Gallaudet and deaf identity

Lennard Davis at Inside Higher Ed on "The Real Issues at Gallaudet":

For non-deaf people, this issue was perhaps the hardest thing to understand. Why would anyone reject a president for not being “deaf enough” when the person was in fact unable to hear since birth? The difficulty might be easier to understand if you imagined deciding to elect a president of the United States who spoke with a heavy accent and whose command of English was less than perfect. Add to this the fact that one of the new definitions of being deaf isn’t that your ears don’t work — it’s that you belong to a linguistic community the way that Hispanics or the French do. Your community has a literature, a culture, a history, and a language — but the leader of your community doesn’t share fully this cultural palette. Wouldn’t you want someone who was fully of your identity?

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