John Lee Clark

It is with a wry shake of my head on your arm that I find myself introducing a fancy new word. As a poet, I dislike jargon. But sometimes we do need a new word, and it can change the way we see everything.

That’s what happened to the sighted Deaf community with “audism.” Although it was first coined in 1975, by the Deaf scholar Tom L. Humphries, it didn’t receive a full discussion until after the hearing-sighted linguist Harlan Lane used it in his 1993 book “The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community.” Sighted Deaf people had always known that hearing society discriminated against them, but the new word suddenly made it much easier to identify and analyze.

As is typical of our community, several DeafBlind folks proposed variations on the Deaf theme. But none of them caught on. More recently, however, “vidism” has gained some traction. It’s a helpful concept for two reasons. First, it places a finger on some of the ways the sighted Deaf community has excluded us. Our brother Bryen Yunashko has done important work in this direction. The second reason is that the hearing blind community did not yet have a term to describe sighted privilege and bias, other than the generic “ableism.”

Yet addressing both audism and vidism still leaves too much behind glass. I knew there was something bigger there, and I longed for something that would shatter that pane of mystification. Something that would allow me to wrap my hands around its throat and say, “I’ve found you out, you old serpent!”

The sense of that malaise which affects all of us, DeafBlind and non-DeafBlind alike, had been growing stronger and stronger ever since the Protactile movement started in 2007. It has taught us so much about who we are. About what is natural and true. About how to live. About language. What we once put up with we can no longer tolerate.

What, I wondered, is the opposite of tactile? Researching our community’s history, I see that we have always been tactile. But hearing and sighted people have always attempted to keep our tactilehoods in check. We’ve always been denied access to some of the most basic human rights. What should we call this force of suppression?

A Standing Apart

I propose to call it distantism. The English word “distance” comes from “distantia,” Latin for “a standing apart.” A point could be made that distantism refers to the privileging of the distance senses of hearing and vision. The ways in which many cultures have evolved on the almost exclusive basis of these two senses have indeed been harmful to us. That insistence on sight or hearing to function in society means only one thing for us: death.

But that would be putting it too simplistically. Each form of social bigotry has its distinctive personality and its unique set of intertwining evils. So I would like to dwell on the concept of distantia, or a standing apart, which lies at the heart of distantism. We already have a Protactile word that describes people who pull away from touch, who refuse to connect. It is an attitude and a behavior. Many hearing and sighted societies prize it highly, and their members seek to maintain physical distance, however thin those margins may be. Their rulers and heroes stand alone-- the more remote they are, the more highly esteemed they are. Even when the less privileged are squeezed closer together due to poverty, exploitation, or as punishment, distantism manifests itself in the long lines, tight cells or dubicles, and above all, their being removed out of sight and hearing. For all the hype around its ability to connect the world, technology has often served to isolate people in every other way.

Are sighted and hearing people wrong to use their distance senses and let it affect how they live? No. If they wish to be all eyeballs and flapping ears, they are welcome to such an existence. There’s nothing wrong with being organized or efficient. But we have problems when they impose their distantism on us.

Let’s read a classic distantist statement:

“The loss of both sight and hearing constitutes one of the severest disabilities known to human beings. Essentially, it deprives an individual of the two primary senses through which we acquire awareness of and information about the world around us, and it drastically limits effective communication and freedom of movement, which are necessary for full and active participation in society.”

It used to be impossible to argue with a statement like that, but with a critique of distantism we can begin to break it down. It’s an old trick, blaming injustice on its targets so that the privileged can pretend there’s nothing wrong. We are at the bottom of society because, what? Because we are DeafBlind. Which cannot be helped. Therefore, we belong at the bottom of society. It’s an amazingly easy trick to pull. They take things out of our reach and then they say we have limited awareness. Whatever they do is our fault.

I wish I could share everything this critique has unearthed for me, but it would take years to write! For now, I would like to touch on a few things that I think tell us a great deal about how distantism works.

Intervenors

Despite the many barriers we encounter in society, we can gain much awareness about the world around us. But when we go exploring or when we just exist, sighted and hearing people rush in to intervene. Can they help us? Please don’t touch. They will be happy to describe it to us. They will guide us. No, they will get it for us. It’s much easier that way. Hello! My name is Katie and I’m your Intervenor!

One of the things I have pondered is why, very early in the history of education of DeafBlind children, they started assigning each one of us a special teacher-companion. This wasn’t always the case. There were some classes where we shared a common teacher and we had each other. We can see in the record how distantism set in, and how hearing and sighted people wanted things to look right. It didn’t look good when we went around “groping in the dark.” It didn’t look good for us to cluster together and have too much fun. Education meant we had to sit behind a desk.

The solution was to assign each one of us a sighted companion. Such teachers made it possible for us to sit apart and for the classroom teacher to stand in front of us. They made us hearing and sighted by proxy. Even though we would be in constant contact with our special teachers, the pair of us made for a tidy unit that could and did stand apart. It also made for a most inspiring sight, the self-sacrificing teacher laboring as our only link to the world. It isn’t a miracle unless there is a miracle worker.

Today those special companions are called Intervenors or Interveners. The title is altogether too apt. Intervenors who eavesdrop on this article will protest, “But I let Jimmy touch anything he wants to!” No. It’s not just a matter of letting or encouraging. There’s a whole cultural element involved. There are distantist modes of touch and there are protactile modes of touch. A distantist cannot truly teach or empower our children to live and learn as tactile people. Yet the field of education of DeafBlind children has never included us as teachers. Why is that?

The Road Not Taken

September 30, 1841, might have been the beginning of a wonderful alternative history. On that day, our brother Oliver Caswell, then eleven years old, entered the Perkins Institution, where our famous sister Laura Bridgman had already been a student for four years. He met many people on that day, but he was immediately drawn to her, and the two latched together. Samuel Gridley Howe, the school’s hearing-sighted director, was the most insufferable distantist imaginable—a man who, for example, decided that blind people must read raised lines resembling print—but on this occasion he allowed Bridgman to serve as his auxiliary for Caswell’s first lesson. Thereafter Bridgman eagerly continued to teach Caswell, devoting many hours each week to the enterprise. Fortune also hugged them when Howe and his new wife departed on a long honeymoon in Europe. It was during his absence that a portrait was painted of Bridgman teaching Caswell to read and write.

In Deaf education, Deaf teachers were involved from Day One. Many graduates were promptly hired as teachers, and Deaf teachers would go on to found schools all over the world. Blind graduates of early schools for the blind were also hired as teachers and continue to play a leading role in that field. But in the education of DeafBlind children, we have not seen the same pattern. There are thousands of Intervenors working today. There are hundreds of teachers proper who work with our children in Deaf, blind, and public schools. There are hundreds of early-intervention specialists. None of these professionals are themselves DeafBlind. What happened to cause so complete a shutout of tactile teachers and leaders?

When Howe returned to his post at Perkins, he found that Bridgman had mingled too much with teachers and fellow students. She had learned too much and had many questions. He considered his neat experiment ruined. He immediately made some radical changes, and, later, for a period of five years Bridgman was in the company of one single teacher. Any suggestions of a future in a widening social circle was abandoned. Perkins would set an example for the world of assigning each one of us a special teacher-companion. They were to help us, keep us safe, protect us from bad influences, and, we can now see, make sure we aspire to the distantist ideal.

It is a common outcome of some forms of oppression that their targets must fit in a narrow space of cooperation and gratitude. The idea with distantism is that we can never uphold it perfectly, but we should make a continuous failed attempt to do so. This continuous failed attempt reassures society that we agree with their values. We are to be good, but never good enough. The field, which Howe firmly sent on its current course, excludes us because it needs to maintain a certain level of failure. If it was its goal to succeed completely in educating us, it would embrace our tactilehood and value us as teachers and leaders. Instead, distantism is the first condition, and for that to make sense, the field needs its work to be difficult and expensive, not easy and effective.

Under Different Names

We adults also receive intervention that serves a similar function. In the United States we have Support Services Providers and in the United Kingdom they are called Communicator Guides. In Canada, they don’t bother to pretend it’s something different. Their Intervenors serve both children and adults.

I am not saying that we don’t need sighted assistants. After all, we do live in a distantist society, and we should avail ourselves of distance-information readers. However, the way our SSP services are performed can be smothering. That’s why a key concern of the Protactile movement is autonomy. When I teach Protactile, I like to make it easier to remember what it means and how to spell it by breaking it down into three parts:

AUTO: They do a lot of things automatically, taking over, making decisions for us, making assumptions.

NO: We need to say “No!” to such automatic actions.

MY: We need to say “My!”—we will do things our way and make our own decisions.

Sometimes I get a new SSP and she asks for my shopping list. She is ready to take charge and have me merely tag along, holding on to the cart. She’s confused when I do not give her a list and I take charge, directing us toward the places where we will find what I want. She is now more like a detector, or a device that I take out of my back pocket to consult. Only she is far more intelligent than any machine could be and there’s a wonderful rapport—that is, if she is able to unlearn her distantism. It is my responsibility to learn and know the world around me; it is part of her job to help me update that knowledge as we go along. But it is not her job to retain any of this knowledge herself.

Having a SSP is still useful, but it makes such an enormous difference how it’s done and when. Sadly, most SSP, CG, and Intervenor programs leave the professionals’ distantism intact. As a result, they often take charge, make assumptions, push our canes away from making contact, pull us back from people, put themselves in the middle of interactions instead of support our direct communication with others, and guide us in such a way as to maintain a margin between us and the world around us. No wonder we have limited awareness!

Their distantism finds its ugliest though unconscious expression at many of our gatherings, conferences, and retreats. You know the routine: We are each assigned a SSP. Instead of helping us connect with each other, they end up being the ones with whom we talk the most. Their presence creates a network of distantism that separates us from each other or makes it harder for us to find each other. They also can destroy moments when we cluster and go tactile. A friend shared with me an experience he had with a yoga activity at a retreat. The yoga instructor was a sister, and she wanted the group to do it in Protactile style. So there was a happy clustering, and people helped each other and passed on information. But it didn’t look right, and one of the SSPs standing back intervened by going to her “client” to correct his position. “That’s not what the position is, it is this.” Soon the other SSPs slipped into the group. In a few moments there was a nice straight row, everyone paired off and standing apart.

The White Cane

Even when we shake off those pesky intervenors, distantism follows us still in the form of the white cane. Now, I love my cane, but it was also one of the first things that told me there is something wrong. As I pointed out in my essay on protactile design, “My Dream House,” it is not our home if we need a cane. What this means for our present discussion is that the instant we feel the need for a cane, we are in distantist territory. One of our long-term goals should be to claim more and more territory where we do not need a cane at all, because the design of these environments is tactilely accessible and appropriate.

For going out in the public, I think we still need to ask the question: Why were we given the white cane? The three words Orientation and Mobility specialists repeat like a mantra are “independence,” “freedom,” and “safety.” Our brother Robert Sirvage has observed that in Amerikcan Sign Language all three are said the same way. Our crossed wrists turn away from each other and move apart, as if breaking out of handcuffs. That’s freedom, and also independence and safety. I now realize that this is the ultimate distantist fantasy.

The white cane makes it possible for us to go many places over a wide variety of terrain all the while avoiding contact with our environment except through our cane. It is a magic wand that conjures up a bubble for us to float in. Sighted Orientation and Mobility instructors have always taught us one-on-one, the better to dance circles around us and make sure the bubble grows stronger. They like to scout out a location first, find a path through it, and then bring us there, saying, “Go straight until you feel a curb, then take a 45-degree turn and walk until you encounter a railing.” A code of aimed turns and sailing until we hit something then another turn.

The field has yet to accept any DeafBlind instructors, adamant in the belief that we cannot teach each other to travel. They are right—we cannot possibly teach each other how to travel in their sterile, desolate, meaningless mode where the goal is for us to go down the middle, in a straight line. They want us to disturb the world as little as possible. Ironically, sighted people make that easy to accomplish by parting like the Red Sea before our rod. Joke: How am I supposed to find anyone if everyone runs away from me?

The bubbles they put us in are sometimes so thick they are more like tanks. I cannot count the times I would approach a brother and sister and get the feeling I’d just interrupted their process of steaming forward. Often they’d be holding something in their other hand, and I must wait for them to disassemble their tank-bubble before we can interact. That’s why I have worked on making my bubble as thin as possible, ready to pop the instant there’s an opportunity for connection. For me, this has meant finding the right cane: a slender beauty made of fiberglass. It’s so light that I can hold it like a pencil if I wanted to, with just two fingers. It’s no tank. It’s a mere whisker, sometimes feeling ahead, sometimes tucked in favor of other modes of experience.

One of these other modes is traveling and exploring together. I agree with Sirvage’s suggestion that we need community-based approaches. This would go against the whole thrust of the rehabilitation system, which is a monument to distantism. It’s built on one-on- one instruction, which effectively isolates us and tells us that we are broken and need to be fixed.

Final Irony

Before I bring up one more thing about distantism, let’s read that quote again:

“The loss of both sight and hearing constitutes one of the severest disabilities known to human beings. Essentially, it deprives an individual of the two primary senses through which we acquire awareness of and information about the world around us, and it drastically limits effective communication and freedom of movement, which are necessary for full and active participation in society.”

The final irony is that a DeafBlind man, the late Robert J. Smithdas, wrote these words. Many hearing and sighted people have expressed the same sentiments, but distantism is so pervasive that we all have internalized it. Helen Keller spoke of us as being imprisoned in the “double dungeon of darkness and silence” and that we are “the loneliest people on Earth.” She was being fanciful, but what is true is that the marginalization we experience is too often literal, involving physical margins.

That we find distantism even in ourselves is good news, for it proves that it is a serious, society-wide sickness. When our sisters, the magnificent Jelica Nuccio and aj granda, launched the Protactile movement, we knew it was a historic event. Now that we know more about distantism and how poisonous it is, their achievement seems all the more astonishing.

Think about it. Billions of people on this planet, and all of them agreeing that hearing and vision are required for leading full, normal lives. Billions of people of one mind that being DeafBlind must be an unendurable fate. Billions of dollars poured into the hope of medical cures. Distantism, that old serpent, held the whole world in its remote-control spell.

As a Braille reader, I find Facebook to be extremely inaccessible. So I’m not part of the many important conversations going on there that do concern my community.

I’ve gotten reports and inquiries from some people who are on Facebook, and I am troubled by some things they’ve shared. I also feel funny when someone tells me, “You need to weigh in on this!” I’ve always resisted commenting, because it feels so inappropriate to dump my thoughts where I can’t be there to respond to comments, where I’m not available. But maybe it’s time that I did comment on a few things.

Not On Facebook

One is the issue of access within Facebook. Many organizations and individuals mean well when they declare that they are committed to making everything they post accessible, such as providing transcripts for videos and image descriptions. But what they may not realize is that the majority of DeafBlind community members do not have access to Facebook itself. In other words, relying on Facebook is not a good way to reach out to DeafBlind people.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook is a great outlet and those who have access to it should take full advantage of it. But problems crop up when organizations turn to it as their only means of announcing events, sharing opportunities, posting updates, and gathering input. Most of us are simply not there. We are elsewhere.

In the DeafBlind world, email rules supreme as the easiest, most accessible, and fastest way to communicate anything over long distances. Going online—as in the Internet—is too difficult, too visual in nature, too cumbersome. We have a DeafBlind email group for pretty much everything. I moderate two—one is a local listserv called DBMinn, which serves the DeafBlind community in Minnesota. There are over three hundred DeafBlind listservs out there, and they constitute our own very accessible social media network.

So I would recommend that interested organizations and individuals check to see if there are DeafBlind listservs they can join. Or they can set up their own listservs or mailing lists and sign up DeafBlind folks as well as others.

Cultural Conflict

Next, it seems that sometimes there is a conflict between Deaf sighted people’s wish to become more visual or advance ASL and sight-reliant DeafBlind people who want access to this visual culture. I’ve had DeafBlind folks and Deaf sighted folks alike come to me upset.

One common situation seems to revolve around transcription of ASL videos. Sight-reliant DeafBlind folks sometimes demand that vloggers transcribe their videos. There is no question that, for organizations and major things, providing transcription should be automatically done. But some private, individual vloggers find it genuinely difficult to provide transcripts. Ironically, one of them is a DeafBlind person, who says that it is exhausting and an impediment to her creativity and storytelling drive to have to transcribe her videos.

Some vloggers have a different reason for detesting the task of transcribing their videos: They want nothing to do with the English language. English has colonized every part of our lives. Some were traumatized by efforts to shove English down their throats. Some want to clear space for ASL to grow in, on the language’s own terms, instead of it always being chained to English.

My sympathies lie very much with the anti-English movement. Why? Because I know exactly what they’re trying to do and what they want. I’ve been enjoying the fruits of the Pro-Tactile movement, which has liberated me socially, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. The DeafBlind community has always known that “tactile equals power,” but it was only recently that we were able to figure out how to put that belief into practice. We even have a new tactile language distinct from visual ASL!

I think that the sighted Deaf communities need the same thing—they need a Pro-Visual movement, or a Pro-ASL movement, or something like that. As we in the Pro-Tactile movement grow wildly and joyously tactile, I want sighted Deaf people to go wild, too, in their own way. The Pro-Tactile movement has healed many DeafBlind people, so too will such a movement heal many sighted Deaf people. Deaf sighted people need written ASL; they need to move beyond bilingualism-is-good-because-it-helps-with-English to ASL-is-good-for-its-own-sake; they have yet to figure out how to live fully as Deaf people.

This doesn’t mean DeafBlind people won’t be involved anymore in the ASL world, or that no sighted people are welcome in the tactile world. On the contrary, the better we understand each sphere, the better each sphere’s guests will be treated and honored.

Instead of discussions about that and what solutions would support both movements, there seems to be a lot of frustrated demand-making on the part of sight-reliant DeafBlind people and a lot of uncertainty on the part of Deaf sighted people as how to respond. Should they speak ASL in a smaller space so that sight-reliant DeafBlind people can see them better? Should new and very visual ASL words be shot down because they’re hard to see or understand tactilely? The outcome is often that no one is happy.

Partially Included

I can understand the frustration of being partially included. It’s like allowing someone to join a dinner party, but only for half of its duration—you have to leave midway through while everyone else continues late into the night. When I was still sight-reliant, it was terrible. Life was full of broken promises. I could go but not take part in everything, I was invited at the same time I was rejected, I was always left behind. All that changed when I went tactile, and sighted Deaf people found it much easier to be inclusive. Sometimes a greater separation leads to a better connection.

I realize it is easy for me to say this, because I am so blissfully NOT on Facebook. For those who do have SOME access to Facebook and want to be on it, well, it can be brutal. Being reminded of what they’re missing, being constantly offered teasers leading to doors closed to them, seeing a massive response to something but not know what it was—none of that is easy. This problem of being partially included extends into real life. This is one reason the Pro-Tactile movement is so important. It encourages all DeafBlind people to go tactile, no matter how much vision they still have.

Why is it a good thing to go tactile? Because everything in life can be achieved via touch alone. There is a tactile world that is complete in its own unique way, just as there is a visual world that is complete for Deaf sighted people. Many sighted Deaf people understand that hearing is simply not necessary. Vision is like that—it’s not necessary either, when you have a tactile world. DeafBlind people who go tactile and are part of the Pro-Tactile community can and do continue to enjoy vision, including participating on Facebook, but it’s on top of a complete way of life.

Connections

Which brings me to my last Facebook-related concern. Traditionally, people who are becoming DeafBlind and want to know more about the DeafBlind community would come into contact with a wide variety of DeafBlind people, including those who are tactile. Jelica Nuccio, aj granda, and I—who are some of the leaders of the Pro-Tactile movement—all had tactile role models. They inspired us to go tactile instead of clinging to every last drop of our dwindling vision. We all saw some DeafBlind people in denial and we all saw DeafBlind people who were very happy and proud to be DeafBlind. Of course we knew whom we wanted to be like.

But Facebook has created a new situation. Its partial accessibility for sight-reliant DeafBlind people and its inaccessibility to fully tactile DeafBlind people means there’s a split. Some of my DeafBlind friends who are on Facebook are troubled by the fact that everything under the heading of “DeafBlind” is dominated by sight-reliant DeafBlind people. Many of them are still in varying stages of denial and agree with each other that becoming blind is a terrible fate. An increasing number of them are considering getting a cochlear implant because they are worried about things like not hearing an oncoming car.

This makes me think of a group of people who don’t yet know how to swim gathered together at the shallow end of a pool. They may be having fun splashing water but they are also afraid of the deep end. And there are no experienced swimmers at the deep end to show them that there is nothing to fear. No swimmers making it look like it’s the easiest thing in the world because it IS the easiest thing in the world. How are any of them going to learn how to swim if the only people they see are other non-swimmers terrified of the deep end?

There are some places where there is a good local DeafBlind community and everyone is in the pool. But there are many places where there is not a local DeafBlind community, and sight-reliant DeafBlind people end up turning to Facebook to learn about their identities and to find other DeafBlind people. But Facebook is missing the majority of the community. Facebook is missing important messages about why being DeafBlind is a wonderful thing, why a cochlear implant is the worst answer possible to declining vision, and the social justice issues we have that are not always the same as what other communities are trying to resolve.

So we have some serious connecting to do. People new to the DeafBlind world who are on Facebook need to be aware that there are vast networks of DeafBlind people NOT on Facebook. Organizations, allies, and friends need to join some of our listservs, too. Members of listservs need to make sure that new people they meet know about these. Maybe there needs to be discussion about how Deaf visual cultures and DeafBlind tactile cultures are separate and how we all can support these to be the best, richest they can be.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” holds a peculiar place in the signing community. As Deaf Americans, our relationship with it is as complex as our relationship is with our country, a nation where we have been and continue to be oppressed and persecuted. We learn at an early age that all the talk of freedom isn’t always about us. Consider, for example, what a Deaf high schooler named Julie Ann Lewis wrote in a poem called “Hear Me America” (1996). It closes with these lines: “My voice is not free— / How can this be / In this free Republic?”

On a more practical level, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is in English, which is not native to Deaf culture. Further distancing it from us, it finds its expression most often as a piece of music, sung at important occasions and sporting events. Even when the anthem is accompanied by a signed version, we have mixed feelings. On one hand, it is good to have signing displayed in public, something we cannot take for granted because of oralist campaigns in the past against the public use of sign language. On the other hand, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is almost never signed well or in a way that makes sense in our language. This forces us to wonder if the signing is there for us or more for the pleasure of hearing people who don’t know the difference.

The Super Bowl is a prime example of this problem. Ever since Lori Hilary signed the anthem at Super Bowl XXVI in 1992, signed renditions have been part of the highest-rated television program on earth. This makes these glimpses the biggest exposure our language receives each year. They are much better for ASL awareness than the static I Love You sign. But are Deaf people inspired by these performances? Hardly. Only snatches of the signer are shown. Worse, most of the performances at the Super Bowl—and elsewhere—follow the same broken formula.

This is strange, because Deaf people have been signing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a long time, since before it became our national anthem on March 3, 1931. The Deaf elite, made up mainly of graduates of Gallaudet College, enjoyed “rendering in signs” various poems and songs, as it signified their level of education and facility with the English language. Those who did this well were praised. Take this admiring passage written in an obituary in the Illinois Advance on the death of National Association of the Deaf’s third president, Dudley Webster George (1855-1930): “He was a master of the English language and of the sign language. Of the correct use and beauty of both he was in precept and example an ardent exponent. No one who ever saw him address a meeting or render in signs the ‘Marseillaise’ or the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ or any other poem will ever forget it.”

We cannot be certain, without watching a film of George’s version, how he executed it. But we do know that “mastery” of reciting poems in those days meant transliteration or something similar to what we today call Pidgin Signed English. Signers would follow the word order of the original English text, delete unnecessary bits like “the” and “of,” and try to sign the words as gracefully as possible. No matter how impressive the bearing of the signer or how beautiful the sweep of the hands, it made little sense as an ASL text. If you taught a Deaf child only ASL, without ever introducing English, and he saw “The Star-Spangled Banner” signed, it would have no meaning.

Signed renditions, then, were not ASL renditions at all. Instead, they were a way to present the English text in “signs,” in order that signers “read” the song in the air. This did not mean Deaf people weren’t moved by the signing of the song. There is still charm and a kind of beauty in the signed versions, and through ritual use, it can become so familiar that it cannot help but resonate. Still, “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been signed again and again for over a century without much improvement. Why has the signed version failed to evolve into a true ASL translation?

The obvious answer is that the signed version has long been expected to accompany the music. The national anthem is signed at every graduation and before every sporting event at every pro-ASL school for the Deaf—which means thousands of performances each year—but all of them involve a sound recording and, often, a hearing “coach” leading the Deaf signers to make sure they keep time. While a translation, by definition, must needs be linked to the original, the demand that the signed version follow the sound has severely limited the potential for a meaningful ASL version.

The earliest known film of signing of any kind was of, yes, “The Star-Spangled Banner” being signed. Made in 1902 by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and labeled “Deaf Mute Girl Reciting the Star-Spangled Banner,” the film clip can be difficult to follow because of its speed and jerkiness. But one can watch Susie Koehn’s rendering, made in a clearer 1943 film, and be immediately struck by how alike the two versions are. And that same basic version is still performed today. Some new versions may appear to be better, but at closer inspection they use the same transliteration approach.

Amazingly, the 1902 signer got one thing linguistically right that none of the others since has gotten right: For “the home of the brave,” the “Deaf Mute Girl” signed “home brave men,” while most signers close with “home brave.” But proper ASL usage begs the question “Brave what?” Of course, it is an old gender bias to think of the brave as men. A true ASL translation must resolve this issue of what or whom the word “brave” refers to or it must shift the concept. “Home people themselves brave”? “Our home inspire bravery”?

That all of the signed versions have since abstracted the meaning of “the brave” and almost everything else tells us that few have been interested in making the signed version communicate the song to Deaf people. The signed versions appear to have been and continue to be more a function of displaying the “beauty” of sign language to hearing people. This would explain why the accuracy of the signed versions as ASL pieces has never been a major concern. Moreover, the national anthem is most often signed when there are hearing people in the audience. It is rare for the anthem to be performed at Deaf-only, Deaf-run events.

If Deaf performers have been used as puppets, signing something that is meaningless in their language, it is no wonder “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not a sacred text in Deaf culture. In fact, ASL literature is full of hilarious spoofs and political adaptations. Patrick Graybill, in his one-man show for the renowned Live at SMI! series, apes his former hearing teacher’s horrendous signs reciting “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Mary Beth Miller has an even funnier routine in her own Live at SMI! video. She performs different versions, from opera style (“OOOooohhhHHHhh ssSSaaAAyyYY cccaaaNNN YYYOOOuuUUuuUU SsSsEsEeee”) to fingerspelling alone in the Rochester Method (“ohsaycanyousee”) to, finally, a sincere rendering that is similar to the one in the above-mentioned films. And the great ASL poet and activist Ella Mae Lentz has adapted it to deliver a political message. In her poem, ASL itself is the banner, persisting in the face of discrimination and language barriers. It closes by saying “Hands are still signing in the land of the Deaf free and the home of the Deaf brave.”

As powerful as Lentz’s message is, her poem is still heavily influenced by the classic abstract signed version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For example, she still opens it with the dawn before awkwardly jumping back in time to the previous night by signing “Last night . . .” Nevertheless, it is a successful adaptation because Deaf viewers would recognize what it borrows from, the same old version that always starts with seeing something and then the sun coming up.

That the signed versions have been chained, sign for word, to the English version has not passed all unnoticed. The Deaf Pride movement did enlighten some people to a degree that they became uncomfortable with the traditional signed version. A new approach began appearing in the late 1990s at the more progressive bilingual Deaf schools, in which the anthem is turned into a kind of short play. Involving choreography, it features various performers enacting different things in the anthem—rockets, the flag—and taking turns signing bits. In some versions, the performers would sign the last lines together. These creative pieces are a bold departure from the traditional approach. Yet the theatrical nature of this method abstracts the meaning of the anthem as much as the traditional version does. We still lack a true ASL translation.

Which brings us to the question of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be translated. First, we must abandon the idea of following the sound recordings. The ASL translation can be signed while the music is playing, and with practice both can end at about the same time, but we must no longer think in terms of the two moving together line by line. The most necessary difference between the two would be moving, in the ASL version, the dawn to near the end. This move would allow us to, at long last, make use of ASL’s cinematic qualities by first setting up the situation. This will, more than anything else, open Deaf people’s eyes to the actual content of the anthem. To have a better grasp of the cinematic possibilities, it is instructive to know the story of how “The Star-Spangled Banner” came to be written.

It was two years into the War of 1812 between our young republic and its former mother country, England. After a victory in Washington, D.C., the British were advancing on Baltimore. Before they could enter the city, they needed to destroy Fort McHenry. The largest and strongest ships from the British fleet were anchored in front of the fort, their heavy guns ready to blast away. One of the prisoners onboard the Admiral’s flagship was a beloved doctor, William Beanes. His friends wanted to rescue him and secured an official letter from President Madison stating that the good doctor was not a solider but a private citizen. Now someone had to go to that ship and present the letter to the admiral and ask for Dr. Beanes’s release.

Francis Scott Key and another friend volunteered for the mission, and they went across Chesapeake Bay on a government boat under a flag of truce. They rowed right up to the flagship and were allowed to go on board. The admiral agreed to release Dr. Beanes but said that, unfortunately, they were about to open fire on Fort McHenry. He did not want the Americans to run to the fort and warn the soldiers there, so he charged them to stay away from the shoreline until the fort was destroyed. They could return to their boat and stay on it, and he assured them that they wouldn’t have long to wait because the British guns would flatten the fort in no time.

That’s how Key ended up stuck on that boat, at a safe distance from the fleet. He was not happy about this circumstance, because he was a volunteer soldier and wanted to fight with his countrymen inside the fort. He was also concerned for his brother-in-law, who was the commanding officer at the fort, and he knew the force there was small.

As night fell, the British began their bombardment of the fort. Key and his companions could not see anything except for the “rockets’ red glare” and whatever it illuminated. Every time there was an explosion, they could see the stars and stripes flying. As long as the flag was still waving, the fort was still standing. But at some point during the night, the guns stopped, and there was nothing but darkness. Did this mean the fort was down?

Then “the dawn’s early light” came, but there was a heavy morning fog. They still could not see the fort at all. As the fog thinned and lifted, there it was! The massive star-spangled banner was still waving! Key cried to his companions, “Oh say can you see!” The attack on Fort McHenry had failed. As the ships left and the Americans’ boat made its way toward the shore, Key was already writing down on an envelope the lines of a poem. This poem was printed under the title “Bombardment of Fort McHenry” and was such a hit that it was being sung in New Orleans within six days, which means it spread faster than the postage. It had three stanzas, and the first stanza became our national anthem, but not before it was already our nation’s most popular patriotic songs.

There is much in this inspiring story that can help us create a powerful ASL version that would make linguistic sense and signed as a true ASL poem. To begin with, there’s the chronology, starting with the situation, the Americans stuck on the boat, on the sidelines watching the ships on one side and the fort on the other. The bad signed version doesn’t establish this situation at all; the signer looks ahead and just signs. This leads to some contradictions, such as the signer talking about looking over the ramparts and then talking about seeing the flag. How can one see the flag ahead while one is also looking over the ramparts, a position where the flag would be directly above, not ahead of the signer at some distance?

An ASL version would set the ships—or, at the least, one set of the guns involved in the conflict—to one side and the fort and the flag on the other side, and the signer would refer to each side by turns throughout, with the default “narrator” looking ahead being the Americans on the sidelines, watching, helpless, hoping, and with the coming of dawn’s early light, joyous.

Their joy can become our joy when we have “The Star-Spangled Banner” unfurled, full and clear, in our own language. We deserve that, for we, too, are Americans. ***** A few recent examples of the National Anthem: Rocky Mountain Deaf School’s 2015 translation: https://youtu.be/7QZzDofFPeA Amber Zion 2014: http://on.aol.com/video/american-sign-language-national-anthem-with-amber-zion-518106545 Treshelle Edmond 2015: https://youtu.be/M6iyLwOdi7w Willow Herbold 2016: https://www.facebook.com/Korika/videos/10153253143040264/ Dack Virnig 2016: https://www.facebook.com/OrlandoMagic/videos/10153465726801909/ *****

From time to time, I would be startled when one of my friends or acquaintances decides to “leave” our community. They are always non-natives, often people who found their way into our world as adults after excruciating childhoods as the only deaf one in their families and schools. One woman who recently did this said that “the Deaf community is a snake pit of backstabbers!” Another friend who walked out on my local DeafBlind community fired off a blanket email message accusing everyone of rejecting him.

The reason why their departures seem so sudden to me is that, as far as I could tell, the Deaf community isn’t a snake pit of backstabbers and that the DeafBlind community did accept that man. These incidents remind me once again how differently people can experience the same thing, in this case, our community. So differently, in fact, that you would think they were talking about different planets.

Some who performed the Exit Stage Left act have suggested that they were mistreated and disrespected because they’ve been mainstreamed or because they don’t sign ASL fluently. They charge me and other natives of being “insensitive.” They say we are “lucky” and that the reason nobody stabs our backs or rejects us is because we went to Deaf schools and because we sign like water. (Never mind that we are subjects of gossip as much as anyone else.) Based on this argument, the community is at fault, and they’ve been unjustly forced to “quit” our community. (Never mind that no one asked them to leave.)

Now, I’m not saying that people aren’t sometimes mistreated in our community. As a DeafBlind member of our predominantly sighted signing community, I am no stranger to being discriminated against or being avoided like the plague. Sexism and racism exist in our community just as they do in society at large. This problem of certain members abandoning our community happens even when these types of bigotry don’t apply. There have been feminists leaving feminist friends. How could there be such discrepancies in how people feel about our community?

If there’s one thing that can make people interpret the same thing in opposite ways, it’s expectations. For example, I visited a sculpture garden with a friend. This place had a famous piece which we would encounter for the first time. We found that it was seventeen feet tall. I was impressed, but my friend was disappointed. Why? Because I thought it would be only five, maybe eight feet tall, while my friend expected it to be thirty, even forty feet tall. Such is the distorting power of expectations. Could it be that some members, especially those who come in later in life, carry great expectations for what our community should be?

One sure way to find “evidence” that says there’s something inherently wrong with our community is to have certain expectations for what would be “right” that our community should fulfill. Our community should be nice to everyone and accept everyone. Our community should not allow gossip. Our community should be patient. Our community should never condone labels. Our community should understand, should know better, should behave, should act more mature, should be more professional, should be more welcoming. Should, should, should. And since all of those shoulds refer to good ideals, we who love our community are at a loss how to respond. It’s not like we can say, “It’s fine that we are immature, and backstabbing is great!” So we have no answer to the bitterness, hurt, and rage bubbling up in those members until they leave weeping.

A quick consideration of their typical backgrounds—mainstreaming, lonely childhoods, communication deprivation—makes me realize that this background is ripe breeding grounds for great expectations. Human beings are social animals. When some are unfortunately isolated, it is natural that they should long to have contact with others. They talk to themselves, they create imaginary friends, they retreat into fantasy worlds. Games, movies, and books are easier to understand than real life. Doing homework on time and getting straight A’s are safer than venturing out into the hallways and back lots and risking awkward situations or ambushes.

And then they meet other Deaf people. It’s a new world. There exists a community! A culture! Could this—? Could they—? Yes, it’s a family, and yes, they can become part of it and at long last belong. And this is great. It really is.

But ours is also an ordinary community. The social climate is, well, normal. There is normal competition. There are natural bonds and divisions. Love, hatred, compassion, jealousy, admiration, intolerance—they’re all part of life in our community, as they are in any other.

Through my conversations with non-natives, I have learned that many of them grew up in a social vacuum where they did not have access to all the finer points of human interactions. This seems to have the result that some grow up with a thin social skin. When they enter the signing world, the first community they have full access to, they enter unarmed and are vulnerable. So things like rumors can be confusing and hurtful. They can become paranoid, worrying about what others think of them. They are afraid that everyone will believe everything that’s said about them, and that they will be rejected, left out and left behind again. The ground beneath their feet can seem so unsteady.

When I encounter this mixture of longing and fear, I want very much to assure them that it’s all right, that they do belong, that they are accepted, and to please not worry. But I have learned that this assurance cannot be magically given or surgically implanted in them. Our warmth, hugs, and encouragement can help, but this assurance, this security, this identity must be born in their very beings. Ultimately, it is their responsibility.

Sometimes they want our community to be different, to fit their idea of the dream community. It is true that our community needs to change, and always keep on changing, with the flow of our human needs. But our community does have certain social structures and rules, and it sometimes cannot accommodate certain attitudes and behaviors. While notions of universal peace and acceptance are beautiful, the reality is that our community’s success depends as much on our flaws and limitations as on our virtues. In the struggle between the base and the ideal is life. It is up to them to reconcile themselves with the foundations of our community or not.

One of the strangest facts related to the signing community is that most hearing parents of Deaf children do not sign. It has been said that ninety-seven percent of hearing parents never learn ASL. Why aren’t more of them willing to learn sign language? 

I used to have complicated theories about this, but one day it dawned on me that the answer is so simple it’s almost shocking. Most hearing parents don’t sign because they don’t want to communicate with their children.

Think about it for a second. If they wanted to communicate, why, it would only be natural that they would sign. The problem has nothing to do with sign language itself, certainly not access to learning it or the challenge of mastering it. Millions of people all over the world flock to sign language classes. Non-deaf signers outnumber Deaf signers. In the United States, ASL is second only to Spanish in its popularity as a “foreign” language. 

You would think that parents have even more reason, no, the best reason, to learn sign language. Instead, it is one of the hardest, rarest things in the world for a parent to do. Why is that?

Most parents are conditioned, from their birth up, for the simple reason they were parented first before they became parents themselves, to engage in a power and control relationship with their children. This is taken so much for granted in our society that very few people are aware that children make up the most oppressed and abused population. True, children start out in life as small, making them vulnerable to—even magnets for—all sorts of mistreatment, but that doesn’t make them any less human or less deserving of respect.

Unfortunately, the Victorian view of children—“Children should be seen and not heard”—still permeates modern mainstream parenting culture. The biggest sickness in a relationship involving power and control is the absence of true communication. There may be a great deal of talk passing between parents and children, but a careful study will reveal that very little of it is real communication.

Because of their misguided belief that they must control their children through the manipulations of power, parents do not want communication to occur. They would find it immediately threatening. This results in their often saying things like “Don’t you dare talk back to me!” or “Because I said so!” If there is true communication, it immediately elevates children’s status, forcing adults to recognize them not as objects or second-class beings but as individuals with totally valid needs and desires that are just as important as their own. Few parents are prepared for such an egalitarian relationship with their children.

The power dynamics involved explain why fathers, in traditional hierarchical households, are less likely than mothers to learn sign language, and why the few signs they do know are non-negotiable signs of authority: NO, STOP, BED NOW. It also explains why hearing siblings, who are more or less equal to their Deaf siblings, are the family members most likely to sign. It’s no accident that most of the parents who do sign are “different” from the mainstream mold—open-minded, eccentric, radical. They may not always realize this, but often they are not only embracing sign language, bilingualism, or the cultural perspective of deafness, but an alternative style of parenting that lessens or removes the “versus” in their relationships, replacing it with, well, “with.”

Interestingly, the oral deaf community has the same problem. Despite their children’s skills in lipreading, most parents are unwilling to accommodate their needs in this area. They still say “Never mind” or “I’ll tell you later.” But there are a few oralist parents who take care to look at their children before speaking, pause between turns, gamely repeat themselves, and take pains to include their deaf children in the family. I wouldn’t be surprised if the percentage of such sensitive oralist parents is comparable to the percentage of parents who do sign with their Deaf signing children. But this is not a manualist versus oralist issue. This isn’t even a problem unique to deafness. It’s a much deeper concern having to do with parenting, power and control, and what it means to truly communicate.

Another interesting phenomenon is that some non-signing parents do learn how to sign . . . later, often too late. There are many stories telling of how a parent got a new Deaf coworker at the office, or comes into contact with Deaf people at church. All of a sudden, the parent is eager to learn sign language. Why now, after five, ten, fifteen, twenty years of living with their own flesh and blood? Simple: the new relationships with these Deaf adults are not stuck in the quagmire of power and control. Other stories tell of hearing parents’ hands magically coming to life when they find themselves to be new grandparents of their Deaf children’s Deaf children. This happened in my family. My grandfather never signed much to his Deaf daughter until the day he learned his grandson was Deaf. Again, the key here is power: The traditional grandparent-grandchild relationship is thankfully much less wrapped up in control than the traditional parent-child relationship.

That the medical perspective of deafness is relentlessly presented to parents doesn’t help. The idea that Deaf children are impaired, in need of treatment and rehabilitation, only discourages parents from regarding their children as individual human beings worthy of equal respect and true communication. So the battle against audism shouldn’t stop with changing parents’ attitudes toward deafness, but should address the very nature of the growing people we call children. Why? Because parents can, and do, learn sign language only to exercise power and control over their Deaf children in different but equally abusive ways. Within the signing community, even Deaf parents need to understand what true communication with their children requires. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be much better than all those hearing parents who do not sign.

“How did you know?”

That’s a response I often get when I interact with people. How did I know that their shoulder needed a massage, or that they were hungry or sad, or a spot on their arm was itchy? The owners of pets I meet are also amazed. Almost immediately I’ve found their pets’ sweet spots. “That’s right! She loves that. But how did you know?”

On one of our first dates, my future wife asked, “How did you know?” Without realizing what I was doing, I had pressed her Melt Button. (She wishes me to inform my readers, lest their imaginations run away, that it was nothing naughty.)

When our twin sons were born prematurely (now a happily meaningless fact), the nurses in the NICU were impressed by what I did. I felt right away that my sons’ skins were too sensitive to stroke. I just held them or squeezed their arms and legs, even firmly, but I knew not to stroke. The nurses were going to give instructions to that effect, but there was no need.

I wasn’t conscious of it. It was natural. So natural, in fact, that I didn’t have a name for it, this skill that goes beyond just feeling texture, heft, shape, and temperature. I’d like to call it metatactile knowledge. It involves feeling being felt, being able to read people like open Braille books, and seeing through our hands and the antennae of and within our bodies. It involves many senses, senses that we all have but which are almost never mentioned—the axial, locomotive, kinesthetic, vestibular . . . All “tactile” to some extent, but going beyond “touch.”

I did write about it in passing. I even wrote one poem that’s all about it, without realizing what I was documenting. Here’s “Clamor”:

All things living and dead cry out to me when I touch them. The dog, gasping for air, is drowning in ecstasy, its neck shouting Dig in, dig in. Slam me, slam me, demands one door while another asks to remain open. My wife again asks me how did I know just where and how to caress her. I can be too eager to listen: The scar here on my thumb is a gift from a cracked bowl that begged to be broken.

As my little ode to metatactile knowledge attests, it extends to interactions with objects. I know, I know, objects are dead and have no feelings. But they still respond to tactile contact and actions. Their design and the materials with which they are made do draw people to handle them in certain ways. Indeed, product developers study this all the time.

But there are quirks, unpredictable things that we do or discover. Take the little subscription-form inserts inside magazines: One of my earliest memories is of tearing such subscription forms into handfuls of soft, fuzzy confetti. The paper those are printed on is pulpy and so rippable! Other kinds of paper do not have the same delicious give, but they may be perfect for folding into airplanes—their lines so crisp and taut!

Probably most people can relate a little to what I’m talking about when they think of bubble wrap. Do not those rows of little tight buns clamor, as it were, to be popped? Another example that should be familiar: Reese’s peanut-butter cups. Remember those old TV commercials where kids would play with a cup, pushing out the center and leaving a hole in the middle? Think on it. There is nothing visual to suggest how one might play with these cups in this way. Tactile investigation is what uncovers the fact that the center is softer than the rim of solid chocolate.

So this is nothing new. It’s an element of human life. Yet, as Lyle Crist asks in his fine 1974 biography of Richard Kinney, a DeafBlind poet and true explorer of the world:

“How much do we ENJOY what is around us? How many really understand the melody inherent in—what shall we use?—the Golden Gate Bridge? How many ever get out of the car, feel the bridge moving gently in the wind swells, how many of us put our hands out to touch the cables, feel the bridge sing to us?”

I inhabit it all the time and apply metatactile knowledge to all my interactions with people, things, the world, and myself. I have Reese’s “fun things to do” for a thousand of things. A thousand of other things sing to me. Of course, when I play King Kong and crush an empty water bottle like it’s so much New York City skyscraper or when I snap off the cotton ends of a Q-tip in order to unroll the stem and fold it into a flower, it’s more about me than the objects. The point is that we all are in continuous conversation.

Except that not everyone is as engaged in conversation as they could be. As a second-generation DeafBlind person, I took it for granted that most DeafBlind people knew and interacted with the world as I did, through an abundance of touch. After all, we don’t have the same visual and auditory distractions that hearing-sighted people have, distractions which leave their tactile skills in a neglected, dormant state. Of course touch would be everything to us!

When I began my work as a Braille instructor and a Pro-Tactile trainer, however, I came to observe things that weren’t always apparent in social settings. One of the first things I noticed in my Braille sessions was how poorly my students figured out their surroundings. Or else they waited to be told where things were, to be guided, as if they could move about in spaces only pre-approved by others for their use. Many also had trouble locating things on a page of Braille—yes, it takes practice to be able to read those tiny dots, but there are broader details that I thought wouldn’t be elusive.

I found out more about this troubling pattern during Pro-Tactile trainings. Random example: A man came up to me during a snack break, asking for help opening his bag of potato chips. I was puzzled, and learned that what he always did, or tried to do, was to take hold of two sides and pull them apart. I inquired if he was aware of the hole along one of the seams, placed there expressly to help open the bag. He was awestruck. In his years buying chips and other snacks, he never knew about the little holes or tears in the seams provided by the manufactures. “Who told you about this?” he demanded. No one had. I just picked it up and have always “known” about this feature. Something as small and simple as a bag of chips, I just KNOW.

What the man had was a bad case of tactile freeze. Isabell Florence, a fellow Pro-Tactile trainer, explains, “Tactile freeze is learned. It is natural for us to explore everything tactilely. But when I was a kid, they hit my hands for touching.”

I would hope there is less hand-slapping going on these days, but DeafBlind children are surrounded by hearing-sighted people—their parents, teachers, peers, and the horribly but uncannily titled “interveners,” their constant adult companions/interpreters/teacher’s-aides/sighted-guides—whose visual biases and values serve to mentally, socially, and emotionally slap their hands. Everyone in DeafBlind education pays lip service to touch, yet the people who know most about how to touch, DeafBlind people whose fields of touch are large and who don’t suffer from tactile freeze, are not welcome.

What of those who become DeafBlind as adults and didn’t have their hands slapped as children? When they start to become deaf or blind, their first contacts are doctors, who try to save or fix their sight and hearing. Next, they get into vocational rehabilitation, whose agencies often have policies that insist on touch-related things being the last resort. It is also a field that has almost no professionals or instructors who are themselves DeafBlind. Most people becoming DeafBlind are left to figure out tactile communication on their own. It often takes a long time before they enter the DeafBlind community and meet culturally DeafBlind people.

And there’s our society, which is extremely anti-tactile, Reese’s peanut-butter cups notwithstanding: Do Not Touch. So many things are buried in tactilely blank boxes and packages. Vital information is printed on flat surfaces. Many businesses prohibit any contact between their employees and customers. Police recite the mantra that “Hands can kill.” Things of great tactile import and beauty are placed behind glass. Knobs, switches, handles, levers, keys, and buttons are giving way to things called, strange to say, “touch screens.” . . .

Fortunately, there are some who have escaped such oppression with their tactile fields relatively intact. One is a young man named Ben Reid, who is currently attending my alma mater. I first met him five years ago when he was eleven and his family visited Minnesota to check out what it had to offer. The instant he came into the room, he found me and sized me up. He also found the small latch on my Braille display and opened it to examine the device. There was a quick, wordless exchange in flutters and pressures that, if translated into words, would run something like this: “Careful with that latch.” “Yeah, it could easily break.” “Okay, you know what you’re doing.” “Thanks. This is really cool!” Then his first words: “Is it expensive?” As I gave his family a tour of the skyways in downtown St. Paul, I smiled and smiled because Ben was all over the place. His orbit of exploration was huge and all-encompassing. I’m very glad to report that it still is.

I don’t believe it’s an accident that the young man’s mother is also DeafBlind. Christy Reid understands that touching is seeing. She bristles whenever sighted people attempt to restrain her. “Often when I reach out and start exploring,” she says, “people would say something that makes me feel foolish, and I explain, ‘I’m just looking and I need to touch it.’ I hate it when they try to stop me from touching.”

This is one of the things the Pro-Tactile revolution is addressing, this awful way we are conditioned to yield to visual culture at our expense. As much of my tactilehood I’ve enjoyed, I still catch myself holding back for something as stupid as appearance—appearance within a visual context entirely outside of my reach. Take a line of people in an eatery. I’m sure most DeafBlind people would try to follow the line, be cooperative, all the while trying not to touch anyone. It takes conscious effort to establish new habits, such as cutting in front of a line if the set-up isn’t accessible, firmly reaching out and establishing contact and some tactile-gestural communication with a person in front of me, or bypassing an impractical counter to go directly to the person I need to communicate with about my order. Also, when shopping with an access assistant, it used to be that he or she would pull me back at times in order to prevent my touching a stranger. It took some doing, but I’ve retrained my assistants to allow, even help, me establish contact with anyone near me or near the things I want to grab off a shelf. Indeed, establishing such contact has made my tasks go smoother, since I can tactilely tell someone she doesn’t need to move away, that I just want this item. It saves a lot of time, too—no more wasteful waiting for someone to move when what I want isn’t even directly in front of her.

Besides the practical benefits of establishing tactile contact as much as possible, there is something more primal at stake. Sighted people take this for granted, and may not appreciate how important this is, but, every day when they go out, they receive acknowledgment of their existence in the form of smiles, waves, nods, and murmured greetings from others. Where is my share in this reassurance that I am here?

Such experiences and thoughts made me appreciate why many sighted Deaf people in the past refrained from speaking ASL in public. They instinctively felt that ASL did not belong in open society, and imagined that their moving hands would startle, offend. They also took all responsibility for communication, either attempting speech and lipreading or carrying a notepad wherever they went.

Then something happened. Deaf people began to impose visual culture wherever they went, forcing hearing people to make eye contact and to gesture back. They spoke ASL freely in public and thought nothing of breaking mainstream rules. They thought nothing of staying in a restaurant hours after ending their meals, much to the consternation of the owners, occupying tables like that. Occupying space, transforming it into Deaf space. The Deaf Pride movement was what happened. My parents’ generation was the first to not carry a notepad. It was now hearing people’s responsibility to look for paper and a pen. Older notepad-carrying Deaf people would point out that it was faster to have a notepad ready, but my parents and their contemporaries couldn’t be bothered with it. It was a different world.

And now the world is undergoing another change. Whereas touch was once forbidden and accidental, now, for a growing number of people, it is a right. Yes, it startles. It may offend. But in my efforts to exercise and expand my tactilehood by seeking people out and touching them purposefully, I have found that sighted people can handle it. Metatactile knowledge exists in everyone, and it surges forward to meet us, to respond in kind. Some strangers I encounter are so responsive I marvel, “How did they know? That’s exactly it!”