Prompt #9, Folio Café, week of 4/3: Reflect on our book Deaf Utopia

When I first read Deaf Utopia, I remember crying only a few pages in. Because one of the first stories Nyle tells is the story of his mom giving birth without an interpreter. It made me sad because even working as an interpreter communication is hard enough. I couldn’t imagine if there was not a liaison to help facilitate communication. We take so much for granted in our modern world with ADA laws. Even the story of Nyle telling how his mom and dad lost contact while driving. We hadn’t developed the technology to do video chat and also hadn’t created the laws that granted Deaf people the right to have access to interpreted phone calls and video phones. If you look at your phone bill you can see where some money is taken out in order to pay for some of these serves.  

Reflecting on what Nyle discusses about Deaf culture, I have a totally new perspective. The way he brings to light that Deaf culture is not only different but equal to that of hearing culture. It is very common to think that Deaf culture should be supplemented with hearing culture aspects or maybe just a variation of hearing culture, but really Deaf culture is completely independent. And I think that framing it like that we able better able to value Deaf culture for what it has to offer. He briefly mentions audism and how that affects him and how that has affected him while building his career. Being able to have a mindset that he is worthy and validate himself has gotten him very far in life.