Have you read Paul Schwartzman’s recent article in the Washington Post (entitled “Gallaudet’s New Aesthetic Openness”)? If not, please do take a look-it’s pretty good. Schwartzman’s focus is on Gallaudet University’s drive to develop a number of adjacent properties that it owns along Sixth Street using an architectural design concept called “deaf space.”

Something that showed up in the story:“Since its founding 144 years ago, Gallaudet’s separation has been driven by the belief that the deaf were better off immersing themselves in their own culture. Their insularity is symbolized by the eight-foot-high fencing and thick stone walls that line the university’s perimeter.”

Let me make a few things clear at the outset. I think that the concept of “deaf space” is absolutely fantastic, and if Sixth Street can be redesigned and rebuilt, I’m excited about that!  I can’t wait to see what it will look like!

That being said, I’d like to tell you three stories.

The first job I ever applied for was a stock boy position at a local Piggly-Wiggly.  They were hiring.  A “Help Wanted” sign in their window said so.  They just wouldn’t hire me.  The manager of the store said I needed to be able to hear the P.A. system when the cashiers asked for price checks.  This was 1983, years before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.  Not that it matters all that much …

Then there was the factory foreman I worked for right out of college (this was 1992… ADA had been passed by that time) when I was having problems finding a job in my field yet needed money.  I cut my hand while working on the line one day and waved at him so I could go put on a bandage.  He saw me, and he saw the blood—it was a moderately deep cut and the blood was already trickling down my wrist—yet he didn’t come over to take my place.  In fact he left me there to work through my pre-lunch break and half of my lunch hour before finally having someone come over and relieve me.  I got extra time off later on during my shift that day, but that’s not the point.  By that time a good quarter of my glove was saturated.  This guy had been radiating tension all week, so I asked him a couple of days later if he had some sort of problem with me.  He snapped, “It doesn’t matter what you can and can’t hear in here.  You gotta move, move, move!”  I never asked to be treated any differently from anyone else while I worked there, so to this day I can’t really tell you what he meant.

And finally there was a summer job that I held many years later while in graduate school-also well after the establishment of ADA.  I was a camp counselor.  This camp catered to deaf children (along with blind children, children with cognitive disabilities, and so forth).  While I was working there, the director of the camp, a hearing man, remarked casually to me one day, almost as an afterthought, that he was thinking about not hiring deaf staff members anymore.  They were only good for the weeks that the deaf kids were there, you see, and during the blind and CD weeks, he didn’t want to be in the position of effectively having hired two people to do one job.  It would be better if all the counselors could hear, that way nobody would have to run around interpreting.

My point: It is theorized that Gallaudet’s future students will desire “integration into the broader world.”  I think this is a reasonable theory, since  I too desired such integration. The obstacles I had to climb over, however, had nothing to do with Gallaudet’s walls.

A story that I’d like to see in the Washington Post is one that looks up that factory foreman and asks him why he did what he did.  Even after all of this time, I’d like to know.  Does that grocery store owner recall his refusal to hire me twenty-five years ago?  Would that camp director be interested in knowing how I felt after he basically told me that deaf people were only useful for working with other deaf people?  Had any of these guys even heard of Gallaudet?  If we showed them pictures of a Sixth Street now lined with strategically placed panes of reflective glass, would they give a damn?

Assuming we could break through and get honest answers out of them, we could possibly gain insight into the types of walls Gallaudet’s graduates might still have to climb over (regardless of how much more accessible the modern-day “broader world” is supposed to be compared to the less-accessible one of old) in order to both find and keep jobs.

But even that would only be the beginning.  I promise you, there are a lot of people—both hearing and deaf—who won’t appreciate that story or ever want to see another like it.  And any attempt we make to find out why will be beaten to death in a barrage of comments accusing the deaf person telling such stories of being an outright liar, of being angry and always focusing on the negative, or of playing the victim.  On top of that, maybe the factory foreman didn’t see the blood!  How can the grocery store owner be blamed when ADA didn’t even exist back then!  If we deaf people can’t get past blaming hearing people for all of our problems, we deserve to be treated with indifference!  The world isn’t fair, get used to it..!

Gallaudet’s walls are a lot of things.  They’re stone and iron.  They’re eight feet high.  They’re undeniably there, and once reduced to rubble they’ll make a good photo in the Washington Post.  They’re also an easy answer, and therefore a distraction from a much broader and deeper set of issues surrounded by walls of an entirely different kind.

As we continue to face them, I doubt that we’ll find a bulldozer to be of much use.