By Allen Neece

Last Sunday, I woke up unusually early, at the heathen hour of 6:30 am. Normally I would sleep in, grabbing some serious shut-eye, recovering from whatever nihilistic abandon that I had engaged in the night before. However, it was finals week coming up at the school where I teach, and being the conscientious teacher that I am (*snort*), I figured I had better get cracking on drawing up the cumulative exams for my students.

After shambling outside to fetch my delivered copy of the L.A. Times, I came in and fired up the expresso machine. As I groggily perused the front page, my eyes landed on the color photograph in the lower left corner. A thrill of excitement shot through me. Without even reading the header, I knew instantly from looking at the picture that this was deaf. It was a picture of a group of high school football players whooping with excitement in a locker room. Almost instinctively I could tell they were my people, merely from the way they were looking at each other. I think you know what I’m talking about. We use our eyes unlike any other culture on the face of the earth. After all, we’re the People of the Eye.

I nearly forgot about the snarling expresso machine as it foamed and burbled, so excited that I quickly spread the paper out on my kitchen counter, the weak sunlight sluggishly blooming into the kitchen. However, my excitement began to dry up as soon as I saw the opening word of this long article: “Silence”.

Klaxons went off in my head. Captain Kirk, whom I idolized as a six-year-old in an era before closed-captions, was ordering everyone to battle stations. A second “silence” emerged in the same paragraph. A variation of “could not hear” followed in the next four consecutive paragraphs. This fusillade of hoary clichés was simply too much for me to handle, particularly at such an ungodly hour. I staggered to my couch and stared blearily around the room.

“They’re at it again,” I groaned to myself. I opened the rest of the paper and read with trepidation until I saw the line “It was hard enough being deaf. And now this.” I tossed the paper into the air and the relative calm of the house I lived in was immediately rent with my enraged bellowing. In fact, as I look back now, I no doubt unwittingly aped (pun intended) what the author had written of Shawn McDonald: my face was contorted, and like the gorilla in the Donkey Kong arcade game, like Lou Ferrigno in the “The Incredible Hulk” (hey, I was a child of the 70s), I made decidedly angry “exaggerated, mime-like motions” with my limbs. After hopping around on all fours, I managed to calm down by eating a treasured banana and resumed reading the rest of the article.

Once I was done, I promptly stormed out of my basement apartment and went to my favorite diner. After eating, it didn’t help that I listened, repeatedly, to Black Flag’s “Rise Above” on the way to the gym where I hit the weights (yeah, I listen to punk rock. Preferably at a loud volume. Does that make me not deaf?). As I torched some calories, I wondered to myself,

Is it always going to be like this? Are we always going to have to be reading articles about deaf people in the mainstream media that invariably focuses on their deafness and how they’re decidedly not hearing, but deaf, deaf, deaf, D E A F? Can’t we, or rather, the hearing world get beyond that? C’mon, it’s 2007, for frick’s sake. Nowadays, when there’s an article about a particular culture, say, black, gay, Jewish, etc., does the article elaborate to the excluson of all else the very specificity of their culture? Are we always going to be defined by the hearing majority from a medical pathological perspective by our lack of hearing? I can’t hear therefore I exist?

Needless to say, I had a robust workout.

That line about deafness being “hard” was not only infuriating; it had also struck a nerve. I had already pretty much composed a letter to the editor by the time I returned home. I proceeded to spend a good several hours hammering it out. Keeping it to a 150 words wasn’t easy. Keeping it polite and cordial was even harder.

I looked around to see what other people might’ve been saying on the blogs. I came across quite a few that for the most part seemed to say that this article was no big deal, he was reporting it like it was, and so on. I became plagued by doubt and indecision. Was I digging a mountain out of a molehill? Had all that chest-beating gone to my head? Should I refrain from eating bananas? Maybe they were right. Maybe I was yet another uncouth “angry” deaf person, going around yelling my head off for no good reason, maybe I should shut my trap and go with the flow, adopt the sheep mentality, zone out to the vapid inanity that is ‘American Idol’. I decided to sleep on it.

As soon as I woke up Monday morning, I decided I was gonna send that letter. No way was I going to let the L.A. Times get away with this. The swine! Someone had to step up to put the ixnay on the hombre.

This is what I submitted, to both the editor and the author of the article:

Dear Editor,

Streeter’s in-depth article about the California School for the Deaf-Riverside’s football team gives insight to the challenges and experiences common to many deaf high school football players. However, as a deaf individual sensitive to mainstream clichés and outright ignorance regarding American Sign Language and the deaf community, I felt compelled to protest the article’s patronizing and condescending tone as well as point out some blatant inaccuracies. For example, facial/kinesthetic expressions are lexical, syntactic, and systematic aspects inherent to the language of ASL, they are not facial contortions nor “exaggerated, mime-like motions” employed because of a frustration borne “by the limits of their hand movements.” Additionally, the article’s redundant references to the “silent” world of the deaf fails to accurately represent the reality that deafness is, in fact, a spectrum ranging from mild hearing loss to profound deafness, and that some deaf people’s worlds are not altogether void of sound nor are their lives defined by the lack of such. Last but not least, deafness is a distinct cultural identity, which is why Streeter’s statement, “It was hard enough being deaf” would be taken as a insult for many deaf people across the nation. Would Streeter substitute “deaf” for “black”, “female”, or “gay”?

Thinking that would be the last of it, I dusted off my hands, and turned to passing out the exams. Imagine my delight when a mere few hours later, I received a reply from the author himself, Kurt Streeter. This is what he had to say:

Thanks, Allen,

I take seriously your concerns but I must say that I respectfully disagree with you. The way I see it the story is about Shawn and his struggles and how he overcomes them. The fact that you feel this story — a hero’s journey, really — is condescending or patronizing, I just am not sure how to respond to other than to say that I am sorry that you feel that way. I will say that this piece does not purport to be a broad-brush look at the deaf community, deaf culture, deaf identity, or an examination of the finer aspects of American Sign Language.

I’ll try to take other concerns one by one.

Regarding facial expressions. As I see it, and as Shawn explained to me, the kids on his campus often “mime” to get points across. I describe him doing this in the story, as he draws an imaginary noose around his neck, yanks it and jerks his head to one side with his mouth open. That’s what I consider to be miming. I think you’d find few people who would say otherwise. Shawn and I talked in depth about how he had to learn to add this kind of movement to augment the signing he was doing when he arrived on campus as around age 12. He also simply had to get better at all aspects of sign language, since he’d spent much of his life getting limited ASL instruction. This comes from him and I simply describe his feelings and what he told me he had to learn.

Regarding what you term a redundant use of the word “silence.” Well, there are exactly 4113 words in the story. Two of them are the word “silence.” I hardly call that redundant. Further, I use them when I describe him playing and when he is playing Shawn doesn’t hear anything. I get that from him. He’s a kid who does have a slight sliver of hearing, if the conditions are absolutely perfect and there’s no ambient sound around. He’s also a kid who, if you are standing two feet behind him and you shout his name, simply does not hear it. So, to me, silence is appropriate. Perhaps I could have written a section about the different levels of hearing loss, decibel readings, residual hearing, all of that, but this is a “narrative” type of story, a feature story. If I were writing for a medical journal, or another kind of story for our paper, then I might have gone into all of this. No need here as far as I am concerned.

Whether deafness is a distinct cultural identity or not isn’t really the point of the story or something I really want to get into. If it is to you, and I know it is to many, that’s great. But to deny that being deaf is hard, in this hearing oriented world, well, I find that quite interesting. To me, identity and how difficult life can be are two different things. You can have a strong, positive identity and also a hard life because of your circumstances. I’ll tell you this much, Shawn certainly feels that aspects of his life, because of his lack of hearing, are quite hard. It keeps him up at night. At the same time he is also proud of himself and his identity. That should be obvious if you read the story closely. Finally, as to whether or not I would write a sentence like “it was hard enough being black.” (Or substitute another minority.) If the story is about a black person who is having a tough time in life because of his or her skin color you can count on the fact that I would.

So, those are my points. Again, thanks for your response and for reading the story.

Kurt

Whoa. On one hand, I was blown away that he had taken the time and energy to sit down and actually reply in length to my letter. On the other hand, my indignation button had been pressed once again and as soon as I got home from the gym, I sat down, and fired off a response. And this is an abridged version of what I had to say (during which I imbibed several glasses of wine):

Hi Kurt,

I deeply appreciate your contacting me and your attempts to address my concerns.

Due to the extremely limited word count allowed for letters to the editor, I had a difficult time composing my letter. Perhaps now I can elaborate at length. First, let me begin by thanking you (and the Times) for taking the time to cover Shawn’s exploits and experience as the captain of his football team at Riverside. I, too, played three years of football in high school. My love for the game was such that because my high school didn’t have a football team, I had to travel to another school in the county and play on their football team (where I was the only deaf player). I feel you certainly nailed the unique nature of CSDR’s football team, the challenges they had to go through. In fact, at one point in my reading of the article, I got something stuck in my eye big time.

That being said, I fully understand and recognize that the article for what it is: a story about Shawn and what he had to go through last year. My beef is not with the raison d’etre (Shawn’s story) but how the story was told. For example, the first five paragraphs of this story all repeat either “silence” and/or a variation of “could not hear”. From the get-go, the reader is being conditioned that these students could not hear. No way, jose, they absolutely could not hear. And, just in case you didn’t get it the first time, they couldn’t hear, yo! Maybe this was a stylistic choice on your part or you wanted to definitively ensure that the reader, in case he or she hadn’t had coffee yet, understood that these kids were deaf.

I spent a number of years touring the country with the National Theatre of the Deaf and have acted with deaf theatre companies in Cleveland, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and with Deaf West Theatre here in L.A. We deaf actors have, upon reading reviews of our shows, grown resigned to the inevitable remarks and comments of “fingers fluttering in the air” (man, you have no idea how many times a variation of that sentence has been written) but when the bulk of the review focuses merely on the artistic beauty of the aforementioned hands in the air with disregard to the rest of the performance itself, it become exasperating for us. Granted, we understand that this is the way it is; a conundrum that will always accompany a life in deaf theatre.

Regarding facial expressions. As I see it, and as Shawn explained to me, the kids on his campus often “mime” to get points across….

If Shawn said he had to use “mime” to speak to other people on campus, then why wasn’t this mentioned in the article? Assuming the reader knows nothing about ASL, he/she is going to think that Shawn and the football players as well as any deaf person out there gets “frustrated by the limits of their hand movements” and has to resort to “contorting their faces and making exaggerated, mime-like motions with their bodies”. Why couldn’t you have just written that Shawn and his teammates use ASL to communicate with each other? What exactly is limiting about hand movements? This simply doesn’t make any sense whatsoever and, again, the reader is going to think that Shawn and his teammates are a few DNA strands shy of being full-blown hooting simians. ASL, as you probably no doubt noticed, is a visual language, and as I wrote before, is expressed through the visual medium. Your choice of words was baffling because I would think that after the amount of time you spent following the team, you would have gained an insight as to the visual vernacular nature of ASL. If this is what he told you, then so be it, but I do believe that the reader would be better served if this was mentioned. In fact, doing so would have served the deaf community a favor for many deaf children endure delayed exposure to language acquisition due to a number of reasons, chief among them belated access to ASL.

Regarding what you term a redundant use of the word “silence.” Well, there are exactly 4113 words in the story. Two of them are the word “silence.” I hardly call that redundant. Further, I use them when I describe him playing and when he is playing Shawn doesn’t hear anything. I get that from him. He’s a kid who does have a slight sliver of hearing, if the conditions are absolutely perfect and there’s no ambient sound around. He’s also a kid who, if you are standing two feet behind him and you shout his name, simply does not hear it. So, to me, silence is appropriate. Perhaps I could have written a section about the different levels of hearing loss, decibel readings, residual hearing, all of that, but this is a “narrative” type of story, a feature story. If I were writing for a medical journal, or another kind of story for our paper, then I might have gone into all of this. No need here as far as I am concerned.

I suppose I should admit to having a knee-jerk reaction to reading an article about the deaf with yet again what I felt were relentless emphasis on the “deafness” aspect rather than on Shawn and the football team itself. I understand where you’re coming from in regards to pursuing a “narrative” story but, still, as I said before, when hearing people write about “silence” and “could not hear” ad nauseam, it gets tiring, very fast. I realize there’s nothing I can do about it but in any case the least I can do is challenge you to see if you could write the same article without having to flog the “silence/couldn’t hear” aspect. I understand you might not have any control over the captions of the photos but there was one photo in particular that I found quite irritating and which fueled my overall indignation. It depicted the football team trotting onto the field accompanied by two Harley Davidson motorcycles. The caption said something to the effect that the players couldn’t hear the hogs. Oh, please. My hearing loss is labeled as “severe”; my dB loss is around in the upper ’90s. I wear hearing aids in order to listen to music and to speak with hearing people. However severe my hearing loss may be, sans hearing aids, I certainly can hear two Harleys muttering several feet away. Furthermore, like a hearing person would, I would actually FEEL them in conjunction to hearing them.

Whether deafness is a distinct cultural identity or not isn’t really the point of the story or something I really want to get into. If it is to you, and I know it is to many, that’s great. But to deny that being deaf is hard, in this hearing oriented world, well, I find that quite interesting….

Kurt, again, you wrote a nice article. I work as a secondary English teacher at a public school composed primarily of deaf Latino students. Most of the teachers at my school, hearing and deaf, all relished the attention and exposure that Shawn and his teammates received. However, all of us, to a big, fat T, were deeply offended by the “It was hard enough being deaf”. In fact, I was floored by your choice of words. No where in the preceding paragraphs has the reader seen any indication or reason as to why being deaf might be “hard” (except that they “could not hear”). The vast majority of the deaf population in America were either born deaf or deafened at an early age. To imply that deafness might be “hard” is astounding for a culture of people for whom the inability to hear has no relative impact on their daily lives. How can we miss something we never had in the first place? I brook no quarrel with you regarding Shawn’s identity and his travails dealing with his expectations, hopes, and dreams for the future but to summarily use that sentence is a trigger for many people, especially me. Even though I have a master’s and a teacher’s credential and have had a rich, fulfilling life, I still get this attitude all the time, daily, from hearing people. It is precisely this parochial attitude (thus my “patronizing and condescending” accusation) that led to the Deaf President Now movement in 1988 at Gallaudet (of which I was intimately involved with) that resulted in the first deaf president of that university as well as the recent uprising that occurred last fall at Gallaudet. Both rebellions occurred for a number of reasons but a chief underlying reason was a general frustration with how the deaf community at large still has to struggle in dealing with a dominant hearing society that still has a long way to go in recognizing and accepting deaf culture for what it is and not viewing it from a medical pathological perspective. Bottom line, many of us felt that particular sentence was a blanket remark with no apparent justification for it. Shawn might be having trouble emerging from the incommunicado of his youth, and his lack of access to ASL, but as we can all readily see, he’s one tough kid, and it’s readily apparent to me that he’s not going to use “being deaf” as a cop-out and a source of unhappiness for the rest of his life.

I could see the average reader sitting with his/her spouse at their favorite cafe reading all about Shawn and his angry “contorted” face, his guttural shouting, how being deaf was “hard enough”, yadda yadda yadda, and that reader is gonna turn to his wife and be going, “man, it must really suck to be deaf these days. those poor, poor deaf kids. Ooooh, our lattes are here!”

Please forgive my sarcasm but like I said before, this stuff be getting tiring. I can jabber at length about this and that but I think I’ve made my point(s) and I truly hope you understand where my frustrations with your article stem from. Again, I deeply appreciate your contacting me and I sincerely hope that what I’ve written has provided you an insight into my culture that you may not have otherwise experienced.

Kurt then emailed me again, thanking me for my “well put” reply. In a later email, he also mentioned that he has “had an overwhelmingly positive response from readers”. When I asked Kurt permission to publish our exchange on this blog, he replied:

Sure. You can put it up. I’ve been reading some of the blogs. It’s just really amazing to me the kind of converstation between journalists and readers that can exist today. I think it’s great, provided the conversation is civil. I’m quite open to it, and try to get back to people when I have time and so long as the notes I get aren’t rude. Now, I would still write the story the same way I did, but it does help inform me to get all viewpoints — it can only make me a smarter, more sensitive reporter — and it gives me ideas for future stories and different approaches to storytelling.

One thing I did find in my latest trip through various blogs was a bit of misinformation about how I went about reporting. In one of the blogs someone mentioned that I was originally going to focus on Selwyn, the star running back who left the team. That’s not really true. In the first weeks I was looking at a number of different kids to follow, Selwyn being one of them. By the time he left the team I had already pretty much decided to focus on Shawn. I picked Shawn largely because, of all the kids, he expressed himself the most about his desire for the team to win. The other kids cared, too, but he seemed to show it the most. That was my impression at least and that is what interested me in him to begin with. The fact that I found him to be a great kid who had changed and was maturing and learning about himself, and that he was a kid able to express his fears and reservations to me in an honest way, sealed the deal.

Although I still have issues with Kurt’s article, I nevertheless have to give him mad props for being so gracious and accommodating in pursuing this dialogue. It’s indeed refreshing to see that reporters like Kurt, despite whatever strong feelings I may have, are open to constructive criticism and to maintaining a civil discourse. In conclusion, it’s my hope that we all learn something from this.

In hindsight, I wish my response to him had been more cogent and organized. I had dashed it all out in one big hurry (You try doing this while grading finals, crunching grades, putting unruly students in half-nelsons, etc.).

Well, dear reader, what do you think?

Would it be within my right to issue a call to torches and pitchforks, to summon the local chapter of wild-eyed deaf militants, and go sack the L.A. Times building, all the while hooting and bellowing in the usual deaf “guttural” voices?

Or has my angst been just a waste of a hullabaloo, the usual “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” putting Mr. Streeter in the clear with his “narrative” writing approach?

What say you?

Allen Neece was born deaf in Washington, DC to a hearing family and grew up mainstreamed across the river in Arlington, VA. He holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Deaf Education from CSUN. Allen currently teaches English to deaf secondary students in Los Angeles and lives in Echo Park. He nurses a lifelong passion for punk rock, hip-hop, politics, and high adventures in the great outdoors. He regrets that he still only has four tattoos.