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Vol. 8 - Issue 8
September 25, 2019
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The first time Haben Girma was called on in class at Harvard Law School, everyone turned around and stared in bewilderment wondering, “How did she know?”
“He called on me randomly and asked me a question about the reading. And I gave him an answer,” Girma said, recounting one of her earliest days at Harvard.
But there is more to this story of a routine law school encounter.
Girma baffled her classmates, with such an ordinary achievement, because she is both deaf and blind. She offered a simple response to her classmates’ wonderment: “I did the reading. Of course I’m going to know the answer.”
I’m on the phone with Girma, 31, from San Francisco, to learn how the Deafblind woman conquered Harvard Law, which is the subtitle of her recently released book “Haben” (Hachette imprint, Twelve Books). “Deafblind” is the formal term for this combination of disabilities.
That Girma is deafblind was no impediment to our conversation. A typist typed my speech into a keyboard. It was immediately converted to Braille. Girma read it. And, with an infectious personality and dry sense of humor, spoke her responses.
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Like many of her stunned classmates that day, Girma set off for Cambridge to become an advocate. This she has done since graduating in 2013, as the school’s first Deafblind student. But her advocacy work differs from many. She is not concerned with who had the green light or whether someone’s trademark was infringed. As a disability lawyer and advocate, her focus is on the advancement of opportunities for people with disabilities. Working toward this goal, she told me, was at the heart of her decision to tell her story in a memoir. “Writing is a form of advocacy. Writing is a way to move people to do positive things.”
Personal experiences forged Girma’s path. During her time at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, she headed to Juneau for a summer. Alaska’s huge tourism industry is well-known for creating a booming job market for students. But the response she received was frosty, she told me: “Even though I had an excellent resume, great grades in high school and college, lots of wonderful volunteer work, employers still didn’t want to hire me.”
Girma called these assumptions, that she could not do the job, ableism, the belief that people with disabilities are inferior to the nondisabled. Instead, she said, there could have been a conversation about “how can we make this accessible.”
Sharing another experience from her college days, she said the school’s dining hall had a variety of food stations, with a menu that directed sighted-students to their culinary options. But for someone who couldn’t read the menu, it wasn’t so simple. “I was a vegetarian at the time,” Girma told me. “It’s really hard to eat vegetarian when you don’t know what the food choices are. |
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Haben Girma (with her seeing eye dog Maxine) receiving her diploma from Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow (2013) |
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Efforts to get the cafeteria manager to provide the menu in Braille or some other accessible format were met with the response that they were too busy. “I put up with it for as long as I could,” Girma told me. “Then I realized, ‘wait a minute,’ I shouldn’t have to put up with it. I’m paying for this service and part of the service is knowing what the food choices are.” Since the sighted-students did not have this problem, she asked herself, “Why should I have to settle for inferior service?”
Following some research on the Americans with Disabilities Act, she returned to the cafeteria manager and explained her rights. All of a sudden they weren’t too busy to help. This time “they apologized and promised to make the menu accessible.” The cafeteria kept its word. The next year, Girma told me, another blind student started at Lewis & Clark and “he didn’t have to fight for access to the menus. That taught me that when I advocate to remove barriers it helps other people, too” and “going to law school would give me the tools to do that.”
“Haben”is a highly enjoyable collection of personal accounts of the ups and downs and how-to of navigating life with two disabilities. While the subject matter is weighty, the telling is light. The author’s serious treatment of the topic often does not apply to herself. And her sense of humor is constantly on display. Describing another student at Lewis & Clark, Girma writes: “Bill is a first-year student from New Mexico who is also blind. People here talk loudly to him, so he keeps trying to explain that he’s not me.”
While the stories in “Haben” vary greatly in time and place, the objective in their telling is a constant. “I carefully chose these stories,” Girma told me, “to teach people about ableism, and what we all can do to remove ableism from society and create more opportunities for people with disabilities.”
The Oakland, California, native takes readers to the West African nation of Mali, where, at age 15, under a scorching sun, she served as a volunteer on the construction of a school. Six years later the climate was much different when she climbed an iceberg in Alaska. The book culminates in Girma serving as the introducer for then President Barack Obama at the 2015 White House ceremony to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Girma gives much credit for her success to the love and support of her parents, immigrants from Eritrea, the East African nation that gained independence in 1993, after a three-decade war with Ethiopia, its much larger neighbor to the north. She details the frequent tension between her parents’ instinct for overprotection and her own desire for independence.
As for the logistics of her instruction at Harvard Law School, Girma explained that the school provided a team of interpreters who took turns “providing visual and audio information from the class.” She also had access to written materials. “Handouts, textbooks, cases, everything was in Braille,” she told me. “I also did legal research online on my own because a lot of the websites work with screen readers—the library website, LexisNexis, Westlaw.” She schooled me on this unfamiliar term, explaining that a screen reader is software that converts graphical information to speech or digital Braille.
While Girma was able to find solutions for the academic aspects of Harvard, it was sometimes a different story when it came to the interpersonal. Recounting the story of a networking event with prospective employers, she described herself as “being both ultra visible and invisible.”
On one hand, she explained that she stood out “as a black woman, with a dog and a funny computer.” But, at the same time, “They see me and notice me, but often they’ll assume ‘oh, she couldn’t work in my firm’ or ‘she wouldn’t have anything of value to add to our conversation.’” |
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Haben Girma using a Braille computer to speak to President Obama at the White House celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (2015) |
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Girma left Harvard with a prestigious Skadden Fellowship in hand. The Skadden Foundation provided two years of funding for a position at Disability Rights Advocates, a nonprofit law firm in Berkeley, California. While there, she served on a team that represented the National Federation for the Blind in its suit against Scribd Inc., seeking to compel the digital library to make its 40 million books and documents compatible with screen readers. Scribd argued that, as an internet-based business, the ADA did not apply to it. The NFB got past Scribd’s motion to dismiss and the parties subsequently settled, with the company agreeing to make its massive library accessible to blind readers.
On the impact of the Scribd decision, Girma said: “I live and work in Silicon Valley, and so many companies do not think about accessibility when they are developing their tech, so having a court say that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to digital businesses that was hugely powerful and it sends a signal to tech companies that they need to make accessibility a priority.”
These days, as a disability rights advocate, Girma is using writing, speaking and consulting to advance opportunities for people with disabilities. She explained that “suing people is one way to create change,” but providing education and training, on what it means to have an accessible website and app, “is also a powerful way to create change.” Getting down to the details, she pointed me to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, a set of technical standards for making websites accessible to those with disabilities.
There is an instinct to call Girma’s story inspiring. But she bristles at that characterization: “When people say ‘you are inspiring,’ they’re feeling uncomfortable. They’re feeling pity and don’t really know what to do. So they just cling to a cliché. ‘Oh, people with disabilities are inspiring.’”
But she is quick to point out that “there are situations where it’s genuinely a useful compliment, in the context of saying you are going to make positive change, ‘like, I’m inspired to make my website accessible.’” That kind of inspiration, Girma told me, is “productive.” |
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