Word: deaf
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...student at Gallaudet University in Washington called that year's protests demanding a deaf president of the school the "Selma of the deaf." Founded in 1864, Gallaudet is the deaf world's premier institution, and yet it had never been led by a deaf person. The protests carried the same moral clarity as the legendary civil rights march, and they succeeded. The hearing president resigned, and I. King Jordan became Gallaudet's first deaf leader. But now Jordan is leaving, and the appointment of his replacement has ignited a new round of protests that lack all the moral clarity...
...which people grow up excluded from many conversations--that she is a poor communicator. By that they mean several things. Some say she makes top-down decisions. Others say she lacks vision for a job that isn't just a university presidency but almost a secretary-generalship of the deaf world. "It's like in Islam, people go to their Mecca for a holy religious cleansing," Lawrence Fleischer, dean of deaf studies at California State University, Northridge, says through an interpreter. "In our world, we see Gallaudet as the Mecca...
...impassioned contingent means something more troubling when it says Fernandes doesn't communicate well. Many who identify culturally as "big-D Deaf" learned American Sign Language before English. Fernandes did not. She grew up speaking English and says she didn't find her "path into the deaf culture" until she was 23. That's too late for some opponents. "People like [Fernandes] who entered the deaf world later in life can become culturally deaf, but some don't ... They sign stiffly. The eye contact, the body movements--all the cultural stuff is slightly off. They're like second-language learners...
...police brutality--seem quaintly simple compared with the 1989 storming of St. Patrick's Cathedral by AIDS activists. Gallaudet's current protests, which began months ago and have involved blockades and arrests and charges of violence on both sides, aren't Selma; they're Chicago in 1969, the deaf community's Days of Rage...
...deaf world, the fight over radicalism was forced on a fragile, just emerging sense of identity by technology and the law. Since 1988, the definition of who is "deaf enough" has been ratcheted up as barriers to the deaf have fallen away. Many parents have their deaf infants surgically equipped with cochlear implants; depending on how much hearing they gain, those kids will grow up with little or no connection to the deaf world. Federal law requires schools to accommodate deaf students, meaning more deaf kids can go to any high school and college they want, not just oases like...