This post could be written by a lot of people who belong to a lot of groups. This post has been written by a lot of people who belong to a lot of groups, and you should find and read those things too. This just happens to be the post that I can write, about a group that I belong to also.

Trigger warnings: audism, racism, discussions of police-related violence/shooting, probably some other stuff.

A number of (hearing) friends from a bunch of my (different) social circles recently sent me -- almost simultaneously -- links to news stories about Deaf people getting killed by cops who couldn't communicate with them.

This is nothing new. It's been happening for ages. Someone with a gun gets scared and pulls the trigger, and someone else is dead. Maybe that person is Deaf. Maybe that person is Black. In any case, that person is now dead, and that's not okay. (Maybe that person is both Deaf and Black, and we mention the second part but not the first. That's disability erasure that, statistically, correlates highly with race; that's also not okay.)

I've been deaf as long as I can remember, and I've known these stories happened for a long, long time. But this is the first time I've watched them from inside the conversations of a Deaf community -- for some definition of "inside" that includes confused mainstreamed-oral youngsters like me who are struggling to learn ASL and figure out where they fit.

I'm a geek, a scholar, and an academic. My last long string of blog posts is part of a draft chapter on postmodernist philosophy as a theoretical language for describing maker/hacker/open-source culture within engineering education, and honestly... that's what I'd rather write about. That's what I'd rather think about. That's what I'd rather sign about. Not people getting shot. A large portion of my Deaf friends are also geeks and scholars -- older and more experienced than me, with tips on how to request ASL interpreting for doctoral defenses and faculty meetings, how to use FM units to teach class, how to navigate accessibility negotiations when your book wins awards and you get international speaking invitations. They are kind and brilliant and passionate and wonderful I love them and I want to be one of them when I grow up.

And we are geeks when we talk about these deaths, too. Kind and brilliant and passionate and wonderful. And my heart bursts with gratitude that I know these people, because it's such a thoughtful and complex discussion, from so many perspectives, drawing on so many historical, theoretical, personal, etc. threads... the narratives I love, the sorts of tricky complexity that brought me back to graduate school and sent me hurtling down years of studying intricate threads of thought so I could better appreciate the mysteries that people and their stories are.

And I can't stop thinking that any of us -- any of these kind and brilliant and passionate and wonderful geeks in the middle of these great and rather hopeful discussions about complex societal dynamics and how to improve them -- we could be taken out by a single bullet from a cop who doesn't know.

I've learned a lot of things about being a deaf woman of color in the past year. I'm lucky; I look like a "good" minority, a white-skinned Asian who can play to stereotypes of quiet submission -- but even then. And I know lots of people who can't. And one of the first things I learned was how to stop pretending to be hearing all the time -- especially in any interaction involving someone with a badge or guns (airports, traffic stops, anything). This isn't just because it's exhausting to lipread, but because it can be dangerous to piss off someone who thinks you're ignoring them out of malice or attitude rather than the truth that you simply didn't hear them shouting.

I first learned this sort of thing in undergrad, when some of my engineering college friends were horrified by stories of some other student from some other engineering college arrested by panicky cops for carrying around an electronics project. I thought they were upset for the same reasons I was -- because it was a stupendous overreaction on the part of the cops and the school. And it was. But they were also worried because -- what if that had been me? And the cops had shouted stop, and turn around, and put down the device -- and I didn't hear them?

"It's fine. I mean, I'm deaf, but I can talk -- I would explain things. I would figure it out," I told them at the time. "I'm smart, you know." As if that would protect me, as if I could compensate that way -- because I'd compensated that way for so much, for all my life.

But being smart doesn't make you more hearing -- to hear shouts from people pointing guns at you -- or less dead, once they fire them. And being smart doesn't spare you from assumptions people make because of how you're navigating tradeoffs. If you're a PhD who decides to go voice-off while getting through airport security because it means you're less likely to get shot, you're going to get treated like a very small and stupid child. Maybe not every time, and not by everyone, but enough that swallowing your pride becomes a normal part of flying. No written note, no typed message, no outward display of intelligence that I've been able to figure out has made someone recognize the intellectual identity I'm trying to communicate when they've already assumed it isn't there.

And being smart doesn't mean you can think your way out of other people's assumptions and their ignorance and their inability to see who you are. And being smart isn't what gives your life its value; being human does. (Being smart doesn't make you more special than people who don't rank as high on whatever flawed metric of smartness you or the world decide to use.) And being kind and brilliant and passionate and wonderful does not exempt you from being heartbroken when the world is broken, and afraid because it hurts you, and your friends, and people like you, and people like your friends, for a lot of different reasons that shouldn't matter in the world, but do.

I wish I were more eloquent, but I can't think about this too much and still do things like finish my doctoral dissertation this week. I wish I could speak to how this isn't just about violence against Deaf and disabled people, how I'm not just speaking up right now because I happen to belong to those groups too -- this breaks my heart when it's Black people and queer people and Christian people and female people and trans people and... people. It's mostly that I can speak a little bit more readily from inside groups I'm in, and that I have a little bit of time to vent this out right now, between writing a section on "postmodern narrative sensemaking as plural" and another on "narrative accruals as co-constructing communities of practice."

Back to the world, I guess. Back to writing my stories of the gorgeousness and complexity and hope that always lives inside the world that wins my heart and breaks it all at the same time.