Author Archives: maxporter

A queer deaf guy who likes movies a lot.

Why Racism is a Deaf Issue

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Posted by maxporter on March 31, 2012 – 1:17 AM
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So in my last post I made reference to not wanting to dip my fingers in “other people’s” struggles, such as racism. Well, after going to the White Privilege Conference and listening to people’s thoughts about white privilege within the Deaf community, my thinking is shifting a little bit: it’s not just “other people” anymore. Racism is a deaf issue, too, not just a hearing issue.

Jane K Fernandes gave a keynote speech and facilitated a workshop. I purposely went in with very little knowledge of the Gallaudet protests that happened – I remember when they happened, but at the time, I only half-paid attention to the protests. I vaguely knew that students had protested against her because she wasn’t “Deaf” enough, which I think is a divisive idea. I had a friend who went to Gally at the time of the protest – he told me about some of the insulting name signs that they came up for her, and said that he didn’t see a real point to the protests other than being radical for the sake of being radical. Other than that, I didn’t know a whole lot of details. I didn’t want my ideas to influence my perception of her. And, honestly, I have never visited Gallaudet in my entire life.

Jane mostly talked about how a small set of Deaf people basically try to control the discourse of deafness. She discussed how there is a lot of language policing of ASL, especially at Gallaudet, and how that translates into white supremacy.

Honestly? At first, I was insulted that she oversimplified the discussion of language policing within ASL and made it seem like it is equivalent to language policing within English. ASL has a long history of oppression. During the age of oralism, deaf children weren’t allowed to use any sign at all because the assumption was that speaking = intelligence. So teachers would do shit like tie a child’s hands together or hit them with rulers if the child even so much as made a hand gesture. Given that history of unfreedom, plus the fact that there is no written version of ASL, I do think that it is valid to say, “Hey, we are finally allowed to sign freely. So how can we codify this grammar and create ASL documentation for future generations?”

However, it definitely sounds to me like racist Deaf people take language policing too far. It’s one thing to say, “Hey, deaf people can finally take ownership of ASL” and another thing to exclude certain deaf people from contributing to ASL. Angela McCaskill, the current chief diversity officer of Gallaudet, was also there, and she spoke about how, when the Deaf institutions were desegregated, “Black ASL” was considered a ‘lesser’ form of ASL. That is super-fucked up. Like Jane said, “‘Black’ ASL should just be considered ASL.” Jane also talked about how, in an old ASL textbook, only one chapter had a black woman signer model – and Jane was told, “Don’t use that chapter. That woman’s signing is full of errors.” If signers of color are the only targets of language policing, that is definitely a manifestation of white supremacy.

Jane also spoke about the stigma against speaking and signing at the same time. At first, I was confused: I personally do not sign and speak at the same time because I find it to be very confusing – ASL is not simply a signed version of English. They have 100% different sentence structures – the way I usually explain it to people new to the idea is, “ASL comes from French sign language. If I went to Britain, I wouldn’t be able to understand their sign language.” If I signed and spoke at the same time, I wouldn’t really be speaking ASL – I would be using a visual representation of English, and I personally would rather use Cued Speech for that purpose.

However, Jane then told stories about black deaf students who signed and spoke at the same time; white students would come up to them and say, “You’re not doing ASL right!” and I realized – this emphasis on ‘pure’ ASL is fucked up. Not every deaf person comes out of the womb knowing Strong-ASL, and 90% of us have Hearing parents who have never met a deaf person in their entire lives. So, yes, some of us use Cued Speech, Signed English, home signs, or whatever – just anything we can do in order to communicate. Maybe my perspective is different because I don’t particularly care about fitting into that mold of the Ideal Deaf person who signs Strong-ASL and only socializes with other Deaf people, but personally, if someone comes up to me and doesn’t sign perfectly, that’s okay – I don’t sign perfectly, either. We live in a Hearing world, for better or worse, and although I would love to live in a world where everybody communicated visually, I have learned that I have to make compromises in order to function in this world. I personally want to improve my ASL skills and gain true mastery of the language, but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that every single deaf person should possess a perfect knowledge of ASL before they are allowed to be considered truly ‘part’ of the Deaf community. In fact, taking that idea too far can be extremely oppressive and divisive.

Another thing – we didn’t really discuss this in WPC, but it is something I am thinking of now. Language evolves. ASL will evolve. Who is “allowed” to contribute to that evolution? Everyone who signs should contribute; it shouldn’t just be a few white Deaf people. If ASL does evolve to become closer to the sentence structure of American English, is that a problem? If so, why? Personally, if I had to speculate about the evolution of ASL, I don’t think that it will ever be exactly like English – it is a visual language. For example, I can’t see why you would insert abstract grammatical articles like ‘the’ into a visual language. However, if the sentence structure of ASL shifts so that, in fifty years, our children sign something with a word order more like English – is that really a threat to deaf culture? I don’t think so.

Even though internal issues have divided the deaf community, I think that the deaf community has a huge potential to be tremendously empowering for many people – the answer is not to automatically “cure” deaf babies; I think that a more empowering approach is to find out what deafhood means for oneself. And audism is a real issue – just because white privilege has taken control of the deaf community doesn’t negate all the crap like the idea that speaking = intelligence.1 But, even though audism exists, it seems like we’ll have to trash the idea of the perfect Deaf person and go for a more inclusive model of deafness. Because, really, in the end, this idea of a perfect Deaf person hurts all of us deaf people – we shouldn’t be fighting each other, we should be fighting our real enemies: audism, white supremacy, heterosexism, all of that. In addition, if we dismiss everything that hearing people have to say, we run the risk of dismissing very important conversations about things like racism because they are not “deaf issues.” Therefore, we deaf people should be much more conscious about forming relationships with each other and listening to what hearing people have to say in order to dismantle this whole system of oppression in place – there is no freedom unless all of us are free.

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  1. Hell, I experienced audism at the White Privilege Conference – I’ll have to talk more about that later, but long story short: Angela Davis spoke and the WPC did not provide an interpreter. [↩]
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Connecting to my Deaf roots

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Posted by maxporter on March 21, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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I have decided that I am going to examine my perspectives on Deafness and Deafhood and read about the issues a little more before I try to dip my fingers in other people’s struggles, like racism.1 That is not to say that I’m going to stop reading and thinking about things like racism – it simply is that I want to understand myself better before trying to get involved in issues that I have little direct personal experience with.

I grew up very proud of my Deaf identity. When I was a child, my parents gave me a book called Movers & Shakers: Deaf People Who Changed the World Storybook by Cathryn Carroll and Susan M. Mather:

Image of a book cover with a green and purple color scheme. It says "Movers and Shakers: Deaf people who changed the world." Five portraits are on the cover.

I devoured that book – I must have read it at least 50 times, no exaggeration. That book, plus my Deaf mentors, really helped me to be proud of my Deafness rather than being ashamed of it. But, in the end, I was an isolated kid who met very few Deaf people. So I felt disconnected from the Deaf community at large.

Now that I am in a city where actual Deaf people show up to ASL chats – instead of just ASL students – I am getting more involved in the Deaf community. That has been very helpful.

I am also going to commit to reading the following:

  • The Mask of Benevolence by Harlan Lane
  • Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks
  • Inside Deaf Culture by Carol A. Padden and Tom L. Humphries
  • And, just for fun: Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir by Terry Galloway

And I would like to find some good ASL Youtube videos about Deafhood.

Any other suggestions?

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  1. Edit: Check out my follow-up post on this. [↩]
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Coming out of the Cued Speech Closet

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Posted by maxporter on March 20, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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I’m going to tell you all something: I grew up using cued speech.

I did not mention cued speech in my blog up until this point because it is such a tiny community that I felt that telling the Internet would make me much more identifiable. In this case, the problem that I had with giving up my anonymity was the fact that I had not yet disclosed to the cued speech community. As far as they knew, I was a straight kid.

I am now getting involved with the cued speech community again. It is such a small community that people are like, “Oh, do you know ____ who lives in (name of a state on the other side of the country)?” When I say my name, people ask me if I am related to…? and then name my father. In addition, my family is pretty prominent in this community – researchers have done case studies of us. Basically, the second I introduce myself, people “know” who I am because they have read about or have met my family.

Personally, I hate publicity, so I have mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Now, though, I am getting involved again. There are things that I don’t like about cued speech as it is today – for example, its association with AG Bell and the fact that people emphasize how cued speech can help kids to speak. I think that the visual side of cued speech is much, much more important than the oral side.

So, yeah, now that I am ‘out’ of the cued speech closet, so to speak, I look forward to talking about it in this blog.

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Making the blind see again?

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Posted by maxporter on March 19, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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Before I start this post, I want to clarify that I am not blind and do not know the realities that blind people go through. So please let me know if I’m getting something wrong.

Stories throughout the canon of Western literature represent a miraculous healing of a blind individual. If we suspend disbelief for a moment and assume that a blind person miraculously regains sight, it raises questions: How does this story frame blindness – as a positive, negative, or neutral thing? Are the outcomes in this story true to life? Who is this story really about – is it about the blind person, or does it center back on the perspective of sighted people? To illustrate the difference in how authors represent blind individuals, I will compare a story from the Bible with an episode of Star Trek.

There are multiple Bible stories in which Jesus made a blind man see again, and this is supposed to be an unquestionably wonderful thing, even if a man was born blind as in this story:

1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. 7 “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

John 9:1-7, NIV

The story is problematic right off the bat: the disciples assume that the blind man is blind because he or his parents sinned. This is completely illogical: if blindness is due to sin, why aren’t more people blind? Aside from that illogical assumption, the disciples’s statement is problematic because they don’t think that being blind is yet another variation of humankind. Instead, it’s a punishment. That’s an insulting way to look at any difference, but it is especially oppressive when people assume that individuals with disabilities must be that way because of some action that we took to warrant God’s punishment – or, worse, that we exist only to punish our parents for some sin that they committed. It’s not our fault that we are different – we cannot control every single thing that our bodies do. And, because the disciples assume that the man or his parents sinned, the implication is that being blind is inherently bad/shameful. After all, the disciples didn’t assume that the man is blind because he did great deeds.

But then Jesus makes it even worse by making the man’s blindness all about him when he says, “this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” The story isn’t really about the blind man, whose name we don’t even know – it is all about the wonderful savior, the “light of the world,” who bestows the gift of sight upon a blind man. John penned this story to prove that readers should listen to Jesus’s teachings.

In reality, the ‘savior’ approach is highly insulting because it minimizes the perspective of the ‘saved.’ We don’t know anything about how the blind man felt when Jesus healed him; this story is all about the wonderfully benevolent savior who took it upon himself to “save” a blind man. But would a blind man really have been so grateful? We don’t even know whether he consented to Jesus putting mud in his eyes – the way the story is told, that’s a minor detail that doesn’t matter so much. The assumption is that seeing is inherently better than being blind. But would a blind man, especially one who had been born blind, really have appreciated eyesight?

As a counterpoint, All Good Things, the two-part finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation represents the situation very differently. Geordi LaForge, one of the primary characters, is blind. In contrast to the Bible’s one-dimensional blind man, we know a great deal about the human being Geordi before the episode even starts: he’s a skilled engineer, he likes to play Sherlock Holmes roleplaying games in the Holodeck, he is good friends with the android Data, and so forth. In the episode itself, viewers see that he plays card games and watch him crack jokes.

In All Good Things, Geordi gains eyesight when the tissue in his eyes spontaneously regenerate in a matter of seconds, growing ‘healthy’ eyes. When Geordi regains sight, he screams in pain and shouts, “It’s like an iron bar is going through my temples! Oh my god! My visor – it’s picking up unfamiliar electromagnetic readings!” He doesn’t know what the sensory input from his new eyes ‘means’ yet, so he interprets it in terms that he is familiar with. But the sensory overload is too much and it hurts him. Worse, he cannot reverse the spontaneous regeneration of his eyes. Most people who don’t have a disability of some sort are so used to seeing the world through their own perspective, so given this situation, I think that many people would assume that the sensation of vision would immediately make sense to Geordi or that he would enjoy the sensation immediately. But, as the episode shows, the reality is going to be more complicated than that.

The thing is, people have to train themselves to think in different ways when they ‘gain’ a new ‘ability.’ One episode, Loud as a Whisper, implicitly compares Geordi’s visor to a cochlear implant,1 so I’m going to draw upon my experiences with a cochlear implant. When I got a cochlear implant, the new sensation of “hearing” was indeed extremely painful. I could only wear my cochlear implant for a few minutes at a time until I got used to the new sensations. If I had spontaneously gained the sensation of hearing like Geordi had spontaneously gained eyesight, I probably would have been extremely distressed like he was. Especially if it was permanent and irreversible – I simply can’t imagine living without the option to “turn off” my hearing; the constant sensory overload would (literally) drive me crazy. Before his eyes spontaneously regenerated, Geordi had the ability to take off his visor whenever he wanted, so I wonder if he had similar feelings about the irreversible change that had been done to his eyes.

Unfortunately, the episode doesn’t really go into the Geordi’s interpretation of that experience. Geordi’s eyesight is one more instance in a series of crises – there is a disturbance in time-space, everyone’s cells are reverting back to a more primitive state, Captain Picard has retroactively threatened the existence of all life on Earth, etc – so the episode moves on from crisis to crisis without dwelling upon Geordi’s dilemma. The next time we see a future version of Geordi, it is twenty years in the future and he doesn’t say anything one way or another about his eyesight. How did he process that experience of suddenly gaining eyesight? We don’t know.

Things like blindness and deafness are just another way of existing in the world. They’re every bit as valid as any other mode of being. If blind or deaf people personally decide for themselves that they want to have that sensory input, fine. But not all of us will appreciate a random savior who swoops in and “fixes” something that isn’t even a problem. The real problem is the way that society is structured and the prejudices of others. In reality, people who are blind or deaf can do a lot more than others give us credit for. Heck, we can become engineers who are even better at our jobs than able-bodied people just like Geordi did in Star Trek. That part isn’t science fiction.

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  1. For more on that, read my post here. [↩]
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Intersectionality is not arithmetic

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Posted by maxporter on March 12, 2012 – 2:09 PM
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I’ve recently seen bloggers make a list of identities that a minority individual may have in order to prove his or her point. One example is when a blogger invoked an imaginary disabled black transsexual polyamorous kinky furry woman to prove their point that not everyone with a controversial identity like being a furry is a privileged person. That point is true, but I become uncomfortable when people begin to construct an argument around listing labels like that. The thing is, identity is more complicated than that.

Our identities aren’t just a list of labels that we put on ourselves. If someone said, “My name is Amy Pond; I am female and 21 years old and a Scottish girl in an English village and heterosexual,” that doesn’t tell us everything. It tells us a lot about her life – she probably lives very differently than a 70-year-old man in identical circumstances – but it doesn’t tell us about who she is. When we learn that she is super-brave – sometimes to the point where she is overly rash – that’s a clue that tells us more about who she is. It’s a part of her personality that doesn’t depend on this list of labels.

So, that disabled black transsexual polyamorous kinky furry woman? Those labels don’t tell me the whole story. They tell me a pretty large portion, especially because we live in a society where those characteristics are not looked upon kindly. But they don’t tell me anything about her – what’s her name, for example? What are her hobbies? Does she have any brothers or sisters? Pets? That kind of thing. She’s not just a disabled black transsexual polyamorous kinky furry woman; she’s a human being.

Another problem is that excessively focusing on all of those identities can be very divisive within a given minority community. Take my example – I am deaf and queer. I value spaces where I can be with other deaf and queer people, but I don’t want those to be my only options for socialization. If I was in a situation where I could choose between going to a deaf queer group or a hearing queer group, I would go to both – and I wouldn’t want the hearing queer group to kick me out just because I would “fit in better” in the deaf queer group. Conversely, if a hearing queer group was my only option, I wouldn’t want the hearing queer group to tell me that I didn’t belong there and that I should go off and make a deaf queer group. Both options should be available. I feel that I could contribute to both and that I could take something out of both.

I think that this matters for those of us with intersecting identities because I think it’s especially important for us to stop defining ourselves based just on our minority affiliations and start defining ourselves as people first. It can be hard to keep sight of that fact because mainstream US society actively resists difference. Also, those of us with intersecting identities often don’t fit in perfectly in one community or another. But I believe that one of the most important steps in becoming empowered is learning how to see oneself as a person first, instead of a set of labels. Yes, our minority affiliations do define us to a degree. But we have to keep sight of the things that make us human. We have names, interests, hobbies, all that. We’re not just our labels.

Furthermore, our labels have complex cultures behind them. For example, if I label myself ‘deaf,’ that goes deeper than simply having less hearing than most people my age – it means that I have this whole culture with this whole mindset. And, for those of us who are in intersecting minorities, our cultures interact in complex ways that are inseparable – it’s not like every deaf queer person can say, “queerness affects 25% of my life and deafness affects 75% of my life.” So, when I see somebody make a list of labels, it just feels like an oversimplification of the whole issue of intersectionality.

You know, I’ve been guilty of all this in the past. Sometimes I get so eager to talk about the complexity of intersecting identities that I lose sight of how those identities actually affect individuals. I’ve certainly used strawmen and overgeneralized in the past. But seeing others do it definitely makes me more aware of what I’m doing so that I can stop it. Intersectionality is not arithmetic – maybe an extremely complex mathematical equation that took up ten boards could start to describe it, but not an equation that looks like a + b + c = d.

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Decoupling elitism from writing

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Posted by maxporter on March 11, 2012 – 3:29 AM
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Recently, I’ve been reading critiques of white people who focus on language, rather than on ideas, in a discussion group. For example, scroll down to dumbthingwhitepeoplesay’s commentary about language here and read witchsistah’s commentary here. So that has been causing me to reflect.

Before I go any further, let me bring any new reders up to speed: I am white, my parents are hearing, and I was mainstreamed into a hearing school, so I definitely was socialized to focus on grammar and stuff like that. I think that, if my parents had been ASL-Deaf, I wouldn’t have been socialized like that to quite the same extent, but that socialization would still have been present in the very structure of the school system and so forth.

Like dumbthingswhitepeoplesay says, this obsessive focus on language is fucked up:

There’s no need to acknowledge another person’s argument if you can use their wording to imply their logical fallibility or intellectual weakness. After all, why bother attacking the actual issue (which is likely to have an objective rightness or wrongness) if you can focus on word-choice (where the subjectivity of definitions can provide all the shelter one needs)?

One example that jumped to my mind was when I went to an elitist Ivory Tower college where a professor critiqued a Black student’s story because it was written in Ebonics. It can be super-ridiculous sometimes – there is a time and place for things, and an argument is not the time or place to go into minutiae of language. And I get tired of people who say shit like “devil’s advocate” instead of actually stating their opinion directly.

However, I have noticed that sometimes people, white or PoC, go in the opposite direction and condemn all people who focus upon language. The people who wrote the tumblr commentary that I just shared don’t do it, so this post is not exactly a direct response to them. But I’ve seen it elsewhere. For example, people have asked me if I am Hearing simply because I write well. I understand why people do this – it is hard to trust those who belong to the same group of people who have done so many horrible things to your people. In this example, Hearing people have used English, written and spoken, to oppress Deaf people for centuries.

But I don’t think that caring about expressing one’s self in writing is, in and of itself, a bad thing. And, actually, I think it’s a little screwed up if people look at a well-written essay with suspicion. Speaking from a personal perspective, I write well because it makes me happy. I like creating order and meaning, and when I string together English words like it’s a chess game, I am happy. I’m not trying to twist my words around, at least not in my non-fiction. In fact, I would want someone to tell me if I was twisting my words around in critical pieces like this – I want my writing to be a space where the reader can trust me and to show my reader that I am willing to communicate with them and learn from them.

I think that the distinction to make is this: it’s okay to care about your own language, and it is okay if a friend says, “Hey, can you help me edit this paper?” – however, if you are actively drowning out someone’s ideas by focusing only on their language and not listening to their content, that’s fucked up.

Writing is a tool that people have used against us, but that doesn’t mean that it only belongs to the oppressors. It can belong to us, too. Writing is an art form and one of the many ways that humans communicate with each other. I want to see it uncoupled from this oppressive power dynamic – it should be a tool as blameless as a screwdriver, not a weapon.

So, from my perspective, respecting all forms of communication can be one way to do that. dumbthingswhitepeoplesay uses the example of AAVE and how white people don’t like it because it forces them to communicate in an unfamiliar way – well, if people approached communication from a more open-minded perspective in general, I think that that would help a lot. In conjunction with that, we need institutional support for that, too – for example, having anti-discrimination policies in place that prevent a professor from suppressing the ideas of a person who just so happens to use an interpreter.

Because, really, in the end, what matters is communication. If we lived in a society where we could speak ASL in public without scrutiny because it was simply another form of communication, if we could read Spanish alongside English without politicians making a huge deal out of it, if white people did not constantly police every aspect of people of color, including their language – I think that that would be a lot closer to an ideal society than what we currently have.

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Do I Regret My CI?

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Posted by maxporter on March 8, 2012 – 1:59 PM
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When people ask me if I regret getting my cochlear implant, the answer is, quite often, simply “No.” I still use it to communicate with Hearing people. I still consider myself d/Deaf. It is a piece of technology, not something that dictates my identity. Personally, I’m not the type to let my Facebook or cell phone dictate who I am; my cochlear implant is no different.

But I do wish that my upbringing had turned out differently. Perhaps I wouldn’t even have considered a CI.

When I was a small child, we lived in the DC area AKA the utopia of Deaf education. I was placed in a school with three tracks: Cued Speech, Oral, ASL. The children from the three programs would hang out with each other for at least an hour per day, which increased as they aged, until the three programs were basically combined by the end of elementary school. Then they would be placed into a mainstream high school. Basically, this is my idea of a perfect school environment – a public school that is actually accessible.

But then my parents let their fears get better of them and we moved to a town in the middle of nowhere.

After spending a wonderful year in DC, I was suddenly in a conservative school where teachers told us to keep our heads full of Godly thoughts and all the children were Hearing. I would always beg my parents to let me go to Deaf school and they were like, “No.” Their excuse was that the academics were too poor – but academics are not everything. Besides, the Maryland School for the Deaf consistently makes higher AP scores than nearby schools. I blame their reluctance on statistics like “the majority of Deaf high school graduates have a fourth-grade reading level” – which is ridiculous because, in reality, I was reading at college level in eighth grade. (This is not to brag – this is just a statement of fact.) But the low expectations of Deaf education is another post for another day.

Given the circumstances I grew up in, getting a CI made sense for me personally. I’m a bad lipreader, nobody could read my handwriting, all that – I wanted contact with Hearing people, and I personally felt that getting a CI was the best way to do it. (It wasn’t the easiest though.) If I had been in an environment where I could communicate fluently all day, would I still have gotten it? Maybe not.

So, yes, I have a CI. And I actually have grown to appreciate it beyond a tool that I use for communication – for instance, sometimes I listen to music. I could have lived a happy life without music, and I did even for years after I got my CI, but being able to experience stuff like Deltron 3030 and Into The Electric Castle by Ayreon and Metropolis by Janelle Monáe has added something to my life.

But, at the end of the day, all that Hearing-world stuff is just decoration compared to what truly matters in my life. I still want to make a more-equal world for Deaf kids who are trapped in Hearing bubbles so that they don’t have a false choice between the CI and isolation so that those who choose the CI actually have a choice and are empowered to make that choice on their own.

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