Foreword to the Reissued Edition

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, I was an academic advisor at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York. It was a challenging time for a city that was hit hard by the crack and HIV/AIDS epidemics that were happening concurrently. New York City was not alone, though, as both epidemics quickly became tragedies nationwide. I was then serving my second term as president of the New York City chapter of the National Black Deaf Advocates. My wife and I were also preparing for our wedding and the arrival of our first child. However, activism in the interests of Black Deaf people could not wait, and we continued our quest to raise up our community. We needed a conference fully focused on our unique needs as Black Deaf people who deal with both racism and audism.

Dr. Roslyn Rosen, a Bronx native, was among my most cherished mentors. We often engaged in discourse where we surveyed the state of Deaf America, and I would remind her that Black Deaf people had a ways to go before we could enjoy the privileges bestowed on White Deaf people in the United States after the Deaf President Now movement and the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. Dr. Rosen took this to heart and asked me what we can do about it. I brought up the idea of a conference specifically focused on the condition of Black Deaf Americans; the conference would give attention to issues such as education, mental health, and barriers preventing the advancement of Black Deaf people. Dr. Rosen’s response was, “Fine, let’s do it.” At that time, she was dean of continuing education at Gallaudet University and was able to get Gallaudet on board with cosponsoring the conference. She then brought in Angela Gilchrist (now Dr. Angela McCaskill), and they came out to the Bronx on Amtrak and then on the 6 train that passed Yankee Stadium and the neighborhood Dr. Rosen grew up in. They rode the train all the way to Kingsbridge and then made the short walk to the Lehman College campus. This was 1990, and the area around Lehman was vastly different from when Dr. Rosen lived there. Naturally we at Lehman were in awe while Dr. McCaskill was totally overwhelmed by the experience.

In no time at all we got to work. Deborah Copeland (now Meyer), who was the director of the Program for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Students at Lehman College, was in full support of the project; she was thrilled that Lehman would be the host. Angela and I were the conference cochairs, while both Gallaudet and the City University of New York provided the logistical support. All of us agreed on the focus of the conference, and as the reader will see in this collection, we addressed topics that remain relevant 34 years later. In this regard, we raised the question of what it will really take to push the Deaf community closer to where the hearing community is with regard to seriously addressing racism and academic inequity.

We have made significant progress in the past 34 years, but the fact that we have so much more to do is a testament to how deeply rooted inequity within the Deaf community is and how it continues to challenge all of us. Four years after this conference, I was hired by my alma mater, Gallaudet University, as the special assistant to the president for diversity and community relations. This afforded the Black Deaf community a larger platform, especially given that Dr. Glenn Anderson was the chair of the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees, and we also had Dr. Reginald Redding who followed Dr. Rosen as dean of the College for Continuing Education when Dr. Rosen became the university provost. This was a major paradigm shift and sent a powerful message across the nation and around Deaf spaces globally. It confirmed Dr. I. King Jordan’s unflinching commitment to confronting what were and still are uncomfortable issues that we in the Deaf community are not always willing to face. Gallaudet continues to seek ways to address the issues, and we now have a Center for Black Deaf Studies and a Black Deaf Studies minor within the Deaf Studies program.

We have indeed come a long way since the conference in 1990, and I am more confident that we will eventually create a more perfect Deaf community. The reader of this collection will be pleased to see the ways in which the community engaged in critical discourse on the challenges faced by Black Deaf people and, in a way, set the stage for similar conferences addressing the unique challenges faced by Latinx and Asian Deaf people. In a sense, this collection was part of the foundation for the amazing scholarship that has since been published on Black Deaf people and other Deaf people of color.

It has been an honor to write this foreword. I hope readers will find both historical and practical value in the reissued collection.

Lindsay Moeletsi Dunn

Center for Black Deaf Studies

Gallaudet University

November 6, 2024

Lindsay Moeletsi Dunn is a scholar and, at the time of this writing, is the interim codirector of the Center for Black Deaf Studies, Gallaudet University.