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One Step, Two Step

Name: Gary Roberts
Email: jg86@hotmail.com
Date: 05 Aug 2000
Time: 02:56:15

Story

I came out of Gallaudet College in 1972. I was not quite 21years old -- young for a deaf person to be graduating college. The years seemed to have run together for me and I was not sure where time had gone or what I had gained from the experience.

I came to Gallaudet with little intact communication skills in Sign Language. This should have been a huge disadvantage for me. In truth, it turned out to be an asset. In the late '60s and early '70s, most of the faculty at Gallaudet could not sign. The people who were really at a disadvantage was deaf people who were users of American Sign Language. People like myself were welcomed by the faculty because we met their middle class hearing culture idea of what a college student should be like. There were deaf faculty members, but they were mostly powerless and sprinkled throughout the departments.

The impression that Gallaudet made on me at that time was that my circumstances of late deafness was an asset. With my intelligible speech and my acceptable written, expressive language and my ability to read, I was a rising star among the faculty. I happened to be profoundly deaf also and that acted as a bar to integration with the hard of hearing who sat mouthing words together around and about campus. So I ended up pretty much and outsider, with some friends and membership in fringe groups. Essentially, though, I was everywhere and nowhere -- a member in some things but actually not in anything.

I developed a third eye in a matter of speaking. I became a student of human behavior because I sought to understand what I could not be. I sought a rationale for my loneliness and non-belonging. These feelings drew me into psychology and lead me to become a counselor. I did not seek solutions as much as I sought insight and the ability to understand what was happening around me.

After Graduation I went to work in public welfare as a case worker. I was the only deaf employee of the agency and, in the years before accommodation, became a topic of discussion. I had to sink or swim on my own. I was sent out to work in neighborhoods with deaf people who were mostly Afro-American. I ended up going into areas that other white employees would not go due to fear of injury or death.

Once I was known on the street as a deaf man, the community kind of kept an eye on me and I went everywhere and was never accosted. So my disability gave me a passport into the community and through doors into people's homes.

After working for two years, I applied and was accepted into graduate school in the field of social work. I was once again to be the only profoundly deaf person in the program. I had to fight with the state office of Vocational Rehab to get them to pay for an interpreter for my classes. They finally put up the funding but left the actual locating and hiring of an interpreter to me.

In my first year of school, two professors denied me entrance into their classes. They said they did not feel a deaf person could do the quality of work they expected of a graduate student. The said all of this while talking to my interpreter and not looking at me. I kept interrupting and insisting they talk to me but to no avail. My faculty advisor was a Afro- American, and he took a stand for me with the professors. He insisted that I deserved a chance and spent long hours with me, reassuring me and encouraging me to stick with the program.

My disability taught me the burden of rejection -- rejection not because I was unqualified but because I was deaf. I was not going to be given a chance because the professors' bias was so strong toward people with disabilities. My deafness gave me an outlook that lead to my becoming a stronger person. I knew what I was capable of and I was not going to let other people set limitations for me. Over the years, I would run into road blocks and dead ends, but I would always put forth the effort because I believed in myself.

Now to fast forward 18 years to a meeting with a man who was a Regional Director of the Program I was employed by. He looks across the table at me and says, "I hear you don't like people like me; you only like people who are disabled like yourself. Why are you working with people who are not deaf like yourself? You should be working with deaf people; that is where your talent is."

For five years, I had dealt with this man and my disability had not prepared me for him nor had I impacted him at all. The ADA had been around for several years, and we were the lead agency in the state for its enforcement. He told me that I was one of the enemy, and I could not be trusted. My disability had taught me that life as a disabled person is unpredictable and uncharted. I choose to be who I am and not like a lot of people: change to meet the bias or limitations of the person we are with at the moment. If our disability teaches us anything, it teaches us the need to survive and live to the next day. Life is terribly lonely when you travel uncharted waters, but you push forward because this is what you know and who you are.

If my disability has taught me one thing, it has taught me the truth in this quote from the Bible: "To love mercy, seek justice and walk humbly with the Lord."

Copyright © 2000 Gary Roberts. All rights reserved.

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Re: Some Perspective

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