Being Daneel
About Daneel Foyer
Daneel Foyer is a British man from Leamington living in Norway who has an interest in psychology and hypnosis.
What is the most important part of your identity?
I would say that I am very individualistic.
Why?
I don't want to be identified as an Englishman or a Norwegian or an autistic man. It is very important that I am just Daneel, just me. So the most important thing about my identity is that I’m very resistant to groups. I don’t like that.
Have you ever encountered racism?
I grew up in Leamington Spa, a very middle-class, very white town and so there were very few people of color.
You were one of the only Black kids at your school?
There weren’t very many, but there were some Sikhs and Hindus there were a couple other kids who were just black like me. But it wasn’t really a thing that was ever really talked about, and I can still remember asking my friends, coming home from school, what racism was because someone had said the word. … And I could remember having a picture in my head of racecars when I wondered what racism was. So my point is that I was very naive growing up so I didn’t really notice any racism I encountered, and they’re probably wasn’t much and later on, in life, I don’t often encounter racism in my face and I see it politically. I studied psychology one thing I learned is that everybody is racist and everybody is biased and we all have this inside us and therefore I’m very accepting that that’s how people think. That doesn't mean it’s ok to call people names or exclude people but I’m familiar with the fact that that’s a part of how the human brain works. So part of it is the fact that I’ve studied psychology and know a lot about it so for me it’s quite an abstract topic.
“The first time I heard the word racism I thought of Race Cars… That’s how lucky I was.”
-Daneel Foyer
How has your autism shaped you?
For the longest time I didn’t know I didn’t get my diagnosis until I was almost 40 so when I was autistic and did autistic things those things were just weird. One of the things I do is when I have a thought, I think of something random in my head. I just say it, I just say it out loud randomly. A good example of that There was just one time when I was skiing with my friends and I would just say random weird stuff out loud.
“Everybody wants to do something cool e.g play the guitar… My ‘thing’ was hypnosis.”
-Daneel Foyer
