Collective Consciousness of Voice: Listening to Black D/deaf Youth in an Antiblack and Audist World

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-2 - Black and Latinx Youth Identities in Action: Activism, Affirmation, and Exclusion Within Community-Based Spaces

Abstract

Overview: We tend to only value voices we can hear. We pay attention to particular voices and how they are used to evoke change. Scholars have argued that the notion of voice carries power and privilege. Power and privilege is used to dictate the direction of various political and educational discourses. Critical pedagogy scholars advocate centering youth voice—particularly youth of color in order to develop a nuanced understanding of activism and discourse surrounding social change and liberation. Although well-intentioned, the current concept of youth voice has been imagined, theorized and reserved for young people who use audible forms of expression. As a result, Black d/Deaf youth’s challenges, joys, frustrations, within and outside of schools, are ignored and often not considered in educational discourse, movements for education reform and Black liberation.

Language and culture are entangled with America's history of racism (Flores & Rosa, 2015). Racial hierarchies birthed from a white supremacist society aligns with oppressive systems and dictates whose language and cultural forms of knowledge have power. Thus, the interlocking of Blackness and deafness creates compounded forms of oppression that manifest itself in hearing-dominant school practices, hyper-visibility and a sense of twoness. The purpose of this work is to understand how Black-d/Deaf youth’s stories of existing and surviving within inherently audist and racist spaces provides intellectual space to (re)imagine voice.

Theories/Methods: Theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality, DeafCrit, Black-Deaf Community Cultural Wealth work to reinforce agency and a strengths-based approach by directly naming the ways white supremacy and patriarchy forms multilayered oppression while still honoring the complexity and sophistication of Black-Deaf youth’s voices in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. The ability to provide multiple opportunities for “voice” in privileges settings without further marginalizing communities is a concern that should be constantly addressed by qualitative researchers from various disciplines. With this mind, this case study centers the voices of seven self-identifying Black-d/Deaf youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Findings/Implications: A major theme that emerges from the findings illustrates Black-D/deaf youths’ lived-experiences particularly how they construct a Black identity “in-between two worlds” (Black experience and D/deaf experience) and how they endure hypervisibility and invisibility in various spaces. I argue that family communication barriers, anti-Black racism in Deaf spaces and a general lack of understanding of Black-Deaf youth’s specific needs in various educational and social spaces have systematically created compounded forms of oppression for Black-Deaf youth. Yet, still within this study the experts’ various forms of expression and storytelling are vessels to develop a collective conscious of voice in the context of, raciolinguistics, Youth Participatory Action Research, and Deaf education. More specifically, the experts’ experiences provide a critical awareness of how d/Deafness ruptures the “laws” of voice. Furthermore, Black-D/deaf youth voice should be in direct conversations with raciolingustic scholars, youth workers, Black educators and National platforms in order to articulate a collective vision and agenda for Black liberation.

Author

• Mary L. Johnson, University of Wisconsin - Madison