How An Encounter with a Deaf Driver Changed My Social Justice Path: Angie Freeman

[00:00:00]There was a moment in my experience that stands out that I always talk about or bring up.

[00:00:06]This was right after grad school in my first full-time job out of grad school working in res life.

[00:00:13]And a colleague and myself were in their car and we were backing out of this parking space in the parking lot and this car comes and almost hits us.

[00:00:25]So we're honking the horn. I was in the passenger seat and my colleague was driving, but we almost hit this car and we're like, "Oh, well what are you doing? You don't see us?" Road rage like instantly. Just like yelling at this other person. No impact happened or whatever. We I look up and saw the other person in the car that was driving and they just started talking to me in ASL and was like and I was just like, "Oh my like my jaw just dropped." And I was like this person is deaf like they did not hear us honking our horn.

[00:00:59]We didn't hear all the other stuff that another person probably would hear. It was just a moment for me of wow, I'm I'm navigating this world in a particular kind of way and a sense of like the world revolves around me. Like why didn't you hear my horn? Why didn't you see me in this car? It's your fault. And from then on it just hit me in a particular way that particular incident and my colleague and I were just like like that we're a-holes. But that was not good. So anyway, from that moment I realized the privilege that I'll navigate the world with. One of those is my ability to hear, speak, talk, walk, all the things. And the program that I worked in had a really big emphasis on social justice and even though I was at a predominantly white institution, the department itself was very diverse and we instilled that in the work that we did. This was at University of Vermont.

[00:01:57]That's where I had my social justice journey really um activated so to speak from that experience. But from there I learned ASL and I I took classes while I was working as a resident director and I just wanted to learn more about deaf culture and the deaf community and you know um I was fascinated with the language itself and just wanted to learn more about that. Navigating the world Navigating a hearing world specifically even with the knowledge that I've learned I still can't even imagine what that feels like and how that is.

[00:02:32]Everything in this world is accommodating for hearing people the structures and how things are communicated and all that. Those are the things that I started to learn in my journey as a residence director and just learning about social justice.