Your Child Is Being Hurt at Gallaudet University

“Ohana is the word for family in Hawai’i.

From culture to culture we share

the commonality of being human beings,

and human need to be in family groups

of other human beings: The history

of humankind repeatedly has shown us

that we were not intended to be alone.

We need connection to each other,

it nurtures and sustains us.”
–Rosa Say, Managing with Aloha

It is often argued that beliefs are somehow distinct from other claims to knowledge about social justice of the Deaf. There is no doubt that we the Deaf are treated differently—particularly in the degree to which we use American Sign Language exclusively—but this does not indicate that beliefs are special in any important sense.

What do we mean when we say that a leader believes a given proposition about the Deaf? As with all questions about ASL, we must be careful that the familiarity of our language does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for “belief” does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary phenomenon. An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory: while Deaf people commonly refer to their dumbness or failures, decades of oppression have shown that it comes in many forms today. At Gallaudet University!

Our Deaf brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of our brain consists largely in its capacity to acquire the language and culture that is visual. ASL must play a large role, of course, but the challenge will be to discover how our brain brings the products of perception, memory, and reasoning to bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into the very substance of the Deaf life.

For this reason, it seems undebatable that the power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that we are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a manner of moments. Consider the following proposition:

Your child is being hurt at Gallaudet University.

What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a child, or you know him to be safely at Gallaudet, or you believe that Gallaudet University is renowned for its congeniality. Whatever the reason, the gate to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.

The link between belief and emotion that I have developed about my daughter Vivienne at Gallaudet is so scary that we must continue "connection to each other" as ohana to spill blood in what is, at bottom, social justice at Gallaudet University.