Hearing Supremacy: The Deniability of Ethical Citizenship of Deaf Identified Community Members

ID: A dark grey bodyperson with a light switch on in the middle and papers in right hands. Mouth on the bodyperson is open to express in a logical explaining stance. Dark talk bubbles are above the bodyperson. (From left to right in black Open Sans font): "I'll tell you later". "BASL/ASL is not a language". "Can you read lips?" "You're deaf? Oh I'm sorry!"

On the lower section:

"Nevermind, not important". "Are you deaf or what?". "It's too much work trying to communicate with you". "Sorry, I don't know how to sign". "Deaf people are stupid".  "Tone down your expression".

[ID ends.]

Creativity spark idea credit: Ali Hamar/Creative design: Ashanti Monts-Tréviska

A video includes a person of Afro-Cuban descent with dark curly hair and glasses is wearing a brown sweater jacket with light blue crossed scarf. Background: dark grey with colorful hanging picture complimented side soft lighting.

[CC]

Transcript: https://writer.zohopublic.com/writer/published/c583b4d5850ab5af940e1925dd0f59ad38c7e

Duration: 29:18 mins

by Ashanti Monts-Tréviska, Community Steward/Communication Equity Facilitator

2021/04/11

Reflective Struggle  

As I looked out the window from my home office room to take a break from work, the reflective space I occupied invoked my pondered thoughts to appear out of nowhere when I found myself frustrated about a lot of things. I found myself struggling to convey the invalidated frustrations that have been building up over the years. Three years ago, I had experienced an unpleasant situation that led to social alienation by the hearing Black community members in the local social justice community. What actually happened was that I noticed one of the Black community members was demonstrating oppressive behavior by not including me in the critical conversation or by talking over me when supporting the work of the local Black Lives Matter chapter. The experience of social exclusion via their unconscious hearing privilege didn't make me feel welcomed as a whole person. I was basically a sub-human in their eyes because of the cultural ignorance as an inner residue of their unchecked belief systems. I shared with the Black community members that audism was being practiced by them. They got so upset with me for calling them in and immediately accused me of bullying them. How could I be the bully when they are practicing the underrepresented system of oppression? Their gaslighting was harmful to my consciousness because I happened to be a Deaf community member who speaks American Sign Language (ASL) as a primary language in everyday life. I have attempted to clarify the misunderstanding with them, however, they chose not to listen to what I needed to say. Was addressing harmful behaviors a wrong thing thing to do? Or was the conscience of supporting people to hold themselves accountable for producing harmful behaviors making me a bad person? Eventually, I realized that I was simply misunderstood due to the cultural conflict occurred in the space. Their choice to react against me was a demonstration of cultural ignorance and the fear of what they don't understand.

Audism was an unfamiliar word to them and to a lot of people. When people are called out as an audist (practitioner of audism), they flail around because they feel they are being attacked. What do you call that kind of fragility? Hearing fragility, it is. Audism is an action of social violence that dehumanized Deaf identified people in social spaces or in structural spaces. I struggled to guide a lot of hearing people to realize that they were demonstrating audist behavior or attitude. I had asked myself why they have a hard time understanding what I was trying to convey to them. I actualized that the language tools that I have been accustomed to were not effective in guiding people to be more conscious of their harmful behavior in the Pacific Northwest.

Connecting the Dots: Coining Hearing Supremacy  

I decided to play with the words in a creative way to increase the reflexive awareness in hearing people. When I read the book written by Rensmaa Menakem about his familial interaction with his grandmother, his concept of white body supremacy resonated with me on a different level. I quickly connected with the reframed understanding of audism from a metaphysical perspective. Hearing supremacy, as a reframed term, offered me so much clarity on how dominant narratives can reproduce various forms of harm and number of things. A lot of people, in general, are familiar with the term of white supremacy because it is well talked about in social media outlets, in books, in alternative media outlets and more. That means people could connect with the concept of hearing supremacy better than the concept of audism. In other words, the theoretical construct of audism presented by the Deaf scholars didn't elicit keen curiosity in the minds of people who intentionally or unintentionally benefit from hearing supremacy.

Hearing supremacy can be best understood as an encompassing ideological system that denotes that the ability to hear is a superior trait to have as social capital currency in civil societies. Any deviations from hearing norms is deemed as abnormal. Hearing supremacy is a byproduct of human supremacy or anthropocentrism that benefits from unilateral power dynamics in play. To clarify this, audism is a result of hearing supremacy, yet, they are interchangeable. To support the working theoretical definition of hearing supremacy, Eckert described audism as a "schema of audiocentric assumptions and attitudes that are used to rationalize differential stratification, supremacy, and hegemonic privilege".

The Consequential Impact of Hearing Supremacy  

Hearing supremacy influences various knowledge systems dating back to the earliest era as classical period. The earliest knowledge systems dating back to the era of classical period have given birth to the hearing supremacist ideologies. Aristotle, the most noted philosopher, held a belief that Deaf/deaf babies should be left in the forests to die because their existence had no value on earth. Hearing supremacy breeds auditory industrial complex (AIC) (Eberwein, 2007). This industrial complex, akin to the military industrial complex and prison industrial complex, acts as an aggressive power and control tool used by medical professionals, government agencies and manufacturing firms to exploitatively target the bodies of Deaf children through the invasive medical processes of amplification devices and corrective surgeries. This is an emergent understanding of hearing body supremacy as one of the forms of internal colonialism (Eckert, 2010).

Hearing supremacy has a profound effect on Deaf education, language rights of Deaf community members in terms of communication equity, language justice, and language deprivation, economic autonomy of Deaf citizens in terms of social mobility, access to equitable healthcare, freedom and safety of BIPOC Deaf community members, and intercultural/intracultural accountability. Deaf communities are far from liberating itself from the bondage of hearing supremacy largely due to lack of whole stewardship skills or holistic leadership skills. The need for intergenerational/intragenerational healing has not been fully grasped among the majority of Deaf citizens or Deaf community members because of the deprivation of representational information or whole transmission of knowledge that they need to access to understand the meaning of social and cultural injustice. Discussion about ethical citizenship of Deaf community members need to happen to begin the healing from decades of hearing supremacy.

Narrative Disparities  

Again, white supremacy and hearing supremacy go hand in hand with each other. It is important to acknowledge that racial experience and Deaf experience or cultural-linguistic experience cannot be compared with each other for a few reasons. Deaf experience (Deafhood or Deaf ethnicity) itself is a global metaphysical experience.  To rephrase this, comparison of such diverse experiences to another is a greater harm because of the reproduction of reductive thinking or attitude. Members of Deaf communities have different living experiences due to cultures, political system, education system, languages, social attitudes, and more in different countries. It is important to note that the meaning of deafness is not analogous with our understanding of blackness. Some Deaf community members fare better education wise in developing countries than those in developed countries. Racism is pervasive in Deaf communities because the origins of Deaf American education focused on quality education for white deaf students. Language deprivation is higher among BIPOC Deaf students because of historical exclusion based on ancestral slavery, racial segregation, classism fueled by capitalism, and cultural ignorance based on so-called colorblindness. Forced assimilation is a good example of narrative disparity because Deaf community members especially BIPOC Deaf community members are expected to accept the white hearing patriarchal supremacist narratives as dominating force in denying liberated agency and autonomy of Deaf individuals to assert continued cultural superiority.  

Ableism, on another hand, is a separate system of oppression because it is a social justice derivative of critical disability theory. Ableism and audism are not interchangeable, however, they are the symptoms of white supremacy. The monopolizing narrative of ableism can perpetuate hearing supremacist attitudes to deny the actual existence of audism. For an example, most dictionaries recognize ableism and autism more than audism. Audism, as a hearing supremacist system of oppression, is virtually nonexistent or is not well versed in our social justice vocabulary. Why is that? Ableism demands for social and ethical citizenship, however, it doesn't demand the same for audism because of the laissez-faire attitudes. Some deaf people confuse those two terms because of their internalized belief that they are part of the categorized group of Disabled people. It is harmful to assume that ableism strictly applies to Deaf community members because many Deaf community members are able bodied privileged and can dehumanize the presence of DeafBlind and DeafDisabled community members.

However, the narratives of ableism and audism can agree on one thing: they both share critical goals of dismantling white supremacy that denied the need for the inclusive process of civic engagement, ethical citizenship (community solidarity opportunities), intercultural accountability (social justice) and autonomous self-determination (liberatory action of re-humanization). Some Disability justice activists forget that ableism supports the concept of consented assimilation while the majority of Deaf human rights activists opposed forced assimilation or unconsented integration to keep Deaf educational institutions open to provide equitable language access for Deaf children. Ableism can benefit from hearing supremacy unintentionally because people will listen to the grievances of hearing Disabled community members more than listening to Deaf human rights/language rights activists who are working to raise the awareness of the need for transformative justice to acknowledge them as members of a cultural-linguistic ethnic group or cultural-language minority group rather than being members of disability groups.

ID: On blackboard background from top to bottom:

White chalked words are in the six white chalk circles (l to r, top to bottom): “hearing privilege. hearing fragility. audism. hearing body supremacy. auditory industrial complex. monocultural assimilation.”

Middle section: (with six white arrows pointing to six circles) “things to know about. underline. Hearing Supremacy.”

Conclusion  

It is easy to forget this pressing truth: we chose to participate in the oppressive economic system in this country which perpetually denies the human rights of the citizens that do not fit in the normalized image of a white hearing able-bodied European man. Jon Kabat-Zinn reminds us that "we can work toward naming and righting inequities, institutionalized injustices, and intrinsic biases, because if we do not, then we are de facto complicit by omission". It is our intercultural accountability (social justice action in transforming human connection) to recognize and acknowledge all systems of oppression in existence. If we choose to ignore one system of oppression in favoring the work to dismantle another system of oppression because it feels familiar and doesn't encourage sitting with discomfort, white supremacy will continue to flourish and its stronghold grip over our bodies, minds and souls is going to get stronger day by day. We need to be compassionate about someone's suffering which is different from your experience of suffering. When it comes to naming and acknowledging the harmful effects of hearing supremacy (audism), we must acknowledge that we cannot afford to be the complicit bystanders in systemic violent spaces because existential disposability is not sustainable or regenerative. We need to shift our current collective linear thinking about how we take opportunity structures (Eckert, 2010) for granted to benefit our upward social mobility inequitably to collective circular thinking that transforms how opportunity structures (employment, healthcare, education, etc.) can be accessible to everyone equitably without any form of internal colonialism.

When a Deaf person or a Deaf community member raises an accountable awareness of harmful behavior that dehumanizes their whole being, people are encouraged to check in with their hearing fragility whether they are able-bodied or not able-bodied as part of their intercultural accountability. Unchecked hearing privilege does a lot of harm whether people are conscious of it or not because it informs the structural designers of white hearing supremacy that they are being revered for systemic work in oppressing marginalized groups. Although, anyone can be hearing supremacists including Deaf community members, ASL interpreters, elite Deaf community members, BIPOC community members, etc. The reproduction of systems of oppression is not going to get us far in healing our human disconnection or social division. If we are open to transformative change to challenge the status quo, we need to actualize that we can work together to co-design a circular paradigm that acknowledges that everything is interconnected through the spirit of Ubuntu. Ubuntu, an African wisdom on humanness, reminds us that "what is humiliating for a member of the community, is humiliating for the whole community (Nzimake)". Overall, we all need to ask ourselves this question: what does liberation look like for everyone?

Coming up next: Circular Designs in Dismantling Hearing Supremacy

Resources:

Gertz, G. (2016). Dysconscious audism. In G. Gertz, & P. Boudreault (Eds.), The sage deaf studies encyclopedia (pp. 330-332). SAGE Publications, Inc, https://www.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346489.n106

Eckert, R.C &  Rowley, A.J. (2013). Audism: A Theory and Practice of Audiocentric Privilege. https://www.academia.edu/4926125/Audism_A_Theory_and_Practice_of_Audiocentric_Privilege

Eckert, R.C. (2009). Towards a Theory of Deaf Ethnos: Deafnicity ≈ D/deaf (Hómaemon ․ Homóglosson ․ Homóthreskon). The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, Volume 15, Issue 4, Fall 2010, Pages 317–333, https://doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enq022

Magee, R.V. (2019). The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness. New York, NY: TarcherPerigee.

Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending OUr Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, NW: Central Recovery Press.

Nzimakwe, T.I. (2014). Practicing Ubuntu and leadership for good governance: The South African and continental dialogue. African Journal of Public Affairs, Volume 7, Number 7, December 2014, Pages 30-41.

Smith, A. (2013). Heteropatriarchy and Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing. https://www.collectiveliberation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/01/Smith_Heteropatriarchy_3_Pillars_of_White_Supremacy.pdf

Walker, Nick. (2020). “DR. NICK WALKER'S NOTES ON AUTISM, NEUROQUEERING, & SELF-LIBERATION.” NEUROCOSMOPOLITANISM RSS, neurocosmopolitanism.com/.