ive been tryin hard but i truly do not understand this elitism thing. still just sounds like to me that people are upset they arent friends with a certain group of people that they wanna be friendly with.

There are so many circles/cliques/groups of friends in this community everywhere. I don’t understand why this elitism thing focuses only on a select few of them. I can name several circles I’ve seen around and wanted to get to know, but things just dont clash that way sometimes

and that’s just OK, different paths will come and go and same old paths will fork in the road at points. That’s just how i see it. It might be simple minded, but it really doesnt have to be so complicated. Its a human thing

Of course like a wise woman once said, elitism is like an onion ( @graceakell) and there are certainly layers in the system where people are looked at as “not deaf enough” and get systemic mistreatment of it. And that’s where it gets complicated, its rather heartbreaking.

And within that there are even more layers. Deaf people who have come from a place of privilege in knowing their language and culture and having a solid foot in who they are in their.. deafhood (?) Are people who have the bare minimum.

They have full access to their rightful language and they were able to grow up in a environment where they were always supported, educationally, socially.. etc. The way it should be. But that’s only when they’re in that little bubble of their life. It doesnt exist all around.

So seeing a lot of mainstreamed or etc kids coming from a place of struggle and late identity discoveries being angry when turned down or not included as a equal to those with “full-access” life, I think that pain is totally valid. The way its lashed back at them though...

I don’t understand how that’s going to work. It will make all of us much more conscious of all of our biases, but at the same time, the cultural experiences of those 2 groups (noting that there has to be way more than just 2 groups to this, but for simplicity’s sake...)

Exist. These differences sometimes dont matter, but more often than not, they exist loudly. And it is natural, so natural, for the common groups to develop as a result of that. It’s so healthy to take a real good look at how that internally harms our people, EVEN though its very

much an outside influence, controlled by hearing people who only wanna split us and fix us and diminish us. They’re the groups I’m really the most upset at. And that’s where i feel this conversation on elitism should be heading, somewhere in that direction.

There’s so much to discuss on this, i don’t know if my compressed tweet blurt even makes sense. To come to an conclusion, I just want to say that 1. elitism and gatekeeping etc do not only exist in the deaf community, they exist in almost any group ever.

it’s a human phenomenon. but that doesnt mean its OK and that we shouldn’t do anything about it. We should. There is always room for change. But be careful before saying, “deaf, that.” Where is that notion really coming from?

And when the discussion on elitism just seems to turn to popularity matters and not the actual systematic advantages within the deaf community as disabled people in this society, that’s when I walk away. Because that makes no sense to me.