“Black Deaf Center” website features resources on Black Deaf Community
There is a newly-formed website, “Black Deaf Center,” that is a one-stop center for resources related to Black Deaf individuals, their community, related books, workshops, and on the Black Lives Matter movement. The URL is www.blackdeafcenter.com
Tar Gillman, who is a well-known vlogger and community leader, was part of a team that built the website. “The Daily Moth” reached out to him to ask him to explain how the website started.
TAR GILLMAN:
I want to thank you for reaching out to me to talk more about the Black Deaf Center, BDC. The BDC was founded this month, June of 2020. The story of how this came to fruition is pretty interesting. There were really no set plans to create the BDC. It was a result of everything that has been happening lately. I have finally reached the point of total frustration. One of the events leading up to the creation of the BDC was Calvin Young’s vlog and his apology. I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Calvin and that conversation led to the creation of the BDC. Calvin expressed his point of view and wished he knew more about the topic. Honestly, there’s so many people that I have met in my life that haven’t known about these topics either. Inspiration for the BDC came during my 2 hour conversation with Calvin. I figured why not create a place for black Deaf people to share information and their stories. I didn’t want to have to have this conversation over and over with everyone I met.
My people are tired of having to do this over and over. When I got the idea, I first thought to call it the Black Deaf Community. These are my people and I wanted to include that. Unfortunately, I hit a wall and was unable to find a domain address that was available. After talking more with Calvin, he suggested why not use the word “center.” I agreed with Calvin and thus the Black Deaf Center was born and I was able to register a domain with that name. That’s how the BDC started. After I was able to secure the domain name, the next step was finding a team. My goal was to create a diverse team, too. I wanted a lot of younger people to join my team so that we could continue to carry on this history well into the future. That was my vision when I started my team. Their role on the team would be contributors. And things went from there.
THE DAILY MOTH:
Now, Tar will share the impact he has seen from the website.
TAR GILLMAN:
The Black Deaf Center, BDC, has a lot of potential for sure. After I posted about the BDC, I had so many black Deaf people share their stories with me about how they were so overcome with emotion when they visited the website for the first time. It was great to see my people so inspired. It was like every time they opened the website, they were overjoyed. It was almost like the website was their bible. The BDC is really important. I am so happy to see that the BDC will help strengthen the bonds between so many communities that has been lacking all this time. One of the focuses of the BDC is to spotlight black Deaf people who own businesses. You can find that information on the website if you’re interested. If you want to provide a workshop, there’s a feature to do that on the website as well. If you want to host a workshop in your schools, colleges or universities, or your workplace, you can use that feature on the website. The BDC wants to be a center where everyone can come to for information. Since I’ve started this project, my biggest focus has been the children of black Deaf people. So many of these children don't know their identity as a black Deaf person and what that means. These children are in white schools and are a part of the white system so it’s not something they have access to. My goal with the BDC is to encourage teachers who work with black Deaf students to use the BDC as a resource for information to teach to their students. Also to encourage students to visit the website themselves for more information. That in itself is very important to us. The BDC team has been hard at work gathering the information that I have requested of the community. We receive so many emails from the community on a daily basis that we are hard at work answering. We are sure not to ignore or dismiss any information that is shared with us. We want to collect all the information that we can and make sure that we are supporting the individual communities as well. Again, the goal of the BDC is to focus on the black Deaf community. I’ll be honest with you, though, and say that we have received some ugly emails and threats as well. But that’s nothing out of the ordinary and we can handle that. I choose to look at the positive that comes from this project and look forward to the change that we are making.
THE DAILY MOTH:
Great to see that there’s a lot of potential but it is sad and unacceptable to see that they have to deal with threats. Tar will add some final comments.
TAR GILLMAN:
I do have to recognize and applaud the work that NBDA, National Black Deaf Advocates, are doing as well. But they need more teeth. The goal of the BDC is to continue to spotlight this important information and continue to fill the gaps where information is missing. We encourage anyone to join the NBDA as a member if they want to. The BDC is not here to step on anyone’s toes. The goal of the BDC is to become a place to gather information and preserve our history.
Any links or information that you have, please send that to us so that we can keep it all in one place. We operate as a third party where we’re totally separate from any other organizations. We don’t need to filter or leave anything out as we have no affiliations with other organizations. Our goal is to encourage and uplift black Deaf people. The BDC belongs to you, the community. The BDC is there to also share and educate the outside communities. You can use the BDC as a resource to share so others can learn from the information we have gathered. We want to disseminate information to other black Deaf people who might not know this information as well. We want to fill in the information and the gaps that have been there for so many years. We want to use this information to strengthen our community.
THE DAILY MOTH:
Thank you for your time and for explaining the BDC to all of us. I will be taking the time to check out the resources in there. They have a donation link as well if you want to support their work.