Run, do not walk, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Just run over to Deaf in the City’s most recent entry about Deafhood. Unlike the balderdash that has come from certain blogs that-shall-not-be-named, Rainmound is actually taking the time to break it down and keep it real.

Which pretty much means: instead of platitudes, he dishes out stuff and analysis you can actually chew on. Agree or no, it’s worth a read.

I find the whole concept of Deafhood interesting. Not Deafhood itself, that is, but the community’s sudden and very recent interest in it. And during a seminar last night, I finally figured out why.

“Never enter a field without knowing its geneology,” said my professor.

We’re doing a research project on the trope of the Harlem Renaissance (nee The New Negro Renaissance), and read Rayford Logan’s monumental Betrayal of the Negro. In it, Logan publishes a list of physical characteristics that anthropologists used to try and rationalize the inferiorizing of certain ethnicities (i.e. skull size of Anglos was larger than that of African-American and Chinese peoples).

It was in the post-bellum period, said my prof, that anthropology really emerged as an academic discipline. “What is anthropology anyway?” My classmates were silent. My mind was racing - I could remember something from my women’s lit survey, but it wasn’t articulating itself.

Finally, he answered: “Anthropology is the study of the ‘other.’” Ah-ha. Now I remembered: women’s lit theorist, writer, filmmaker, and teacher Trinh T. Minh-ha, who wrote Woman, Native, Other, spent a bit of time on this. My professor continued: And then because we now had a valid academic field focused on polarizing differences between races, we (meaning Western and white academics) had a means by which to render every non-white person as “other” and therefore deem them more fit subjects to be ruled.

“Anthropology,” he claimed with a flourish, “is the handmaiden of imperialism.”

The significance of anthropology emerging during the post-Reconstruction period in American history (known, ironically, as the Redemption period) shouldn’t be overlooked. After all, the North won the Civil War military-wise, but if you look at the consequences and the inferiorization of the African-American and the American Indian, the South won the war culturally.

And that anthropology validated many of the Southern Democrat’s claims of white supremacy is no coincidence.

Back to Deafhood: I find it no coincidence that we started paying attention to Paddy Ladd’s work (which was published in 2003, but only really gained widespread recognition recently), Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, at the same time the Gallaudet presidential protests erupted.

Certainly, there will be retorts that the protests had nothing to do with the BOT’s selection’s culturally deaf status, but the reasons given by oh-so-articulate protestors — not necessarily affiliated with the FSSA, mind you — in media reports and in vlogs makes it apparent that at least some people think the presidential selection has a heck of a lot to do with understanding (and possibly, representing?) Deaf culture. Discussions of Deafhood, as a result, have mushroomed.

To me, at least, the connection between Deafhood and the protests, wasn’t immediately apparent.

Whether these people (who point to Dr. Fernandes’ inability to represent culturally Deaf people as a flaw) truly understand and represent what’s caused the disenfranchised feeling on Gallaudet’s campus remains to be investigated by future academics or researchers (or bloggers).

Personally, I’m of the opinion that there are things in the Gallaudet community that need serious examining. But it makes me wary when we see people misunderstanding the protest’s true beef and taunting the BOT’s selection for her less-than-fluid signing skills, among other things.

But along with the Gallaudet protests came a discussion of Deafhood. In his blog, which excerpts Ladd’s explanation of Deafhood, Rainmound writes:

We should not be forced to struggle to explain and justify our existence all the time. But Deaf people know this struggle. Anyone who has been asked “What is it like to be a Deaf person,” anyone who’s had to explain about interpreters or work out ways to take control of a communication situation before it takes control of you, we all know this. We have all had to summon the courage to speak up, to stand up for ourselves and for others. A lot of this courage comes from each other.

Like Rainmound, I find this explanation of Deafhood resonates in me deeply.

It ricochets against all of my memories of being the token deaf member of the after-school cueing club, of my mom nudging me in the mall every time we saw someone else using their hands to communicate (”Look,” she’d exclaim in a whisper, “There’s deaf people!”), every time someone asked if I received a certain radio station on my hearing aids. And it especially echoes off of all the work I’ve done, especially through adolescence, to fight the implications my hearing family and both deaf and hearing peers gave me that, because I was different, I needed to assimilate and fix myself, and now that I’m a mother of a deaf daughter, that I need to fix her as well.

And though I know very little about the book, I’m very aware that all of a sudden, Deafhood is the thing to talk about in our community. Aside from the book, there’s a Deafhood chapter (in California somewhere?). There are Deafhood presentations being made. Deafhood blogs.

Well, that all seems well and good. I’ll reserve my opinion until I read the book.

But when I read Rainmound’s analysis, I think: Wow. Powerful. I could really have used this when I was growing up, even if I wasn’t a signer yet. I was still struggling to claim my place in my world even when people implicitly told me I didn’t belong.

Where were you Deafhood debaters when the book first came out? Why did I have to find out about you, Deafhood, just at the moment that newspapers were confusing a select few claims that Gallaudet’s president had to conform to a specific idea of being D/deaf with an entirely separate issue of social justice? Why did I have to form an impression of Deafhood as solely being the compatriot of rallies on the steps of Chapel Hall?

Nonetheless, just like anthropology has had a less than sparkly birth but still — in my opinion — has merit as an academic field, I’d say the idea of Deafhood, in spite of possibly becoming historically connected with controversy, is worth every ounce of self-understanding it gives us. Any help towards the ancient Greek mandate “Know thyself” is always appreciated, isn’t it?

Now, as Rainmound has implored many of us to do, I’m off to go buy the book and actually read it before I say any more about stuff I really don’t know about.

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