Brendan Stern

If you haven’t heard – or seen, in my case – the news, Starbucks has opened a “sign language” store near Gallaudet University, the only 4-year liberal arts university for deaf people worldwide. Splashed on the H Street NE storefront entrance is S-T-A-R-B-U-C-K-S spelled out in the hand shapes of American Sign Language (ASL). Inside, 24 employees have been hired to make coffee, take orders, and run the shop using ASL.

Corporate bigwigs at Starbucks are no doubt patting themselves on the back for this virtuous venture. Plenty of Deaf people are celebrating it too, for understandable reasons.

But as some wise dude once said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

As a Deaf person, I see worrisome signs of fetishization and victimization that are not only problematic if I may use this fashionable word but also self-defeating if we consider the long-term interests of the Deaf community.

(To be clear, am I offended & outraged? No. Am I dazed & confused? Yes. Do I want boycotts & apologies? No. Do I want conversation & clarity? Yes.)

Inside the Starbucks signing store, there is a loud sign boasting that the store is “dedicated to people united by sign language and Deaf culture.” 

To see the weirdness, flip it. Try to imagine white people opening an “African-American store” next to Howard University.

Or English-speaking business owners writing on their store wall in Dearborn, Michigan, that the store is dedicated to Arabic.

Or evangelical Christians in Mississippi opening a Jewish coffee store several blocks from the only synagogue in the state.

Or a hearing family from Carson City visiting the Asian Elephants and Sumatran Tigers at the National Zoo, the paintings of the Obamas at the National Portrait Gallery — and then the signing baristas on H Street.

Look, Mommy! Here is how you fingerspell V-E-N-T-I!  

How different is this from the human zoos of the 19th and 20th centuries, where privileged visitors came to gawk at “exotic” people from “faraway worlds,” all under the high-minded guise of multicultural education? (Other than the fact that the Starbucks on H Street pays a living wage and has loud signs saying all the right things.)

Now, if that hearing family wants to learn sign language after visiting the Sumatran Tigers, then cool pies. How about visiting Gallaudet University? Downloading the deaf-owned ASL App? Buying a pint at that deaf-run brewery, Streetcar 82, a stone’s throw away in Hyattsville?

But know what? At the end of the day, hearing people can hijack and gawk all they want. Like it or not, it is still a free country. 

What is really confuses me, however, is seeing Deaf people wipe away tears of joy while discussing the signing store. Talking about “finally” being able to order coffee in ASL. About “finally” not being shut out of conversations and stuck in hearing spaces. 

If you read social media and news coverage, you’d think the signing store’s removing profound barriers for Deaf people.

Yet, when we cannot order coffee at a signing store and portray it as a “barrier” at the most basic level, we exaggerate the offense’s severity. How time-consuming or upsetting is it to write “Grande Vanilla Latte with soy milk” on pen and paper, point it out on the menu, or type it out on our iPhone? Are we not diminishing the rhetorical power of “victim” for those far more deserving?

More fundamentally, this narrative of victimization is unproductive at best and dangerous at worst if we consider the crossroads at which the Deaf community stands today. Cochlear implants are booming, early detection is improving, mainstreaming is up, enrollment in schools for the deaf is down. The very survival of ASL and Deaf culture is at stake.

If we want there to be enough Deaf Americans in 2050 to sustain ASL and deaf schools, then our unique task is persuasion. A sparsely populated community will not stand. We have to persuade people outside our world that Deaf people aren’t victims.

More specifically, we have to persuade strangers that Deaf people are not victims to get more of what we claim we want. Why? Being Deaf in the United States is no longer a medical condition. Nor is exposing deaf students to Deaf identity, culture, and education a sovereign decision made by and for Deaf people.

Instead, because of technological and legal advances such as the cochlear implant and the Americans with Disabilities Act, it is a personal choice. And it is a choice made by, for all intents and purposes, ‘others’ if we consider that more than 90% of deaf children are from hearing parents.

That people who are different from us get to choose whether or not the next generation has a different identity and culture from us is an exceptional dilemma known to almost no other minority community.

As a low-incidence, low-power group, we should carefully weigh the trade-offs of a victimhood narrative. Sometimes we prioritize awareness at the expense of persuasion. Remember Project DARE? It spread awareness about drugs effectively. Yet, it failed at reducing drug use.

What message are we sending by celebrating this signing Starbucks? Of what exactly are we making others aware? If I’m a hearing parent of a deaf baby, reading all these posts, what do I conclude? That being Deaf is so isolating that even ordering a coffee is a triumph if it happens in sign? In celebrating, we might be reinforcing exactly the perceptions that steer parents toward cochlear implants and oral education, and away from ASL and deaf education.

By spreading the impression that ordering caffeinated drinks is a barrier for Deaf people, it becomes difficult to refute Helen Keller’s famous observation that deafness is a much worse fortune than blindness because it prevents us from participating in the world out there.

It becomes more challenging to refute the contentious position of the Alexander Graham Bell Organization that listening and speaking is the solution for deaf children. Quite ironically, we tend to consider AG Bell Enemy #1 because they support cochlear implants and “oral education.” We accuse the organization of xenophobia, phonocentrism, and audism and denounce their long-standing practice of “eugenics.“

Quite rightfully, we contend that deafness is not necessarily an affliction, that sign language is beneficial, and that parents should not despair if their deaf children do not listen and speak.

Yet, in the next breath, we act afflicted, despairing about commonplace experiences for deaf people who cannot listen and speak in public spaces.

This tactic is problematic because the hearing parent with a deaf baby reading about the signing store might, quite reasonably, wonder: if an everyday task as mundane as ordering coffee is this traumatizing for Deaf people, then what must it be like for us every day outside the “DEAF WORLD “? For us to walk around in public spaces without signing people and signs announcing fealty to Deaf culture?

The irony is not only that most Deaf people I know are perfectly OK with ordering coffee, which is a straightforward process pretty much anywhere in the country, but also that it has never been a better time to be a Deaf American.

More big-screen movies are captioned than ever. ASL interpreters in most public spaces are not unusual luxuries but lawful mandates. Deaf people are opening businesses at an unprecedented rate. Nyle DiMarco is winning the hearts and minds of tweeters, tweeners, and influential people. In the past several years alone, Broadway has reimagined a play by putting deaf actors and hearing actors on the same stage and revived another that challenges common misconceptions about deaf people. The VL2 lab is discovering the cognitive benefits of ASL. And so it goes. 

Yet, you wouldn’t know it from our breathless praise of the Starbucks store.

It’s time for activists and leaders to rethink how we talk about “the Deaf experience” and what we label as “progress.” We should be asking tough questions about this signing Starbucks, no matter how well-intentioned it is:

1. Does it promote ASL and Deaf culture as commodities to be marketed and consumed?
2. Are we implying deaf people need specialty stores to live well in public life — that we require a signing Chipotle, signing Sweetgreen, and signing Uber?

To persuade strangers, if nothing else, I submit that Deaf people ought to celebrate less often places like the signing Starbucks store, and more often deaf baristas and managers at our local Starbucks.

That we should advocate less often for Deaf-centric places, and more often for accessible public spaces.

That we should resist the trendy impulse to play the victim by sensationalizing less about barriers that are not entirely and by seeking honesty, self-reliance, and dignity instead.

Until then, if you want Starbucks coffee and are passing by on H Street, so be it. Stop by and order a venti iced skinny hazelnut macchiato in sign language or on their two-way keyboards.

At the end of the day, however, I appreciate good coffee around the corner, so I’ll order my espresso from Peregrine Espresso across the street from Gallaudet and their award-winning baristas.

Even if I have to take 5 seconds to write down “a quadruple shot of espresso, please.”