Tag: discrimination

On Being Deaf

Jessica Kirkness in her memoir, The House With All the Lights On, lets us see and hear what it is like to live with grandparents who are Deaf.   Her story covers her experience of living under the one roof with her parents and grandparents and coming to understand the “language of light”.  In the process, Jessica enlightens us about what it means to be deaf and how to interact with adults who are deaf.

Jessica’s grandfather spent a lot of time in and out of hospital.  She highlighted the problem of a lack of understanding on the part of hospital staff despite being told of her grandfather’s deafness. She maintained that his hospital care was often compromised because “staff had no clue how to interact with him”.   This was despite explicit instructions to get his attention before speaking to him, use pen and pad to enable him to understand their message and respond and ensure they actually looked at him when talking.

Jessica herself had studied Auslan (Australian Sign Language) to communicate with her grandparents, particularly with her Grandfather who refused to learn how to speak.  She even had to use sign language to communicate to him in hospital that he was dying after a cardiac arrest.  Jessica provides an enlightening  insight into sign language and its accompanying “visual and spatial tactics” generated by the hands and body movement.  She explains that movement serves to direct the viewer’s attention.

Being deaf

Jessica makes the point that, contrary to the general opinion in the community, her grandparents viewed their deafness as a “way of being in the world”, not a deficit (the focus on something missing).  They were able to recognise nuances in facial expressions and insisted that everyone faced them directly when they talked to them.  This enabled them to expertly read faces and attempt to lip read.

Jessica points out at one stage in her book about the lipreading  traps inherent in the English language.  She explains that this is the result of what is called “homophemes” – “words that sound different but involve identical movements of the speaker’s lips”.   The words themselves have different meanings, leading to confusion and stress for the lip reader.

Discrimination

Jessica quotes Rachel Kolb’s TED Talk, Navigating Deafness in a Hearing World, when she discusses the “primacy of voice” in our hearing world and the fact that “mouths are not a prerequisite for speech”.   Rachel makes the salient point that if you can’t hear, how can you learn to speak?  She was born profoundly deaf and has become a Rhodes Scholar, writer and disability advocate.

Rachel knew that her speech was defective and had to come to terms with her difference.  She spent 18 years in speech therapy to be able to talk, spending a lot of time learning speech through feeling the vibrations in the throat of her speech therapist.  Still people thought that her difference in speech was due to a foreign accent.

Jessica highlights the discrimination experienced by her grandparents in what is a “hearing world”.  People expect to be understood when they speak (“being heard”, “being listened to”).  The distortions in the speech of many deaf people lead to misunderstandings and assumptions about “lack of intelligence” or dumbness.  Jessica states that “deafness is the thing that we cannot look away from but cannot bear to face”.

The disruption and disorientation of deafness in a hearing world is not understood and sometimes feared.  People lack an appreciation that a deaf person can have a heightened sense of sight and an enhanced peripheral vision (so that actions “behind their back” can sometimes be detected and seen as derogatory).  People who are deaf often have a strong sense of touch and vibration.  As Jessica remarks, “sound is received in the body in all sorts of ways” and people who are deaf can “hear” music through vibrations in the floor.  I had personal experience of this in Melbourne when a group of us visited a school for deaf children and watched them dancing enthusiastically to music by sensing floor vibrations.

The language of light

Jessica’s Grandmother insisted that ‘the entire self is required for conversation”.  She could not tolerate people turning away from her when listening to what she had to say.  Jessica does point out, however, that the exception to this “whole-self rule” was when she was driving.  She notes too that “touch and sight were always interwoven” for her grandparents.  The world for them was “experienced through the interplay of the eyes and body”.

Consciousness of light was important because being in front of windows when communicating could create shadows that distort the images of hands and faces.  The world of deaf people is “driven by sight” where looking is equivalent to knowing.  Gerald Shea titled his book The Language of Light to express the role of light in sign language and the centrality of the visual for the deaf.  When the lights go out there is no dialogue.

Reflection

Jesscia’s book helped me to understand how easy it is to unconsciously exclude a person who is fully or partially deaf.  It reminded me that I have a friend in her eighties who is hard of hearing and I often overlook the need to face her when I talk.  She points out that being able to speak multiple languages, she has developed a propensity for lipreading – something I deprive her of when I am not facing her.  She often notes too that I “mumble”, failing to properly articulate my words which increases her sense of isolation.

By gaining an understanding of what it is like being deaf, we can learn to better include deaf people by more conscious speech and actions.  As we grow in mindfulness, we can increase our awareness of people’s differences, our own limitations and biases and be more compassionate in our interactions with others.  

Having been considerably moved by Jessica’s book, I wrote the following poem from the perspective of someone who is deaf:

Being Deaf

Being deaf is not a deficit
It’s a way of being in the world.
With refined senses of sight and touch
A reliance on light for meaning.

Face me so I can read your lips
Be in the light so I see the nuances in your facial expressions.
I am not dumb, I am deaf
I sense sound through vibrations.

While I can’t hear
I can see and feel things that you don’t notice.
My vision is not narrow
I can see my periphery clearly.

Don’t avoid me out of fear
Approach me out of curiosity.
Don’t judge me for my voice distortions
Listen intently for my message.

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Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Mindfully Developing Inclusive Leadership

Andrés Tapia, international inclusion expert, recently presented a webinar, Overcoming Hypocrisy: How Workplaces Move From Performative Allyship to Authentic Commitments, in which he explored how to mindfully develop inclusive leadership despite opposition within organisations.  He highlighted the personal and career costs of attacking this laudatory goal in a mindless, unconscious manner.  Andrés webinar was hosted by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, who published his co-authored book, Autentico: The Definitive Guide to Latino Success – which looks at bias, conscious and unconscious, as barriers to overcome if Latinos and Latinas are to get ahead.  He also attacked the issue of inclusion from the leadership side when he wrote the book, The 5 Disciplines of Inclusive Leadership: Unleashing the Power of All of Us, co-authored with Alina Polonskaia.

In the webinar, he shared his experiences of developing inclusion in organisations on a worldwide basis.  He noted that bias and exclusion are not the sole province of white, male-dominated organisations in the West.  He indicated that exclusion exists everywhere but may manifest differently through bias on the grounds of religion, gender, ethnicity, skin colour or gender preferences thus having an impact on different groups, e.g., women, LGBT+, non-gendered, Muslims, Jewish. 

Andrés explored several strategies for consciously developing inclusive leadership.  His mindful approach included the following:

Be mindful of, and focus on, the people who are open to influence

Andrés warned against mindlessly attacking the problem of exclusion without awareness of the potential impact on mental and physical health and career success.  He suggested that wasting time and energy on the extreme opponents to equity and fairness is exhausting, unsustainable and ineffective.  He argues that you should seek out people in power who demonstrate an openness to inclusive practices and a willingness to explore the barriers, both personal and organisational, that perpetuate exclusion.  This entails, in the initial stage, developing a conscious awareness of where other leaders stand on inclusion issues.  It also means noting how inclusive are their friendships and social activities – what Andrés calls “foundational” evidence.

Develop allies

Exclusion is an arena of power so it is important to develop allies who will support and sustain you in your endeavours to create a counterculture that is compassionate and inclusive.  Ignoring this advice can lead to burnout and isolation.  Whenever, you are attempting to go against mainstream thinking and action, you need the support of others, both inside and outside your organisation.  This is exactly what we did in establishing the Action Learning Action Research Association (ALARA) in 1991.  At the time, action learning and action research were considered “aberrant” approaches to leadership development and organisational research – they were not mainstream and, in fact, challenged the very assumptions of the prevailing teaching, research and development culture. 

Understand “bedrock principles”

In giving an illustration of a female executive’s support for the advancement of an Asian woman who had been discriminated against, Andrés maintained that the executive observed some “bedrock principles” for developing inclusivity – have a through understanding of diversity and inclusion concepts, develop awareness of an individual’s talents and capability, appreciate the importance of personal sponsorship and coaching, and draw on your courage to “step up” and “stand up” for what you know to be fair and equitable in the way individuals are treated.  I have previously described the traits of inclusive leadership which reinforce Andrés concept of “bedrock principles”.  He adds a further trait that he considers is frequently absent even among well-intentioned leaders – that is, an awareness of their own personal and positional power and a willingness to leverage this power in the pursuit of inclusiveness.  Andrés points out that leaders often focus on empowerment of others who are disadvantaged but overlook their own power to create change.

Develop personal preparedness before seeking allies amongst disadvantaged groups

Seeking out allies amongst disadvantaged groups while being personally unprepared for the challenge of creating change puts an unnecessary burden on people in these groups who are already burdened by bias.  Andrés suggests that you have to build your own preparedness for wise action through observation, reading , watching videos, listening to podcasts and engaging others in conversation. He suggests that this more mindful approach develops full awareness of the nature and extent of disadvantage experienced by a particular group of people, the origins of the underlying bias, and the complexity of the challenge involved in creating an inclusive culture.  Mindfulness meditation can be employed to develop the necessary personal traits of inclusive leadership and awareness of our own unconscious bias.  Andrés notes that we can draw inspiration from the example of companies like Discover Financial Services that deliberately located one of their call centres (employing 1,000 people) in one of the poorest, Black neighbourhoods of Chicago, in pursuit of economic diversity and economic justice.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness, we can increase our understanding of inclusion issues, develop self-awareness (especially in relation to our biases and their impact on others), build up the courage to intervene where necessary and gain the insight and creativity to take wise action.  Developing inclusive leadership needs to be approached mindfully if we are to be effective in creating sustainable change in equity and fairness within our organisations.

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.