Recently I have been thinking about passing privilege. A lot of people assume that I can pass for white, which I have never been able to do, nor have I wanted to. I have had people tell me that I am “not really black” or not know what I mixed with or assume I am something other than Jewish, Cherokee, Black, Dutch, and French. I am aware that I have light-skinned privilege and that colorism exists. That my otherness is less discriminated against than my siblings who are darker skinned. I also know that, even within certain aspects of the community, colorism exists. I know that my grandmother who was beautiful and dark-skinned valued that I was light-skinned. None of this makes me happy. All of this makes me sad. Yet I embrace my passing privilege when it comes to being abled, and only recently came out as hard of hearing. I am terrified of being exploited because of my hearing or inability to hear. I have physical ear-level tonal deafness and attentional deafness. Tonal deafness means there are certain tones my ears cannot hear. Attentional deafness means that my brain lacks the ability to “listen”. This means that sometimes my brain will not recognize that my ears have “heard” a sound.

Everyone at some point in their life will probably experience attentional deafness. Most people experience this when they are concentrating deeply, and they tune out the world. For me, it is quite a bit different. I can be looking directly at a person and will be unable to hear what they are saying to the extent that I will need to read their lips to know what they are saying. It is a symptom of my lupus. The doctors are unsure if it is due to inflammation in my ears or along the hearing pathway. What this means is I spend a lot of my time lip reading. I don’t point out that I am lip reading or identify my need to do so unless it is absolutely necessary and then only do so very casually. I don’t think people are aware of how bad my hearing is. I mask it. I pass as fully able to hear and I don’t want to give that up, or know if I should. Who do I out first: the community or myself? Being able-passing feels differently to me than being “white passing” but I am not sure if it really is all that different. I am hiding an aspect of myself to be accepted among a group that I do not belong to. I am working through this and not sure where I will land. I do know that I have come out on twitter and now I am writing this blog post. My dream life would be to be able to podcast full time and then it wouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter.