
“History, despite it’s wrenching pain, cannot be unlived/But if faced with courage need not be lived again.”- Maya Angelo
From the local to the global, debates over hate crimes in Deaf community-what they are and what we should do about them–are all around us. A close examination of these debates reveals that hate crimes are not simply academic challenges, but social, political, economic, and even Deaf culture, as well. Perhaps nowhere is this complexity more evident than in current discussions over the meaning and practice of “hate crimes”.
Hate crime as a broad introduction to the interdisciplinary field of sociology and society interactions. We need to adopt a sociological lens to consider the causes, consequences, and responses to hate crimes–from global worries over political and legal change to local controversies over educational use and development. In my work, I will not be focusing on the political dimensions of issues per se.
Rather, I will examine how different social structures, processes and belief systems shape how hate crimes in Deaf community arise and get defined; how Deaf community experience and respond to these challenges; and how policy debates over what to do about them unfold. For decades and decades, hate crimes have used what they call “active measures” to destabilize Deaf community today and tomorrow.
We need to turn those tools to defeat them, through in that process that for example, Alexander Graham Bell (AGBell) Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing actually violated plenty of federal laws when they target Deaf community. It is rule number one of the hate crime: they will be caught.
AGBell is something that we have been for many years. Why do we want to claim our intellectual life? Well, let’s look at hate crime dimensions that we suffer from. We looked our across the educational landscape and saw this oppression practice and thought, “OK, what about American Sign Language (ASL) today?” a broad number of AGBell followers would say, “You know, let’s demonize them for the fuck of it” and this comment does explicitly refer to oppress Deaf people as in hate crimes. Serious.
It does because AGBell will expect money and lies with immediate solution. Deaf people and my name will be in it–what I care the most is if Deaf people had experienced hate crimes even when they do not know that they actually experience hate crime, then Deaf people will be always oppressed, too. You know, today is the day after AGBell’s death in 1922, he may be forgotten but at the same time, he must not be forgotten for what he had done.
After all, That is how AGBell as a narcissist think. He was basically defective in the brain. Broken.
Deaf people will be always target for academic freedom–ASL and the state of being Deaf. It is a branch of human ignorance. What should we make of it? Can Deaf people point to a greater language hegemony than we experience hate crimes? Is the difference between ASL and hate crimes just a matter of what AGBell or any particular group of human beings says it is? Soon, you will see something powerful….

-JT
Copyright © 2016 Jason Tozier
This text may be freely copied in its entirely only, including this copyright message.
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