As I was scrolling through Facebook a little while after our new president’s inauguration day, I found this video showing a deaf man signing his experience of President Trump’s inauguration. He explains that deaf Trump supporters went to his inauguration only to find that no interpreters were present in order to accommodate for those who could not hear. The man explains that the absence of interpreters is the same thing as saying “F**K” to the deaf community. Below the video, there is a caption saying “Now, I wasn’t there, but I was told that they may have had interpreters – no one has confirmed this yet though – but if they did, the interpreters were not on the stage, nor were on the TV screen”. Regardless of whether the man or interpreters were physically present during the inauguration, the fact that interpreters were not visible to him or his friends is discriminatory towards the Deaf community. In her article The Social Construction of Disability, Susan Wendell explains that disability can’t only be explained in biomedical terms, but also by social arrangements and expectations. She develops the idea that disability is created by social conditions, such as wars, violence such as beatings or rape, living environments, etc. It is also created by the pace of life, which is adapted to the young and healthy, but the people who cannot follow that pace become disabled. She says: “Societies that are physically constructed and socially organized with the unacknowledged assumption that everyone is healthy, non-disabled, young but adult, shaped according to cultural ideas, and, often, male, create a great deal of disability through sheer neglect of what most people need in order to participate fully in them” (Wendell, 2013, p 50). In the case of the deaf community, they needed interpreters for President Trump’s inauguration and were made disabled because of the lack of accommodations. Without interpreters, the Deaf confirm cultural stereotypes of people with disabilities, defined by Susan Wendell as they “cannot perform or are expected not to perform” (Wendell, 2013, p 51). Without accommodations, people who have mental or physical limitations cannot perform, and so they cannot follow the pace of life that Susan Wendell mentions in her article. Consequently, because society will not adapt to people who are not “the young or healthy” (Wendell, 2013, p 50), they are made disabled, and they confirm stereotypes and assumptions made by “the young and healthy” people. In this case, because interpreters were not easily accessible to the Deaf, the Deaf were incapable of fully experiencing our new president’s inauguration. They were made disabled by society’s lack of accommodations.
Link to the video: https://deafeed.today/syndicated/the-real-reason-there-were-no-asl-interpreters-at-the-trump-inauguration/
Posted by Adele.