Every July, National Disability Pride Month invites us to celebrate disabled communities not as a footnote to other conversations, but as communities with their own history, culture, and joy. This month, the CSU Student Success Network (Network) is spotlighting the Black Deaf Project, an organization born at the intersection of race, disability, and language, and built on the belief that no student should have to choose which part of their identity gets to show up in a room.
What started as informal meetups between Black Deaf students has grown into a college tour, a for-credit course, a study abroad program, and a nonprofit that has reached communities from California to South Africa to France. It is a body of work defined less by a single program than by a posture: notice the gap, ask who’s missing, and build the bridge in real time rather than waiting for permission. In the conversation below, founder, Lissa Ramirez-Stapleton, Ph.D., talks with the Network’s social media and communications coordinator, Adwoa Akyianu, about what it means to lead from a place of hearing privilege in service of the Deaf community, why joy is as much a part of disability justice as access, and what higher education can improve upon when it comes to better serving students living at these intersections.
Adwoa Akyianu (AA): What inspired you to create this work, and what need did you notice wasn’t already being met for Black Deaf students and communities?
Dr. Lissa Ramirez-Stapleton: I was working at Cal State Northridge. I was a faculty member in the Deaf Studies Department, and I think just working with students, seeing some of the challenges that, specifically, Black students were experiencing in our program. Black students who were leaving the major because they felt like they couldn’t sign well enough, or were afraid to go out into some of the social spaces and practice sign. That led to realizing, where are all the Black Deaf students? And so that individual experience with students led us to creating a Black meetup group. We would just meet at a restaurant, or Starbucks, to connect and just kind of be in community. And I think that’s where we really heard even more of the issues around retention, just being stressed out about being the only one in class.
It started with the meetups, and then we started doing more cultural events and having Black Deaf folks come onto campus—Black Deaf History Month, panel discussions, an art exhibit—just trying to create that space that we didn’t have. And then realizing, okay, where’s the pipeline for Black Deaf students to even come to college? We realized there was a Black Recruitment Day for the university that the deaf schools were not being invited to. I got involved with that and said, “Well, can we invite those schools?” We invited the deaf schools to come down and participate in the main event and connect with the deaf services on campus.
We were just seeing that there was a lack of students, a lack of retention. Folks were unhappy. They didn’t see themselves in the curriculum. So that turned into creating a Black Deaf Communities course—again, to keep infusing us. And a lot of that was led by student interest, students saying, “We want something different.” We added an international trip, we went to South Africa, and that was a really amazing experience.
As we got closer to 2020, I was still there, and up to that point, we were still doing the programming—the study abroad, the class, the meetups—and then the meetups turned into a club. We added, as a part of the Black graduation celebration, signing the Black National Anthem, which had not been done—adding sign language and Deaf people and culture into Black spaces.
And then in 2023, I left the institution and said, “Okay, the university can’t hold the vision.” It’s getting bigger than this space, and there were so many restrictions. When I was leaving in 2023, I basically took everything I was doing on campus and put it under the nonprofit, The Black Deaf Project, and it has taken on a life of its own, and allowed the community to be more involved and connected to it than what we had before, which has been really, really amazing and beautiful to see.
AA: Your work sits at the intersection of education, race, disability, language, and culture. How have these intersecting identities shaped your own leadership, and how have they influenced the way you approach educational equity?
Dr. Ramirez-Stapleton: I think for my leadership, I take it from a space of privilege. I think as a hearing person doing this work, that has very much guided how I think about my leadership, how I think about community. We have to move at the pace of access. We have to move at the pace of the community and of building trust.
As a hearing person, I can’t always lead. I shouldn’t always be leading. There are times where I need to be in the back, and other times I have to be at the front, because my hearing privilege opens a door, or gets people to listen in ways that folks are not listening to Deaf and hard-of-hearing folks, and so I think, for the organization, we are very community-based. Our board of directors is never less than 60% Black Deaf, probably closer to 70% right now, and I don’t actually have a vote in the nonprofit as the executive director. I’m really the person that’s looking for the money, building the relationships, and knowing when it needs to be me and when it shouldn’t be me. If there’s a program we’ve been doing for the past five years and we shouldn’t be doing it, if it doesn’t align with what the community needs right now, then we got to drop it. I think, as much as possible, I try to include the community from the very beginning. They’re not an afterthought to the work that we do.
And that sometimes means we have to move slower. We have to always figure out access to language, and that’s not convenient, because we live in a hearing world. Our organization does a lot of pre-education before we walk into spaces. For example, on college tour, the hearing people will go in and train every single organization we work with before we bring our people there. We go in and talk to the hotel staff, and we have a training video, like, this is how you interact with Deaf folks. With our van company, with the universities that we work with, we vet them before we show up, because if it’s not a space that we believe our students will thrive in and be successful and supported, then we don’t want to take them there. It’s a constant balance.
I don’t always get it right. I mess up all the time. But I think understanding hearing privilege, understanding how audism works, understanding the history and the current realities of both, are really important, even down to our events being signed events. If you’re a hearing person who doesn’t sign, we have interpreters, but the onus and the burden is on hearing people to figure it out, not on Deaf people to figure it out. You are not going to see our board, or myself, not signing in Deaf Space if there’s one Deaf person there. Even when we do presentations, if there’s one Deaf person in the audience, we’ll be signing that presentation, and the hearing folks will have the interpreter. It’s about trying to shift the burden of who has to provide access. Even if it’s for that 90 minutes that we may be doing a presentation, Deaf folks are not going to have to struggle to be connected in ways that they may have to struggle or navigate the hearing world in other times. That’s a major part of my leadership style—the continuous work, because I have not arrived, I’m always working on it. But it’s about staying grounded and rooted in community, and making sure that folks who are most marginalized are leading, as much as possible.
AA: What would you say are some common misconceptions that you encounter about Black Deaf students?
Dr. Ramirez-Stapleton: I think some are about all Deaf students and some are that intersection. The access, language, and access to information, is all Deaf students. We do a college tour, and we go in and vet institutions: Do they have a disability service office, someone who specifically works with Deaf students? Do they understand Deaf needs and experiences?
I think the biggest thing is access to information and language. I think folks immediately look at the price tag of interpreters and try to figure out how do we get around this thing. They’re always spending time and energy on how to get around providing the access requested versus figuring out how to get the money to do the access that was requested. I think folks don’t always understand how difficult it is with some of these other alternative options.
For a lot of Deaf folks, English, particularly written language, is not people’s first language. It’s very difficult for a lot of young Deaf folks around reading and writing. To have your entire educational experience in just captions is very difficult when your natural way of knowing and understanding is through a visual language. There’s so much more that goes into sign language besides just the signs—the body language, the eyebrows raised, the movement of the body—all these things are a part of the language that give context to what you’re actually talking about, that you’re not going to get with flat captions. I think that happens often within higher education. Faculty members are not taught how to make our spaces accessible. Disability services have been a table at a fair during my orientation. Outside of that, you get that student that needs it, and then you’re scrambling to figure out, how do I make my PowerPoint accessible? I think as of this past April, the requirement was to make sure your Canvas pages were accessible, but that’s been slow coming. Most people in higher education don’t take a disability studies class in their master’s programs.
I think the principles of disability justice are so important. Folks with disabilities, Deaf folks, have lived without you, up until 18 or 19, they’ve navigated their lives, and there is expertise that they have, that if we tapped into and said, “I’m not quite sure how to make this space accessible in the ways that you may specifically need it. What has worked for you in the past?”—and really honored people’s own expertise over their own lives. That’s not relinquishing all responsibility of those who are responsible for creating educational spaces, but it is reframing that interdependence is okay: you have an expertise that I do not have, I have the resources and the privilege to be in the room to shift things, and let’s work together to make this space what it needs to be.
I think adding on the piece about race is super important also, because so many of our Black Deaf students, they enter a space as Black students first even though we can’t separate those things—what people see first is a Black person. And then on top of that, they are a Deaf student, so now they’re not getting the access that they need for their Deaf needs—but they’re also already being seen as a certain type of person, with whatever stereotypes that professor or staff member has about Black students. It’s doubled in terms of that oppression, doubled in terms of those assumptions.
I think about vocational rehabilitation (VR) services for so many of our Black students. Every student with a disability gets access to VR. The point of VR is to help them be able to get a job. VR is a federally-funded but state-controlled entity, so that VR counselor has the say over what they think a student is capable of doing work-wise. I’ve talked to so many Black Deaf students who say, “Well, my VR counselor says they don’t think I can do that,” or “That major’s not going to lead to a job for me,” and they’ll refuse to pay for tuition, and that’s if they can even get those services. Looking at research out of the National Deaf Center on Post-Secondary Outcomes at the University of Texas at Austin, Black Deaf folks are the least likely of all disabilities, of all racial groups, at the intersection, to get support from VR services. They are most likely to be on the waitlist, most likely to not get the support. Again, that intersection just can’t be ignored.
AA: I noticed that the Black Deaf Project intentionally centers joy alongside advocacy. Why is it important to create spaces where Black Deaf students can experience joy, celebration, and community?
Dr. Ramirez-Stapleton: Because we deserve that. Our young people deserve that. We have not been put here to just struggle, to just kind of get the scraps, to live in a space of marginalization and accept that. We have a right to joy. We have a right to thriving, we have a right to just be, we have a right to make mistakes and learn from them. We have a right to grow as people.
What I feel like I’ve seen happen, particularly for folks who want to become more race-conscious, is that the flip side is, “I’m just going to give them all the bad stuff—slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, all the things that have happened.” And then you forget that we’ve invented a ton of stuff in this country, that we’ve had leaders, accountants, banks, communities, churches, cities that have been burnt to the ground, but we’re highly functioning, highly collective, highly successful. That just doesn’t get added into that education. Those things need to be taught alongside. Even in the midst of resistance, we have thrived, we come from kings and queens. The complexity of Black life includes joy, and you got to tell it all, so that you don’t leave our children stuck in oppression. Oppression isn’t an identity. It is an action done to Black people, that Black people have responded to in lots of different ways, and joy is a radical reaction and resistance to that: dancing, music, food, collectiveness and the rituals—all of that is also a part of who we are, in spite of the oppression, not because of it. We come from greatness.
AA: What practical steps can staff, faculty, and campus leaders take to better support Black Deaf students, and more broadly, what advice would you offer to higher education leaders who want to move beyond good intentions and build campuses where accessibility, belonging, and equity are woven into everyday practice?
Dr. Ramirez-Stapleton: I think there’s so many things that higher education can learn from nonprofits and grassroots efforts. All the knowledge is not sitting in higher education. Higher education and practitioners have to connect to organizations that are doing the work with people outside of the academy, because you don’t know who’s being locked out if you don’t talk to anybody who’s not in.
We’ve had an experience with our college tour where it was a poor experience. The campus was not ready for us. We spent four months meeting and planning. I physically showed up on campus a year before we were going to get there, to say, “We’re coming, most of our group is Deaf,” and we get there, and the very first thing that happens is we’re at admissions, and there’re no interpreters. The moment we step on campus, it’s not accessible. It was mishap after mishap all day.
Of course, the campus was deeply embarrassed. I met the entire executive cabinet that day, and everyone’s like, “Here’s my card, let’s follow up I want to figure out what happened. This is not okay.” I have followed up three times, and not one person has gotten back to us. It’s not enough to admit that you’ve messed up, if you don’t learn from the experience. Messing up is not the issue, generally speaking, but doing better once you realize you have messed up is really important.
We go back to this idea of “crip time,” from Critical Disability Studies—a different mode of how people move through time, humanity and community over individuality and production. Institutions very much function off of production—get them in, and graduate them. There is not a lot of space to honor collective movement, or bodies that just exist differently, or need different ways to process information. So thinking about Paulo Freire’s work around praxis—reflection and action—it is not enough to just reflect in the moment things aren’t working, if your action hasn’t shifted and changed. And people are waiting for folks of different communities to show up before they make a space open, when it really should be the other way around.
Even on this campus, the first thing said to me was, “Okay, we’re gonna fix it for next year when you all come back.” We’re not coming back. For many of our students, this is their first time ever being on a college campus. This is their first impression, and the first impression is no access. At best, it’s discriminatory, and at worst, it’s just not taking care of people in the ways that you say you take care of people. I think people just got to sit in the mess, and then try to figure out how do you plug in the community to then improve, and that requires people to slow down.
AA: What continues to inspire you and give you hope about the future of Black Deaf leadership and education?
Dr. Ramirez-Stapleton: Our young people. We’ve been doing the college tour for six years now, and to see who they were when they were first-year students in high school, to where they are now, being able to talk about their future in a way that’s not scary: “I like this place because of the academics, because they have this major.” To see their movement, to see their joy, to see their confidence, to see them build community with other youth across the state. It brings me so much joy and excitement to see what is going to happen next with them.
We also have a symposium we host every other year called Black Empowerment and Success, Thriving in Deaf-Related Fields—trying to get more Black folks, Deaf and hearing, connected to the Deaf community. The pull that we’re able to bring Black people together has been really great to see. We are a collective, and this is where we thrive, in spaces where we’re together.
The same is true with our international program, Black Hands Travel. We go and connect with the Black Deaf community in other countries. We just got back from France and London, connecting with our Black Deaf sister organizations there. Wherever there’s Black people is home, we are everywhere. There’s just a natural inkling to joy, and to laughter and connection when we’re together, that’s not hard for us.
Whenever I’m like, “I can’t do this anymore, I’m tired!” I feel like the universe sends a sign of, “No, we need spaces, we need each other.” I’ll get a text from a parent that says, “I have a Black Deaf child, and what you’re doing is having an impact,” and I’m like, “Okay, we have to keep going, because we’re needed.” I see myself as a community builder, a bridge builder to bring us together. Even if it’s impacting just one person, that ripples out and has other impacts.
For our college tour, we’re now giving out graduation cords for any student who has come to our program two times. We just had someone graduate this year, the first person graduating out, and we took the cord to school and honored him during his final senior event, and seeing the younger Black kids saying, “Ooh, that’s going to be me next year. I’m going to get one of those cords.” To see the ripple of that, and to see parents not be as afraid to let their kids come, because so many of our Black families, and really, hearing parents with Deaf kids, are met with fear with their children first, because their Deaf child is the first Deaf person they’ve met. Seeing kids when they come back from a college tour, and parents are like, “Who is this kid? They’re happy, joyful. You can have them every year.” That ripple that I know the organization is able to do, and that we collectively do together is what keeps me going, and I think keeps the organization going.
Reflection
What comes through most in talking with Lissa isn’t a strategy or a five-year plan but noticing who’s missing and doing something about it. A meetup at Starbucks becomes a college tour. A missing course becomes a class built with students, for students. A campus that can’t hold the vision becomes a nonprofit that reaches from California to South Africa to France. Along the way, joy stays as central as access, because for Lissa, one was never separate from the other. The Network is honored to share this conversation and to celebrate Lissa Ramirez-Stapleton and the entire Black Deaf Project community this July.
This Q&A has been edited for readability and punctuation.