{\text{Proximity to Power}} ]\)

where a high deviation from whiteness increases the likelihood of being framed as deviant, while proximity to power determines whether one is granted nuance or simply erased. Those at the margins are most vulnerable to categorization, discipline, and control.

White Supremacy as a Lacanian Discourse: The Circulation of Desire

White supremacy does not function merely as ideology—it is a discourse in the Lacanian sense, a structuring principle that shapes subjectivity and organizes social desire. It operates as an invisible Real, a structuring absence, always present yet unspoken, constituting the implicit rules of legibility and power.

This discourse circulates desire in a way that ensures whiteness remains the site of coherence, of implicit authority, of the master signifier. The neurotic subject of whiteness exists in a constant state of desire for recognition, needing to reassert its place as the unseen norm. Meanwhile, racialized subjects become objects of jouissance—excess, spectacle, threat, fetish—depending on how they are positioned within the matrix of white desire.

We can observe the function of white desire, D(x) is the function of White Desire, which only exists through a dialectic of inclusion-exclusion:

\( D(x) = \frac{\text{Desire for Recognition}}{\text{Structural Othering}} \)

where the stability of white identity is predicated on the presence of an Other against which it is defined. The circulation of desire requires racialized bodies to serve as both the object of consumption (exoticized, appropriated, or commodified) and the site of repulsion (criminalized, pathologized, or erased).

Thus, white supremacy does not merely exclude racialized subjects—it requires them, both as threats to be managed and as sources of jouissance to be extracted. This is why racialized bodies are simultaneously hyper-visible (as spectacle, danger, labor) and structurally erased (from history, from full political belonging).

D(x) is the calculus of whiteness—the way it sustains itself through cycles of desire, extraction, and negation.

The Empire’s Masochistic Economy: From CIA Identity Politics to Anti-Racist Dinners

This economy of white supremacy does not merely persist through dominance—it thrives on its own critique. The illusion of dismantling the empire becomes another mechanism of its expansion. The CIA’s use of identity politics, corporate-backed anti-racist dinners, and self-flagellating liberal whiteness are not contradictions of empire; they are its latest functions.

The modern landscape of anti-racism is akin to the dominatrix-client relationship: a controlled environment in which pain is administered within safe, predictable limits. The white consumer remains central, even when occupying the position of masochist. Like a CEO who undergoes performative struggle sessions in a company-wide diversity training before returning to extract surplus value from underpaid workers, white self-critique is a ritual of absolution, ensuring that racial capitalism can continue unimpeded.

Thus, if we were to construct an economic model of racial capitalism, Rc​(x) represents the resilience and self-perpetuation of racial capitalism through performative gestures of white guilt:

\(R_c(x) = \frac{ {Performativity of White Guilt}}{ {Actual Redistribution of Power}}\)

where the higher the performative discourse of racial justice, the lower the likelihood of substantive systemic change. The empire is not being dismantled; it is extending itself through its own critique, absorbing the language of resistance into new markets and spectacles.

• The numerator (Performativity of White Guilt) refers to the highly visible rituals of self-critique—public apologies, corporate DEI initiatives, anti-racist reading lists, philanthropy from extractive billionaires, and other gestures that simulate justice without redistributing material power. White guilt is not an obstacle to empire; it is a fuel source that allows it to adapt and rebrand.

• The denominator (Actual Redistribution of Power) represents the substantive transfer of economic, political, and structural power—abolition of exploitative systems, reparations, land redistribution, or radical structural transformation. This denominator remains suppressed because actual change would threaten the foundations of empire.

Thus, Rc​(x) measures the degree to which racial capitalism maintains itself through spectacle rather than structural change. The higher the performative discourse of racial justice, the lower the likelihood that real power will shift.

The DSM of White Apathy: Diagnosing the Neurotypical Majority

If the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) functions to regulate and contain deviation from social norms, then we must imagine its inverse—a DSM that classifies the structural disorders embedded within normalcy itself. Here, we diagnose the pathologies that sustain racial capitalism, white supremacy, and liberal paralysis:

• Moral Cowardice Disorder (MCD) – A pervasive condition characterized by an aversion to confronting ethical wrongdoing, even when fully aware of its consequences. Symptoms include avoiding discussions of race and power by invoking civility, deflecting urgency as “too extreme,” and privileging personal comfort over systemic justice.

• Diffuse Responsibility Syndrome (DRS) – A cognitive malfunction where accountability is dispersed so broadly that no single actor ever feels responsible. Symptoms include statements such as “It’s just the system,” “We can only do so much,” and “It’s complicated,” all of which neutralize the possibility of meaningful intervention.

• Empathic Dysfunction Disorder (EDD) – A condition where individuals experience emotional detachment from systemic violence unless it directly affects them. Symptoms include the reduction of genocide to an abstract policy debate, treating structural oppression as an unfortunate reality rather than an urgent crisis, and performing outrage selectively.

• White Fragility Response Syndrome (WFRS) – An acute defensive reaction to discussions of racial injustice, characterized by emotional dysregulation, centering oneself as the victim, and reversing the perpetrator-victim dynamic, such as DARVO.⁷ Symptoms include tears when challenged, invoking personal hardships to derail racial analysis, and dismissing critique as “divisive.”

• Performative Solidarity Disorder (PSD) – A chronic reliance on activism as aesthetic identity rather than a vehicle for material change. Symptoms include corporate DEI initiatives that change nothing, progressive politicians who platform racial justice while expanding carceral policies, and influencers who build personal brands on “raising awareness” with no tangible action.

Pathologizing White Attachment: A Disorder of Empire

If attachment theory is often wielded as an instrument to diagnose relational dysfunction, we must invert it to reveal how white attachment itself functions as pathology—a clinging to comfort, an inability to detach from structures of privilege, an anxious dependence on a moral superiority that must be continuously reaffirmed.

• Anxious Whiteness Attachment Disorder (AWAD) – A condition marked by an obsessive need to be validated as “one of the good ones.” Symptoms include compulsive allyship performances, over-identification with marginalized struggles while avoiding personal accountability, and a deep fear of being labeled racist.

• Avoidant Historical Accountability Disorder (AHAD) – A pervasive inability to confront historical violence and complicity. Symptoms include reflexive discomfort when discussing colonialism, reluctance to acknowledge privilege, and the selective forgetting of historical atrocities.

• Disorganized Allyship Syndrome (DAS) – A disorder characterized by inconsistent and contradictory racial politics. Symptoms include expressing solidarity in theory while maintaining racially exclusive personal networks, wavering between activism and self-pity, and retreating into neutrality when racial discourse becomes too charged.

• Parasitic Guilt Syndrome (PGS) – A condition where white individuals use guilt not as a path to transformation but as a self-soothing mechanism. Symptoms include frequent self-flagellation without action, demanding emotional labor from racialized people to alleviate discomfort, and an economy of apology without redistribution.

The DSM for the Racialized: A Framework of Empathy

If whiteness is diagnosed with pathologies of avoidance, apathy, and moral cowardice, then what does a DSM look like for the racialized? It must offer a framework that acknowledges structural harm, resilience, and the systemic psychic toll inflicted by a world that demands their invisibility.

This is why post-colonialism as an academic discipline has become suspect—because it often serves as a liberal cover for ongoing imperial relations rather than a break from colonial structures. Post-colonialism still assumes the logic of the nation-state, still frames progress as a negotiation within the existing global order, still treats whiteness as a mediating structure rather than the root of structural violence.

Decolonialism, by contrast, names the necessary break. It refuses the polite negotiations of empire, rejects the civility politics that ask for gradual change, and acknowledges that empire has never ended—it has only rebranded itself. Liberation begins with refusing the fantasy of whiteness as the reference point of discourse.

Beyond Deconstruction: The Diagnostic Turn

The Diagnostic Turn is upon us. We must move beyond traditional psychiatric frameworks that have been used to pathologize the oppressed while normalizing the pathology of empire. By reversing the gaze and exposing the illness embedded in whiteness, we begin to see that what is called deviance is often the only rational response to an irrational world.

No more. The diagnosis is clear.

It is normalcy white supremacy that must be treated.

1. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-Muqābala [The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing], 9th century. See Roshdi Rashed, The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994), 9–15; also see E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume 1: From the Earliest Times until Firdawsi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 409–411.

2. Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), Liber Abaci [The Book of Calculation], 1202. Fibonacci popularized the Hindu-Arabic numeral system in Europe but largely omitted attribution to its origins in Indian and Islamic mathematics. See Kurt Vogel, The Mathematics of Fibonacci (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 35–42; also see Roshdi Rashed, The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994), 128–135.

Joseph, George Gheverghese. The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

3. Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres], 1543. Copernicus' heliocentric model was influenced by Islamic astronomers such as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Ibn al-Shatir, and Al-Battani, whose works on planetary motion, trigonometry, and celestial models were foundational yet largely uncredited in the European Renaissance. See George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 195–208; also see F. Jamil Ragep, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi’s Memoir on Astronomy (al-Tadhkira fi ‘Ilm al-Hay’a) (New York: Springer, 1993), 12–18.

Ragep, F. Jamil. Copernicus and his Islamic Predecessors: Some Historical Remarks. History of Science, 1995.

4. René Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia [Meditations on First Philosophy], 1641. The assertion Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") was framed as an original epistemological foundation, yet similar ideas appeared in earlier Islamic, Hindu, and Scholastic thought. Al-Ghazali (1058–1111) in Deliverance from Error (Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl) developed a form of methodological skepticism akin to Descartes, positing self-awareness as the only certainty. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037) introduced the "Floating Man" thought experiment in Kitab al-Shifa, arguing for self-awareness independent of sensory experience. See Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 203–212; also see Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 87–98.

Leaman, Oliver. A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

5. The term bluewashing refers to the corporate and institutional co-optation of neurodivergence, particularly autism, as a strategic branding tool rather than a commitment to structural change. While the term originally stemmed from critiques of UN partnerships with corporations engaging in performative ethics, its application to neurodivergence follows a similar pattern: autism is framed as a marketable asset when attached to productivity narratives (e.g., "STEM genius") but remains a liability when it challenges institutional norms. See Robert Chapman, Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (London: Verso, 2024), 119–133; also see Anne McGuire, War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 87–102.

Roscigno, Vincent J. The Face of Disability Rights: Corporate Image and the Commodification of Inclusion. New York: Routledge, 2021.

6. In philosophy, a "turn" refers to a shift in focus—a fundamental change in how a problem is approached. For example, the Linguistic Turn (early 20th century) shifted philosophy away from metaphysics and toward language, asking not what things are but how we talk about them. The Ethical Turn in postmodernism questioned whether truth is neutral or shaped by power, emphasizing morality in philosophy.

The Diagnostic Turn follows this pattern, shifting focus from what conditions exist to who gets to define them. It is not just about medicine or mental health but about legibility—who is seen, understood, and granted depth.

This builds on Michel Foucault’s idea that institutions do not just discover illnesses; they create categories that shape reality (The Birth of the Clinic). Frantz Fanon showed how colonial subjects were not just oppressed but pathologized, their resistance framed as madness (Black Skin, White Masks). Judith Butler extended this to identity, showing how power decides which lives are recognized as fully human (Precarious Life).

The Diagnostic Turn argues that diagnosis is not neutral. It determines who is granted contradictions, whose struggles are reframed as brilliance, and whose deviation is treated as proof of instability, exclusion, or defect. In short, it is not about care but control—deciding who gets to exist on their own terms and who is reduced to a label.

7. DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) is a psychological defense tactic identified by Jennifer Freyd, widely used in colonial and military strategy. Zionist hasbara deploys DARVO by denying Palestinian history, attacking critics as antisemitic, and reversing victimhood—framing state violence as self-defense. This mirrors British counterinsurgency in Palestine, French tactics in Algeria, and U.S. COINTELPRO, where resistance is pathologized while state repression is justified as necessary security.