Tag Archives: race

Deaf people of color

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Posted by maxporter on December 26, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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In the city where I used to live, there was a pretty nifty store in a low-income neighborhood that allowed people to learn about computer geek culture – with donations, they were able to build computers, learn programming languages, learn about network security, and so forth.

Once, I went there to donate computer parts. One of the staff members assisting me, an African American lady, noticed my cochlear implant and began telling me about her deaf son. She was hearing, so she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with him in some ways – which is super-common in hearing parents; my own loving parents were like that. So I guess she was looking for a deaf man to give her some advice about how to raise her boy.

She told me that he was acting out in class because he couldn’t always understand teachers, and I nodded – yeah, I can relate to that; I did the same thing in grade school and went to the principal’s office a lot. But then she kept talking and I quickly realized that her son was experiencing a vastly different reality than I did when I was a child. When I was a kid, I was sent to the office to talk to the principal and got sent home to watch TV and that was it. In contrast, this deaf kid’s school had labeled him as a ‘troublemaker’ and wanted to put him in a class for children with aggression disorders. But the thing is, he didn’t have an aggression disorder – he was simply deaf! So they were basically setting him up for failure.

There’s probably a lot of reasons why this kid is experiencing different issues than I did, but I think that a major factor is racism. Authority figures have this tendency to see white people as innocent and racially profile people of color as criminals. So, they feel a need to “intervene” in the life of an African-American deaf boy – but the problem is, their interventions are inappropriate. It would be better to address the root cause of the problem – lack of access to the education causes him to become bored and act out – rather than treat the symptom that fits within preconceived stereotypes. Instead of assuming that every boy of color who acts out has an agression disorder, how about addressing the root cause of the problem?

Worse, it sounded like this lady’s doctor wasn’t really communicating the kid’s needs very well – she kept talking about how she wanted to get him a cochlear implant but the hospital kept telling her no. Later on, she talked about how the kid’s deafness was from nerve damage. I don’t think she realized that nerve damage rules out someone as a cochlear implant candidate – even if the cochlea worked perfectly, the auditory signals wouldn’t be able to get to the brain. I don’t know – it just seemed like a failing of the healthcare system to me.

I haven’t really heard a lot of Deaf people talk about intersectionality, except maybe for LGBT/Deaf issues. I’ve also noticed that the Deaf community is pretty white. I think that we could do a better job of being more inclusive – the Deaf community is a wonderfully empowering environment for a lot of people, so I think it would be awesome if we could expand our community to include everyone, not just people who look like us.

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Gang Signs & ASL

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Posted by maxporter on December 16, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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I learn so much every day in my new job working with at-risk youth. I wish I could share all my insights with you guys and start a dialogue every day, but my schedule is usually quite busy.

The other day, an interesting situation occurred. One of my students is the type who tries to make friends with everyone, including the teachers. He usually succeeds, but teachers can’t exactly be his friend because that is not our role. So we have to remind him to behave within professional boundaries that are appropriate to a classroom setting – for example, he cannot say that a random female adult is hot. He also jokes around a lot with everyone.

The other day, this student jokingly made signs at me that looked like gang signs. There were several things objectionable about that, so I explained that it is insulting to make random gestures to Deaf people because it mocks actual sign language, certain signs mean certain things to certain people but don’t mean anything outside of that group, and it is not acceptable to make gang signs in our classroom because it is intended to be a safe space for all people with no territory claims. He took it all quite well and showed engagement by asking questions, so that made me happy.

That wasn’t the first time that I’d thought about gang signs and deafness in recent months, however.

During a recent training day, members from a local gang outreach organization came and talked to us about gangs. They showed a clip of gang signs, and I was frightened at how much it resembled Strong-ASL.1 I could tell that it wasn’t ASL, but it certainly made me frightened that I could be signing ASL to a friend in the hood and then get shot as a result. I mean, the majority of Hearing people think that sign language consists of nothing more but random, spontaneous gestures, like miming – how can I expect them to understand the difference between gang signs and ASL?

After the video clip, I spoke to my interpreters, who shared the same concerns that I did. They said, “Yeah, we’ve all heard stories about Deaf people getting shot because they were mistaken for a gang member.”

Sure, it’s not very likely to happen, but it points to one of the underlying problems within the Deaf community: the Deaf community is extremely White. I know very few people of color or people who were born in poverty who identify themselves as Deaf rather than hearing-impaired or hard-of-hearing. Why is that? How can we change things? Personally, I’m trying to contact a variety of organizations about this issue so that we can brainstorm solutions.

I’d love to see a more diverse Deaf community and a hood/barrio where Deaf people are accepted. I don’t want to see gangs or other inner-city strife, period, but since it looks like they’ll be around for a long time to come, I want to see people in the hood/barrio who understand that Deaf people aren’t gangstas; they are simply communicating in their native language.

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  1. By Strong-ASL, I mean extremely fluid sign language spoken by a native Deaf ASL speaker, rather than the choppy Englishy stuff that some people sign. [↩]
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Work in Progress

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Posted by maxporter on November 4, 2011 – 1:25 AM
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Lately, some of the clients on my caseload have been more difficult to deal with, so I end up thinking about them.

So what helps me is – I plug myself into my MP3 player, then I open up Music and put on the album ‘Metropolis’ by Janelle Monae. (AKA the most amazing woman in the history of music.) Then I dance away all my worries.1

But, seriously, I’m gaining a greater and more profound appreciation for Monae. I’ve been a fan of her long before I started this roller-coaster, but I’m finding that since I began my job, I’m starting to understand her lyrics a little better. For example:

We’re dancing free but we’re stuck here underground
And everybody trying to figure they way out
Hey Hey Hey, all we ever wanted to say
Was chased erased and then thrown away
And day to day we live in a daze
-Janelle Monae, Many Moons

Metropolis is ostensibly about a dystopian future that’s like the German silent film Metropolis meets Blade Runner. In a highly stratified society, the androids are at the very bottom of the social ladder – but the androids are so advanced that they are more or less equivalent to humans at this point in the future. But, as is typical for Afrofuturistic works, there are definitely very strong parallels to today’s African-American experience. As Wikipedia puts it,

Afrofuturism is an emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.

Please listen to her ASAP. You will not regret it.

So, I’ve talked a lot about certain minorities in this blog, but haven’t really touched upon the full range of current social justice struggles – for instance, Occupy Wallstreet is an epitomical history-making moment, but I haven’t talked about it at all in this blog. And I’ve barely even touched upon race.

Well, it just goes to show how blinding privilege is. I’m sorry, I hate it when people act all overwhelmed when they become aware of their privilege; I don’t mean to do that. But anyway. Now that I’m in my first post-college job in the social work field, I’m definitely learning a lot more about the world.

And now it’s making me ask questions and I’m ever more eager to do work with people who experience multiple minorities.

In the meantime, I’m looking for good activisty theory – think bell hooks, Julia Serano, et al. I’m gonna check out Audre Lorde – other than that, suggestions?

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  1. Disclaimer for those of you who just followed that video link to the most amazing showcase of dancing skills ever – I don’t dance that well. But I don’t care; I figure the neighbors may appreciate the entertainment of this random boy dancing while he plays with his roommate’s dog. [↩]
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Police brutality & deaf people

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Posted by maxporter on September 9, 2010 – 12:14 AM
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In a nutshell: this video by Sabina England is about a partly Deaf Native American man who was murdered by a cop simply because he couldn’t hear the cop. The video is signed, but it has captions for those who don’t know ASL. [Youtube link]

Transcript under the jump:
Click for transcript

So, here’s a really horrible example of police brutality and how it should be a central issue to talking about Deaf rights. I hate to say it, but this type of story is not very uncommon. It’s probably one of my biggest fears. Not to minimize what John went through, but I can definitely think of instances in the past where authority figures – lifeguards, teachers, etc – have shouted at me to stop. When I didn’t hear them, I got in trouble.

But what if I ever found myself in a situation where I had to face an unfriendly cop? Or, in the comments: “that’s happen to before one man deaf was in bank for take out of money somehow the man who trying to rob deaf man but he yelled at him n he couldn’t hear n he yelled “don’t turn around” so, deaf man turned around n he shot his head n took his money.” These types of scenarios – being killed just because I’m deaf and can’t hear what a crazy person wants me to do – scares the crap out of me.

One could argue that the cop had no way of knowing that John was deaf, but that’s ridiculous – you don’t shoot somebody who is just walking along. Just approach him to resolve the conflict. What is this “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality all about? It doesn’t make sense and it scares me to see cops behaving in this way.

There’s also cultural issues here – John is Deaf, and he is Native American. Both of these cultures clash with the dominant paradigm and caused his actions and intentions to be misinterpreted. I don’t feel like I know enough to critically analyze the whole issue but I do want to underline this as an example of intersectionality.

Near the end, Sabina England says, “How can we be assured that our rights will be kept in mind if we’re being confronted by cops but can’t hear or understand them?”
This made me think about the importance of communication, not just hearing. She doesn’t expand upon this, but again, I think back to previous experiences with authority figures who think that I’m trying to be smart when I say that I don’t understand them. They get exasperated, which has the potential of causing the conflict to escalate. If the cop had walked up to John and asked him what was going on, what would have happened if John had said, “I don’t know what you said”? Would the cop have assumed, ‘this guy is trying to play dumb and pretend that he doesn’t have a knife,’ and then handcuffed him? It’s just speculation, but it doesn’t seem very improbable to me.

As an afterword, the vlogger who put up this video is Sabina England, aka Jihad Punk 77. She is a fairly well-known blogger – I have seen her everywhere in the blogosphere. Her blog is here – I will mention that I don’t agree with everything she says or does, but she’s an interesting voice in the blogosphere.

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