“SORRY HARD UNDERSTAND STRONG ACCENT!”: Racial Dynamics of Deaf Scholars of Color Working with White Female Interpreters
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“SORRY HARD UNDERSTAND STRONG ACCENT!” (SHUSA!) is a phrase in American Sign Language (ASL) that a Deaf Scholar of Color may see an ASL interpreter say.1 When this phrase is produced spontaneously in response to the interpreter’s struggle to understand speakers, especially those explicitly marked as having nonnative English accents, the scholar often does not know how to evalu-ate the situation. Did the interpreter just commit a microaggression, or were they genuinely struggling to understand the speaker and were informing the scholar about it? In either case, the scholar would not always know whether to interject or keep quiet to allow the interpreter to finish interpreting the speaker’s talk. The scholar then would have to process the interpreter’s stance and decide whether to address it or to let it go. This is an example of the many awkward moments that a Deaf Scholar of Color may experience when working with ASL interpreters in aca-demia. It is also an example of the mediated representation of other people’s voices that scholars experience through their interpreters’ own understanding.
En P. Rangan (Ed.), Thinking with an Accent: toward a new object, method, and practice.