Content area
Full Text
Abstract
There is a historical legacy of dual discrimination and institutional oppression against Black d/Deaf students within the educational system. This oppression has manifested itself in many ways including in the classroom as the hidden curriculum (i.e., the unattended outcomes of the schooling process). The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study is to understand the ways in which racism and audism might still contribute to the hidden curriculum in the college classroom and how Black d/Deaf college students resist this oppression. The theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory and Critical Deaf Theory along with the analytical frameworks, theory of microaggressions and Black Deaf Community Cultural Wealth guide the data collection and analysis. The findings are presented as an inverted counternarrative showing how students experience issues of audism and racism through faculty's non-diverse curriculum, hearing-centric evaluation methods, and racist and audist faculty-student interactions. The study concludes with practical recommendations for faculty.
Keywords: Audism, d/Deaf College Students, Racism
"No, 'We are all deaf,' but 'We're White deaf and you are Black deaf, and there is a difference. ' A lot of these African American deaf students are not prepared for that, not so much the academics. You are not able to be Black at Gallaudet. You can be deaf, but you can't be Black." (Borum, 2012, p. 12).
In their book, Black and Deaf in America: Are We That Different?, Hairston and Smith (1983) stated that there are approximately two million Black people with some form of hearing loss, and of those, 22,000 are profoundly deaf. This number has changed since the 1980s, and as of 2011 Black d/Deaf2 (Bd/Deaf) people made up approximately 8% or 3 million of the total Black population (National Technical Institute for the Deaf, 2011; Rastogi, Johnson, Hoeffel, & Drewery, 2011). The question of how different are White and Bd/Deaf students or Black hearing and Bd/Deaf students greatly depends on the individual student and him, her, or zir1 lived experiences. Bd/Deaf students share characteristics and values specific to the d/Deaf community, such as hearing loss, communication barriers, and audism2, as well as facing issues that are unique to the plight of the Black community, such as historical and systemic racism (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Scholars have stated that Bd/Deaf students are...