The Intersection of Black, Caribbean, and Deaf Communities: An Interview with Dr. Derefe Chevannes

Originally from Jamaica, Dr. Chevannes is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Memphis. Dr. Chevannes’s research surrounds the intersection of Africana Studies, Deaf Studies, and Caribbean Studies. His primary specialization is in political theory, focusing on Africana Political Theory with an emphasis on Black Liberatory Politics.

Liahna Strout met with Dr. Chevannes via Zoom on November 17, 2023 to discuss his work as a professor, his studies surrounding the Black Deaf community, and his experience as a Jamaican in the U.S.

Liahna Strout: Can you talk a little about your area of study and specific interests? How do you understand what it means to be a Black political thinker? Why did you pursue credentialing and work as a Black political thinker?

Derefe Chevannes: My area of interest lies in Black political thought. I came to political science through political theory because I quickly realized my brain is geared toward philosophical ideas and theoretical insights. I had lots of probing questions growing up as a young child in my homeland, Jamaica. During these formative years, I was asking many questions, yet I had no one to give me answers, so I decided I was going to find the answers on my own. This is what brought me to political theory, and specifically Black political thought. My areas of interest concern what’s going on in the Caribbean; what’s happening in the United States, what’s unfolding in Africa, including other forms of Black diasporic thought being lived in different parts of the world.

What brought me there? I think my current study had so much to do with growing up in my native land. I was born and bred in Kingston, Jamaica, which is part of the reason I am interested in Caribbean Studies. I think, though, that even if I had been born in the United States, I would still be interested in what Black people had to say about the world. I grew up pretty humble—I would even say poor—and I realized when I examined my society that the people who tended to not be in poverty were people who were very light-skinned. Sometimes that means white folks, non-black folks, such as Asians, or very light-skinned Black folks. With the country being majority Black, the issue of colorism predominates, where color constitutes the new social hierarchy; whereas in the U.S., race becomes the social hierarchy. Here, an important question arises: How can colonial relations or ethno-racial oppression manifest in a Black majority country? One way of making sense of that reality lies in one’s proximity to whiteness. Simply, the closer you are to whiteness in terms of your skin color, the more opportunities you’ll have. I grew up and realized something was off, that there was this lingering inexpressible imbalance between “the haves” and “the have-nots,” and work ethic became an insufficient justification to account for the glaring gap in political reality and socio-economic livelihood. Understandably, I wanted to study all these racialized and ethnicized phenomena and the ways that race affects people’s livelihood—the way they grew up, their access to education and other social and economic opportunities, and what they thought about themselves, who they were and who they could become

When I came to the United States, I went to a very white liberal arts college in Iowa. That was the first time I was made to feel like the “n-word.” I was 19 at the time and had spent my entire life in Jamaica always surrounded by Black people. When I attended a predominately white institution—like, 95% white—then, I still vividly recall thinking to myself, “Oh, this is what it feels like to be an n-word in the U.S.” Sometimes it wasn’t an intentionally, conscious hatred directed toward me, but there was a clear feeling of being treated as though I was an object, or what W.E.B. Du Bois once called, “a problem”—the problem of being black in a white world.

These lived experiences as a Black man, both in Jamaica and then moving to the United States to pursue my studies, really started to fan the flames of my philosophical interests. The combinations of all of those experiences anchored me in the certainty that this is something I definitely want to study. I had realized that, for me, the classroom was a very free space where I can begin to push the lines that I couldn’t push at home or in church. When I came to the United States, I was able to experience this in even more extreme terms and textures. The classroom, overall, was a very important space for me, and because the classroom gave me that platform to really think, critique, and question—and receive really good answers to those questions—it made me want to find even better answers than the ones I was receiving. That led me to doing the work I do, posing lots and lots of questions, even if those questions couldn’t be answered fully. Yet, as long as they could be asked, that made all the difference in the world—because I had known so many spaces where I couldn’t even interrogate. In such spaces, to interrogate was to either advocate or desecrate. The questioning itself became an existential threat to life as we know it. It was in these moments I had come to the realization that a society that cannot question is, at once, a dead society.

Thank you for sharing that with me. I relate a lot to your experience of looking for answers to questions and feeling like no one had any answers. What is it like being a Black Jamaican studying and teaching in the U.S. South? How do you think about the relationship between Blackness in Jamaica and Blackness in the U.S.?

That’s a very good question. A lot of white folks don’t even realize the difference between being Jamaican and African-American. When they see you, the first thing the white gaze observes is being Black. I then have to explain that I am not from here; I am from somewhere else. Sometimes folks say, “Oh… cool,” and then they’ll ask, “Can you tell me about this…” or they’ll tell me, “By the way, my favorite movie is Cool Runnings!” So, in terms of international awareness, I find global consciousness to be very limited within the United States. The only sort of contact many people have with Jamaica is whether or not they have gone on a cruise to Montego Bay or spent time with their family or spouse at a Sandals resort. Of course, my barefooted reality of my country is far more complex.

There are not a lot of white southerners who fully understand my experience. When it comes to Black southerners, they definitely appreciate the cultural differences. Black southern folks say, “You’re definitely not from Memphis,” or “You’re definitely not from the south.” They want to hear more about Jamaica and they have a whole lot more cultural competency about Jamaica because they’ve listened to Reggae or Dancehall music, and that’s Black music—you won’t find many white people just listening to Dancehall music on a good old Sunday afternoon. When I meet Black southerners, their entry point into Jamaica is through its culture, through the roots of its people, through its food, through its music. For most southern whites, the entry point is the commercialism of resort lifestyle. Also, in my experience with Black folks, there is a palpable appreciation of the differences that exist between African-American southern culture and Jamaican urban culture. Sometimes there is an intrigue and sometimes difficulty knowing how to relate to me because I am not African American, though I am Black. There is this cultural divide, which is to be expected, because it is two different cultures and ethnicities.

As someone who was not born or raised in the United States, there is a lot of culture shock many immigrants experience, regardless of one’s race or even the racial community you are interacting with. There’s a genuine difficulty in acclimating and assimilating to the dominant culture in the U.S. because (1) I miss home and (2) when I speak Jamaican patois, for example, many have difficulty understanding my speech, regardless of whether they are Black or white. So, there are those cultural differences that make it hard residing outside one’s native country. As can be imagined, there are social and personal difficulties that will arise. Nevertheless, these difficulties are far from being irresolvable.

The relationship between Jamaican and American Blackness raises the question of ethnicity because to talk about culture is to talk about ethnicity. Afro-Jamaicans and African-Americans share the same race, but different cultures. Of course, there are many similarities between the two: 1) there is a shared sense of global Black culture as well as a global experience of what it means to be racialized as Black subjects who are rendered poor and become institutionally arrested as criminal subjects. When a white person sees me, (s)he does not, at first, see a Jamaican. What some do is to proverbially clutch their pearls, or purse. These shared experiences of negrification through anti-black racism affords both black communities a deep sense of racial solidarity. My ethnicity isn’t a barrier to engaging African-American culture. It’s a form of embodied solidarity because both the African-American and the Afro-Jamaican, realize it matters not where we were born. Anti-black folks will view us exactly the same, completely anonymized and indistinguishable as two black faces blended together as a single threat to white civilization. These experiences of exile create moments of solidarity and community, in making sense of the political and social world.

Elaborating on that last question, you have a unique experience as you are now a professor in the south, but you experienced university in the north at UConn. Has the classroom environment been different for you in the South?

Yes, totally different. Let me give you an example. I remember teaching a course, “Introduction to Political Thought.” In the course, there were about fifteen different scholars and thinkers, where twelve of the fifteen were all white because that’s the canon—Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, etc. It had all the people that you would expect to see in an intro course, and it had three Black thinkers: Fanon, Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin. I remember getting evaluations from my students, who were majority white. Their first criticism: “This is not a Black studies course, and he’s teaching this course as if it is a Black studies course. I didn’t register to be in a Black studies program or to take Black political thought—I wanted to take Intro to Political Thought, and he’s just putting race into that.” There are twelve white thinkers in the course and that doesn’t make the course “Introduction to European Thought,” but three Black thinkers make it “Introduction to Black Political Thought”! There is a peculiar way some students view me as the first Black professor they’ve had, coming straight out of high school, which illuminates a genuine racial crisis. Ultimately, what happens is that some students say, “…he’s a Black professor plus he’s teaching Black texts… overload of Blackness!” They freak out.

Part of that is an expression of anti-black racism against me experienced in the classroom as a Black professor, and students feel so strongly about this racial reaction that they write this on course evaluations. Comparatively, I would’ve never gotten a response like this in Jamaica. We would read the ideas and engage them for what they are. In the American classroom, the default idea is Euro-American reason, and anything that is not that, one is lampooned as straying into some other tangential discipline. Defiantly, I am saying, “No, black voices are a part of the canon. There is more to the canon of political thought that is not white or Eurocentric.” For me, there has been tremendous difficulty in teaching some white students in the South. For my Black students (or students of color), they love reading black political histories. They say, “Give me more!” Some of them have never read these foundational texts; they are so hungry for more radical thought. Some white students also have this hunger, but other white students have a different hunger, a hunger to maintain Eurocentrism.

By the way, I should mention, the only Black person some white students wanted to read was Booker T. Washington. If we know anything about Mr. Washington, it is that he is a Black conservative man who advocated for continued racial segregation in the South. I mean you can’t make this up. Some students say, “If you’re going to teach Black political thought, then it should have been Booker T. Washington.” That shows you that what some students are actually interested in is white ideas, and if these white ideas are in Black skin, then it’s allowed, but if they’re Black ideas in Black skin, then that constitutes too much black radicalism and therefore rendered persona non grata! So, I was a text, a living embodied text. You look at me, you see I am Black, and say “Oh, he’s a radical, he’s a liberal,” and thus, when I teach these texts all hell breaks loose. That has been my experience.

When you hear the terms “Black power” or “Black excellence,” what do you think? How would you define each term and the relationship between them? What do both terms mean for members of the Black Deaf community in the U.S. and in Jamaica?

When I hear those terms, I feel black joy! “Black excellence” is a term that has been used a whole lot in the last 10–20 years, and what “Black excellence” speaks to is Black people succeeding here in the United States, making economic and social achievements. That is important because a huge part of American culture has been denying Black people social uplift and economic mobility. The reason we’re talking about “Black excellence” is because, for a long time, the anti-black, racist narrative is that Blacks are “dumb” or “lazy” or “we don’t want to work or don’t do well in school.” The fact is the most credentialed sub-race/gender group is Black women. They have the most degrees of any other race/gender sub-group. “Black excellence” is a way of profoundly speaking against the lie that the only person who has reason is the white subject or European Man. It is getting at the fact there is Black reason and Black reason is just as good as white reason, and some might even argue better. “Black excellence” clamors for solidarity with other Black people. It’s about accomplishing despite the ever-increasing hurdle of American white nationalism.

“Black power” is a political movement that began in the 1960s from mostly those who wanted an alternative to the Civil Rights Movement of MLK. These folks were Black Muslims or even Black atheists who felt that white power was a fatal problem in the U.S., and white power was white supremacy. What “Black power” aimed to be wasn’t Black supremacy in a substitution or replacement of white supremacy. Rather, “Black power” was a call for Black uplift and political transformation. In other words, if we collectively struggle for the end of Jim Crow and white supremacy, we can’t just idly sit on the sidelines and hope for the decency and morality of whites to allow Blacks to be human beings and charitably bestowing upon them the equality of opportunity. No, one has to realize that the struggle for freedom must be self-instituting. So, “Black power” was a call to “arms,” not necessarily guns, but rather a call to contestatory action, to arm yourself with knowledge, arm yourself with values that say you’re a human being capable of enacting and constituting a new social order, which means arming yourself with the fact you are Black, capable and beautiful. All of these attributes give a sense of what “Black power” sought to do, to really empower Black folks who, for so long, had been disempowered because of systems of racial domination.

So, part of “Black excellence” is to actualize, to enact “Black power.” If you’re achieving, it is because you’ve been empowered to achieve, so these two elements go hand-in-glove. This is how I conceive the relationship of “Black power” and “Black excellence.” 

For Black Deaf people in the U.S. that have to deal with anti-Black racism, part of “Black power” and “Black excellence” is to say that the Deaf community doesn’t have one monocultural identity. By monocultural, I mean having only a single cultural identity—that is, deafness in totality. What Black Deaf people have been saying is “we have a history and we even have a different way of doing sign language.” That way isn’t in opposition to Deaf culture, but rather a pluralization of it because it is Deaf culture, as well.

This is interesting because when you learn about Deaf history in the U.S., you learn about how Deaf people have been marginalized from society and how they’ve been viewed as “clinically insane” and that hearing people want to “cure” Deaf people by giving them hearing implants. Meanwhile, Deaf people are saying they’re not sick; some Deaf people even argue they are not disabled. Instead, Deaf people contend they are wholly human and their common “d” “deafness,” that is, their inability to hear, does not symptomize human defect. Much about Deaf history illuminates Deaf people’s experience with audism.

Audism is related to racism. While racism is discrimination on the basis of race, audism is discrimination on the basis of hearing capacity. What Deaf people are saying is they experience discrimination, which is audism, yet some Black Deaf people are saying “no… the discrimination Deaf culture writ large is interested to talk about is discrimination against white Deaf people from hearing society. Yet, there is also a lengthy history of Black Deaf discrimination, where Black Deaf people were segregated, where they couldn’t join their white Deaf peers.” So Black Deaf people argue “we need to talk about Black Deaf history because it is not necessarily the same as Deaf history.” There’s a difference between those two histories because the Black Deaf community had to experience racial and ableist segregation and the white Deaf community didn’t have to experience racial segregation.

So, part of “Black power” and “Black excellence” for Black Deaf people is to say, “We are going to write our own history about what it means to be Black and Deaf, and not just rely on white Deaf folks to give us a history of Deafness because, if they do, it won’t include Black Deaf history.” Part of my research is to illuminate Black Deaf culture, for example, Black Deaf sign language contrasted alongside mainstream ASL—this is the empowering move.

How do you think the political landscape of the past decade (in the U.S. and globally) has affected Black people’s ability to enter and excel in higher education? What are some important achievements that have been or are being made in terms of or by Black people in higher educational institutions? Can you talk about how the recent affirmative action decision of the Supreme Court impacts Black students and faculty in higher education?

Well, in the last 10 years, we have witnessed book banning. Part of the project of colonialism, part of the project of white supremacy, is to erase the history of other people who aren’t white. If you erase their history, then they have no sense of self and then they are enchained within the same sort of system for generations. This is why “Black Power” says you need to know your own history to be empowered to do something to change it.

I teach critical race theory in Tennessee. When critical race theory was first introduced in legislatures, legislators said, “We’re going to ban this because it’s a racist course because it’s telling white people to hate themselves, that they’re the colonizers and that doesn’t seem very American or equal.” I’m not teaching any of my white students to hate themselves. I am teaching my white and black students the history of whiteness in America. There is a difference between white people and whiteness. As we see with Booker T. Washington, he was a Black man, but this Black man was embedded in whiteness in terms of its thoughts, philosophies, values, and attitudes. If you’re not teaching folks about their history and about practices of contemporary anti-Black racism, then you can’t expect anything to change. In Tennessee, legislators began banning critical race theory because “it’s racist.” They decided to start at the elementary level because they believe we shouldn’t be teaching our young kids about slavery. So, they banned it. They decided to extend it to high schools, so now you cannot teach Critical Race Theory in high school. Where are they coming next? Colleges and Universities. There will soon come a point where I can’t teach the very thing I was employed to teach and therefore, I cannot do my job.

What I have experienced in the classroom is that a lot of Black students have experienced tremendous difficulties at home and that has everything to do with legacies of historical Jim Crow and contemporary anti-black racism. These homes are sometimes socially broken, where there is only a single parent working full time, in addition to the student working full time while trying to juggle three courses and all their assignments. As can be imagined, such a situation can be overwhelming. When these Black students see me in the classroom, often their reaction is, “Wow, here’s a Black man that has really achieved, and he’s young.” Seeing black role models gives students permission and imagination to do similarly, and even better. My presence in the classroom is not a theoretical matter, it affects lives. You need to see examples of people who look like you in order to be emboldened to achieve. Being in the classroom, as a Black subject, I contest anti-black images of what a Black person can or cannot do. When I was growing up, the people that impacted me the most, beyond my immediate family, were my teachers. If you don’t have Black teachers creating the way for a new generation of Black students, then we’re going to reproduce a generational crisis. In the last 10 years, there has been banning of Black political issues and subject matter, from Black books to Black ideas and histories. This does have a deleterious impact on the educational outcomes and opportunities for Black people. 

I am on the Admissions Committee at the University of Memphis. We are getting a lot of applications from international students from Black countries in Africa and the Caribbean. Having Black diasporic immigrants coming into the country also expands opportunities for Black folks, not only African Americans. The more Black visibility, the better. When Black people have advanced degrees, they can create businesses, and the more businesses you have, the more you’re able to employ Black folks, creating Black industry and Black economics. It’s a ripple effect that starts with higher education. I am very optimistic about the future of black folks in the United States.

Now, the decision on affirmative action is a very sad one, but it is not very surprising. It was foreshadowed by the Court’s previous ruling in Grutter v. Bolinger (2003). Sandra Day O’Connor, who was the swing vote, wrote the majority opinion that narrowly protected some parts of affirmative action and stated that “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Lo and behold, 20 years later affirmative action is dead. There’s almost a racial and national fatigue when it comes to talking about anti-Black racism in the United States. So, the affirmative action, though destructive, is not at all surprising.

The SFFA v. Havard (2023) decision that ended affirmative action will harm Black people, make no mistake about it. You are going to see a diminished enrollment of Black folks in universities across the country, and not only in the Ivy League. I am talking liberal arts colleges and public universities, in general. We know this because California had outlawed affirmative action from the early 2000s, and studies have consistently shown that fewer Black people attend Californian universities. Because of this, the Black population of the state is not being reflected in the Black population in its universities in the state. We know when you ban affirmative action, it has a disproportionate effect on the very groups it was seeking to help.

Can you talk about the experiences of Black Deaf students in pre-college schools and institutions of higher education? What are some of their barriers to entering institutions of higher education and barriers once in university?

Some of the barriers are just access to sign language. A lot of Black Deaf students would need interpreters. How do you bring an interpreter with you to every single class? What about university-sponsored events? This raises social and pedagogical issues. That’s a real barrier to many Deaf students who attend hearing educational institutions and, obviously with barriers, there will be problems with the enrollment of Deaf people in what we would call mainstream, hearing colleges. Mind you, this is why Deaf people decided they must create their own educational institutions. Such colleges cater to Deaf students and hearing students (CODAs) who live in Deaf households. If both of your parents are Deaf, that does not mean the child is deaf biologically, but this child’s first language will not be English, it will be ASL. So, you have children of Deaf adults (CODAs) who attend Deaf schools and they identify as Deaf culturally, even though they’re not deaf biologically.

Is that lack of access to interpretive services even greater for Black Deaf students?

That would be my guess. I never did a study on it to say empirically that is the case. I’m with you on that, though, since interpretive services require money and funding. Where do we know resources are typically lacking? In communities of color. Black Deaf students would have an even harder time than white Deaf students, and white Deaf students already have a very hard time.

Black Deaf students are taking on what it is to be a Black student, often with white teachers, with a lot of white students. Having a disability on top of that, which prevents you from communicating with others in the school about your experience, would be very difficult.

Right! One has to navigate not only being Black, but being ethnically different. Some Deaf Studies scholars argue Deafness is an ethnicity. It’s a cultural ethnicity because Deaf people have their own culture. Deaf people call hearing people, “the hearing,” similar to Black people calling white folks, “the whites.” There’s a hearing world and there’s a Deaf world, a Deaf world with Deaf churches, Deaf schools, and a web of Deaf social institutions. When you’re a Deaf person, you’re living in a hearing world, just like when you’re a Black person, often you’re living in a white world. When you combine race and disability, it gets even more complex. The world is telling you in every way that you’re wrong—the wrong form of human being

Let me share this side note with you. One of the studies I am doing is looking at forms of slave resistance. What people don’t realize is that because there were Deaf Black people, there were Deaf slaves. How the slave master viewed the Deaf slave was that if you were Deaf, you were classified as being clinically insane. For instance, there was an advertisement that was released on a slave plantation that announced: “Dumb slave left the plantation, if you see him bring him back.” By “dumb” the slave master simply meant “Deaf,” which was the term used to refer to Deaf people. By being deaf, one was thought to be absent of a rational mind and thus, became “dumb.” This is where the term “dummy” comes from, due, in part, to Deaf history and a genealogy of audism. Yet, many Deaf slaves would play the part of being “dumb,” as a form of resistance in order to run away from the plantation. They would play into the audist tropes and stereotypes and then weaponize those tropes as a form of resistance against the system itself, by engaging in fugitivity.

Building on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, can you speak to how intersectionality, or any other theories, explain (or fail to explain) the life experiences of the Black Deaf community?

Where intersectionality is concerned, Crenshaw originated that term to make collective sense of gender and race because, historically, these concepts and ways of being were treated as being wholly separate and disparate, which affected how society understood the inner workings of systems of oppression that black women were experiencing. Now, folks have expanded the term to include other social identities beyond gender and race, for example, sexuality and social class. In terms of Disability Studies, that expansion goes even further.​​ Intersectionality has been meaningful in conceptualizing the experiences of Black Deaf people, and describing those experiences as different from Black hearing people and white Deaf people. That has been an important entry point in Black Deaf studies, which speaks to the values of not only Deaf Studies but also Black Studies.

One critical insight my research on the Black Deaf community imparts on my study of Black politics is that we should never foreclose what it means to be Black. Few would readily think of the Black Deaf subject as a different form of embodied Blackness. The very existence and reality of Black Deaf subjects radically opens the very concept of Blackness and it opens it in such a way that Black people can be fully Black and Deaf at the same time. They don’t have to disavow their Blackness to be Deaf or disavow their Deafness to be Black. All these radical openings at the level of race and disability are the result of interventions made by Black Deaf communities and speak, in turn, to why those interventions are so important for Black freedom and disability freedom.

How do you think the Black Deaf community has been affected by the record of Black people in higher education of the past decade? How do you think being part of the Deaf and Black Deaf community affects or informs the study of politics?

The problem with racism, or whiteness as racism, is that whiteness doesn’t contest itself as white. Whiteness argues, “I know everything about what it means to be a human being so I don’t need to learn from Black people, Asian people, or any other race.” This creates a crisis in politics and in reason because it creates a superiority complex. Believing that one does not need to learn from another, and that they only need to learn from you, creates a God complex. Slavery argues the slave master is the civilizer and the Black person is the savage. According to this logic, slavery, therefore, attempts to civilize the black savage. That’s a problem when you have a living ideology that refuses to critically evaluate itself and forecloses itself to the influence of other non-white ways of being in the world.

What Black Deafness does is to argue that Blackness must radically interrogate what it means to be Deaf because there will be different forms of Deaf people, and different forms of Black people. The political value of being Black and Deaf is that one radically contests both the category of Blackness and the category of Deafness such that you open these categories to other forms of themselves. When this is done, when different people present their Blackness differently or present their Deafness differently, they won’t be viewed as “not really Black” or “not really Deaf.” They will be accepted for who they are. This is the radical contribution of Black Deafness. It allows Black Deafness as a racial category to open itself beyond hearing Black people, and it also contests and critiques disability as being white.

Do you have any closing thoughts you would like to share about your current research and writing?

My current research is looking at Black genocide, what I call Negrocide, and how it affects Black cultural and political productions, and specifically, how it affects black political futures. I ask, what are some historical systems that have been negrocidal? Are there contemporary systems of domination that are still enacting negrocide? If so, what are they and what are the effects of such systems? I explore why it is important to name “negrocide” as a modern political project of colonial domination. I’m really excited about taking on these questions for current and future research!