“Empower Them to Teach Us”: College Persistence Among Black Deaf Students

Despite the critical call for diversity in higher education, deaf college students experience lower graduation rates from postsecondary settings than their hearing peers. Using narrative inquiry, we explored how Black deaf college students remain persistent when confronted with audism and racism. We sought to examine how students developed contextually specific strategies to remain persistent in phonocentric instructional environments. Three themes emerged related to factors that influence academic persistence for Black deaf college students: (1) interactions with faculty members have dimensions that contribute to the teaching-and-learning environment; (2) access to disability support services served as a source of support for students and facilitated their academic persistence; and (3) connections with other deaf students contributed to college persistence and enhanced students' commitment to transform the culture of the campus. The collective narrative of Black deaf college students in this study is significant due to the similarities among their experiences despite being enrolled at different types of campuses, which included deaf-serving and predominantly hearing-serving colleges and universities. The application of disability critical race theory and deaf critical theory reveals the ways Black deaf college students experienced cultural taxation. There is a need to transform college campuses into more inclusive environments.