Preserving Black American Sign Language

Amy Shearn
Momentum
Published in
1 min readMar 1, 2021

Photo: Juan Silva/Getty Images

How we speak shapes what we think, what others think of us, and how we connect with each other. So it makes sense that, given the tumult of the last year, many Black deaf people have been working to preserve Black American Sign Language, or BASL.

“Amid the reckoning, young Black signers went to social media to highlight the history of a language that had been suppressed for decades,” ABC News

Amy Shearn
Momentum

Formerly: Editor of Creators Hub, Human Parts // Ongoingly: Novelist, Essayist, Person