It was very interesting to me to read on someone's blog about what the term "grassroots" would mean in the deaf world.
First we would need to know for sure what it signifies in the hearing world. THEN apply it to us.
To me, grassroots would be an ASL speaking deaf person who probably went to a state run school for the deaf. ' And a deaf person who has never depended on Federal money to survive.
I actually have no schoolmates from my deaf school who EVER collected SSI or any other kind of benefit from the government. We all worked and usually stayed with the same job for 25 to 30 years. That is TRUE grassroots.
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I dunno...by that definition you are going to exclude many, many deaf kids from the sixties and especially the eighties onward, when mainstreaming and then the ADA forced many deaf kids out of residential/deaf schools into the "regular" school system...
ReplyDeleteTo me grassroots has the connotations of local organization or activity, versus a large statewide or national one. So for example, a grassroots deaf activist or person might be someone who pours all her energies into local deaf issues: mentoring or teaching or putting together groups for local parents of deaf children, local deaf clubs, and so on...
From your description, you certainly sound like a grassroots deaf person the way I'd think of the definition :-)
Cheers,
BEG
Thank you for posting. I enjoyed your offering. It is interesting to note the different opinions of different generations.
ReplyDeleteI hope to learn alot by blogging!
Great points. I saw some additional points made in Trudy Suggs' article here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.i711.com/my711.php?tab=2&article=48.
In addition to giving some history of the term, her point is that we should wear the "grassroots" name with pride. I tend to agree.
Hello Ed, thanks for the url. What would today's deaf world do without Trudy Suggs? She says it like it is because she knows from experience.
ReplyDeleteI recall rocking my youngest child to sleep in a deaf club while my husband played poker half the night. And my son has confided that his earliest memory was being in the nursery at a bowling alley!
I guess one has to walk the talk before one can understand.
Please kindly follow the definition correctly in deaf scholars work. What you did was an inaccurate description. Thank you. You have misled màny.
ReplyDelete