Diversity at Gallaudet University is racist
I am half white (Full disclosure: I was born to Indonesian father and Dutch mother but I look brown, neither Indonesian nor Dutch) and I think diversity is racist. It is racist because it presumes that the color of an African American or the surname of a Hispanic defines her thinking, that somehow she will bring something different to the intellectual table just because she looks African American or her last name sounds Hispanic. Talk about shallowness!

I do generally agree that there must be a way of getting around doing anything substantial about providing Deaf people with the opportunity to better themselves in the way they themselves see fit (as opposed to being told they are better off because Gallaudet University President designate JKF is now trying to articulate between two schools—the Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences Department, that works on cochlear implants, and the ASL Department, that provides education in sign language, deaf culture and deaf history.) Gallaudet University should be the community of alienation, accommodation and affirmation wherein each school pursues its core subject matter. For example, ASL Department is about ASL per se, not “education in sign language, deaf culture and deaf history.”

Some say a degree of diversity is a good thing, but within certain demographics it has overwhelmed the old Gallaudet politics, and there are plenty of people in this or that minority culture for whom the old-fashioned non-cultural politics is more relevant. For most people of any group, including the minority groups, the specifically diversity issues are a small proportion of the actually important yet colorblind issues affecting Deaf people everywhere.

I think that diversity should be pretty much extinct at Gallaudet University, in the sense that Gallaudet is quite welcoming to anyone Deaf. That hasn’t always been true. Language, communication and skin color racism exists in the term of subtle diversity at Gallaudet University.