I have every confidence that Gallaudet is here to stay with some bumpy roads ahead to overcome.

PWD?

Your logic is great! I understand perfectly… and right there is what I mean: you also exemplify perfectly the argument that a person CAN move back and forth between “cliques,” so to speak. In other words “identity” need not be so rigid… it can be fluid. And I think that one should TRY to make it fluid, at least some of the time. You only get one life, right? I’d rather spend mine exploring as much as I can, talking/signing to everyone I can, letting go of my one little narrow limited worldview and embracing somebody else’s… because that ENRICHES me… that’s an ADVANTAGE to me.

It’s just that for me, as I said, there are simple, healthy, fucntional limits. I’ll TRY to meet anyone halfway… it’s just that I won’t try and try and try and try and try. This is a very bitter lesson that I have learned from “friends” whom I thought would be there for me forever, but surprise. Same thing goes for family members, your spouse, etc. Who is with you today could be gone tomorrow. I would always try to meet people in the middle but I wouldn’t stay in dysfunctional relationships (and that includes dysfunctional relationships with “mainstream” society) any longer than it took me to recognize them as such.

Hopefully that doesn’t come across as arrogant. I like to think it’s just assertive and healthy. I’m done with sickness. And I think that a lot of deaf children are stuck in exactly that: sickness that damn near destroys them before they ever arrive at Gallaudet. I’d do almost anything to change that. I think at lot of people would–if only because they remember how it felt. All they need is maybe a roadmap showing them HOW they can effectively do this.

That and just a little faith.

That is my aim in saying that us deaf have to be “aggressors” for lack of a better word. If we want people to stop treating us like we are zoo animals, we have to work to overcome their pre-fab understanding of deaf people. Of course, if one doesn’t care a whit about hearing folks or interaction with them, then one would get along better. But we humans are social animals, and while quite unfair, it’s a fact of life that the ones that are different in any way have to prove they belong. Same thing happens at Gallaudet. New signers are tolerated until expert signers get bored of the novelty and move back into their super-fast ASL cliques. I should know. I’ve been on the new signer side of the coin. I didn’t let it stop me though, and because I was assertive in my requests to be included, in my observation skills, in requesting people to repeat their message, and in asking others to teach me this sign, that grammar, and so on, I graduated four years later a mere shadow of my former timid, SEE-ing self. I got involved in a culture that was totally foreign to me as a late-deafened young adult. I guess my thrust here is if hearing/HoH/non-native signers can be assertive and find their niche in deaf culture, why shouldn’t we expect the same of deaf folks out in the hearing world? Why the double standard? Do you seemy logic? If it’s flawed, help me out here. Thanks! And Chris, as always, your replies are thoughtful and appreciated.

For me personally, it’s a question of fuel. I only have so much energy. I obtained my high school diploma, my BA and my MA, and I will soon obtain my Ph.D. all from hearing institutions. I have no problem really making hearing friends or going up to hearing people. “Aggressor” isn’t the term I’d choose (though I know what you mean), but I also long ago learned that there’s a downside to always having to go to them… you end up becoming surrounded by people who don’t realize that a healthy relationship means that half the time they ought to be coming to YOU. And that simply leads to emotional burnout.

Now if my standing demand that people meet me in the middle, meet me halfway, seems to anyone here to be an unfair thing… okay… but then I don’t really have anything more to say to you on this topic, because I find it exhausting to have to do all of the work. I have better things to do with my time than read hearing peoples’ lips every damn day. I have better things to do than check over my shoulder every five seconds to make sure that hearing people aren’t calling out to me.

My own parents and most of my brothers and sisters do not sign. I haven’t cut them out of my life, but I match their level of effort to meet me halfway. When they write to me, I write to them… I might even pop off a few emails all on my own, thus seizing the initiative, but if I don’t hear back from them for a while, I eventually just stop writing them. Same thing goes for my friends. I have both hearing and deaf friends (in fact I have about equal numbers of both), but I don’t have many friends who can’t sign. That’s just the way it is. If you want to be my friend, learn to sign. If you don’t want to learn to sign, we’re probably not going to become friends. This isn’t to say I’ll hate your guts or be rude to you or anything. It’s just the way it is. I have a couple of friendships with people that are still based on note-writing and emails, but I find that kind of stuff naturally fades away after a few beers or after hanging out a few times. Just about everyone that wants to keep hanging out with me seems to WANT to learn to sign. Those that don’t just sort of drift away. Result: I have a pretty good number of really close, awesome, cooperative, sharing friends, a lot of more casual friends who communicate with me easily, and I know almost nobody who constantly gives me **** about how I choose to communicate. How is that a bad system?

In other words, it’s not a discriminatory thing. It’s an accessibility thing. And that definitely goes for the work environment, too. I’ll work in all-hearing environments, and I’ll work in all-deaf environments, or any mixture. But I won’t tolerate being “beat up” by anyone over things I have no control over.

I remember once I used to work as a busboy in this restaurant… a woman employee there got mad at me because I had an easier time understanding the deep-voiced men than I did her comparatively higher voice (this was back when I could still hear a little bit). No kidding, THIS was why she was mad. Without me ever having been rude to her or having slacked off on the job or anything like that. So what I did, right then and there, was freeze her out. After a couple of days she noticed this big time, believe me, and cornered me on my behavior,. She wanted to know–if you can dig this–why I was mad. I told her to either treat me with respect or leave me alone. She said she didn’t understand, and I said that was too bad… treat me with respect or leave me alone. I just kept repeating this until she went away. Eventually she got some other job, and after that I got some other job.

Moral of the story: her going away and leaving me alone did not in any way negatively impact upon my life. Me not giving her any further explanation did not in any way negatively impact upon my life. If the world doesn’t owe me anything, then that works both ways, friend. I don’t owe IT anything. I don’t owe it to anyone to hop around like a puppy trying to keep them in my life by conforming to their ways–even if their ways exclude me 90% of the time. I can be friends with who I want, I can work where I want. It’s my choice, and I choose two things: I won’t tolerate disrespect, and I won’t expend any more energy than I have to on people who won’t meet me halfway.

So when you talk about that girl who left Gallaudet to go to a hearing school… I really do have to sigh in exasperation, especially over what so many people continue to perceive as “victim mentality.” By leaving Gallaudet in the first place she was taking responsibility for her education. How can a person who accepts responsibility for herself be a victim? Nonetheless plenty of people here and in the community at large would’ve seen her as a wimp and told her to suck it up. Now she’s in a hearing school being ignored by Hearing America at large… and what happens? Again, her fault. Jesus, BACK OFF. Believe it or not, not everything under the damned sun is a deaf person’s fault.

Can anyone say: “internalized oppression?”

The shiny, squeaky-clean hearing people do screw it up TOO, once in a great while.

Scroll down to the bottom, will you? Thanks.

Dirty laundry is right.