The AAPI deaf signing community is very small. What makes it infuriating and liberating is that everybody is constantly locating themselves vis-à-vis other people and (re)positioning them in different categories of personhood with respect to language, ethnicity, race,

nationality, indigeneity, citizenship, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, audiological status, hereditary deafness, and the likes. But many, especially light-skinned East Asians, don’t recognize their privileges and realize how they contribute to anti-blackness

and anti-indigeneity, which renders them complicit in upholding white supremacy. We -- and this is a particular we that I'm deliberately using -- need to have a candid conversation about this. My inbox's open.