Gallaudet and the Signing Starbucks (a D.C. travelogue)

I visited Washington, D.C. recently. I got to try out my brand new camera there! Having a camera on you really changes what you pay attention to, and even how people see you and interact with you, in little ways.

It's an intimidating city — lobbying firms on every block, embassies wedged in between businesses, bus stops plastered with tech ads aimed at government agencies. And the White House is just right there. I can't wrap my head around the fact that it is just… right there.

Other than the discomfort of being surrounded by these particular institutions of power, I had a lovely time there. Most of the photos I took are collected later on in this post, but I wanted to take some time to talk about Gallaudet University and the "Signing Starbucks", two places that captured my attention and imagination so strongly.

In these environments, unlike so many others, American Sign Language (ASL) is the dominant language, and the outsiders are the ones who don't understand it.

At the Starbucks, staffed entirely by Deaf workers, ASL signers can sign their orders to the baristas at the counter. If you don't sign, you can write your order on a pad for the barista to read. I was thinking and practicing all the way there, but I chickened out at the intimidating length of the drink names — just looking at the menu item for "lavender oat milk matcha latte" was overwhelming. But even without signing the main part of the conversation, I was so happy to be able to use little signs here and there — "hello", "good morning", "small", "for here", "thank you". I sat with my drink at one of the tables for probably too long that morning, just staring at people as they came in and got their drinks.

A group of people came in, looking like they might have been an ASL class; they circled with their teacher away from the counter, reviewing signs for "coffee", "tea", and others. But aside from them, many of the patrons who came in seemed like they didn't know anything about this being a "Signing Starbucks" — they were just stopping in for their regular coffee fix. Other people in line were quick to let them know about the situation, and they always seemed to adjust quickly.

What I especially loved there was seeing how people found ways to communicate. At one point, the barista asked a customer what size they wanted. The customer looked like they understood the question, but wasn't sure, at first, how to relay an answer back. Pretty quickly, though, they figured out that they could point at one of the plastic cups taped to the side of the counter, and that got an "perfect" sign from the barista. Later, another customer picked up their completed order, but wanted to get a lid for the to-go cup. They gestured to the barista with a cupped hand on the top of the cup, and that was all the barista needed to be able to point them to some other counter, where lids and straws and other accompaniments were available.

Once I felt like I had really been sitting and staring for a little too long, we left the Starbucks to make the short trip over to Gallaudet University. It was the tail end of spring break, so there wasn't much activity around campus. We walked around and lingered in as many places as were open to us as visitors.

We visited the National Deaf Life Museum, which occupied a space in one of the academic buildings. (Here, I got to sign with a couple of staff members who asked if we needed help; together, we figured out that the stairs were locked and we needed to use the elevator to get up to the right floor for the museum.)

The museum was showing a new exhibit about Native Deaf people and their culture. The exhibit emphasised that, while people outside of the community were welcome to visit and learn, the exhibit was created by and for people in that specific community. The framing had a strong influence on how I approached each part of the exhibit — it didn't feel like a space designed to showcase some exotic culture in a certain place, at a certain time; it felt like a space for Native Deaf people to feel a sense of belonging and connection to each other, right now, right here.

We also spent some time at the visitor center, exploring the exhibits about the students and programs at the university. (Here, I got to sign a little bit with the student workers at the information desk, who saw that I was maybe struggling to understand some of the conversation, and asked if I wanted them to voice. I said yes, feeling embarrassed that I wasn't able to keep up, but they were very nice and helpful about all of it. Later, another student worker came over and we had a brief conversation in sign, during which he asked if we needed help, or if we were waiting for a tour, and I reassured him that, if it was okay, we actually did just want to sit here in the waiting area and watch the informational videos playing on loop — I was just really enjoying them.)

There was one final small exhibit in another building about the history of the university, including pivotal movements like Deaf President Now. (I didn't interact with anyone here, but the exhibit was great.)

I think about the accommodations, in a way, that Deaf people have to make for hearing people in their daily lives.

Like it is with so many kinds of privilege, those of us who use the dominant language in a community never have to think too much about communication barriers. Those in the community who don't use the dominant language, on the other hand, have to work that much harder to communicate. They may be more likely to have experience being in situations where they are misunderstood, where, perhaps, others are making a less-than-generous effort to understand them.

So we see situations where hearing people learn about the existence of communication barriers (but not so much about the actual people experiencing those barriers) and end up peddling over-engineered technological solutions to the problem as they understand it. Make Deaf people wear clunky sign language gloves, so that we don't have to make an extra effort to learn some sign, or take the slower approach of miming or writing or typing to bridge the communication gap. Make them wear expensive auto-captioning glasses or use buggy personal caption screens, so that we don't have to provide interpreters at live events or open captions on movies.

Being a hearing person in Deaf spaces is an illuminating reversal of those norms for me. (I can only speak to Deaf spaces that I've experienced as a hearing person, where interfacing with hearing people is the intention or one of the expectations.)

When I first stepped into my ASL class, our teacher let us know that it was going to be a fully immersive learning experience. That meant no voicing — that is, no talking. I was nervous from how little ASL I knew. I'd been studying it on my own for a number of years, but only by myself, online, with no exposure to people signing in the real world. All of that supposed knowledge seems to fly right out of your head when you first try to use it in the real world.

But a good language teacher — especially, I think, a good Deaf ASL teacher — knows how to make communication work. As we fumbled through the early portion of the course, our teacher wrote on the whiteboard or typed words out on a screen when they needed to communicate longer concepts. As a student, though, I was surprised at how much we were able to get across through miming and gesturing (that is, not ASL) and imperfect signing. Our sentence structures were stilted and/or very "English", and the signs weren't always the right ones, or perhaps we used the wrong shapes or movements. But because we all wanted to understand each other, we made an effort to pay close attention to context, body language, and facial expressions — information that tells us a lot about what we want to say, so much so that they're part of the grammar of ASL. The more we got to know each other, throughout the lessons, the more we got used to each other's signing and fingerspelling styles.

By the end of our last course, we had improved significantly in vocabulary and maybe slightly in fluency, though mistakes were still plenty. But it felt like the most important thing that had changed was my experience in communicating imperfectly and my ability to feel slightly more comfortable being in that position, where you and I have little language in common and must therefore rely on our kindness, generosity, and patience in understanding each other as human beings in dialogue.

Okay, there are more photos! I didn't want to further overwhelm this long post, but you can click to expand this section if you do want to see more of the photos.

More photos