US Deaf News: President Obama appoints Deaf lawyer!

Deaf News Today has reported that President Obama has appointed a Deaf lawyer to his disability issues team at the White House.

Extract:

The White House has a new person in the job to oversee its efforts on disability issues. Claudia Gordon moves over from the Dept of Labor where she dealt with potential discrimination by federal contractors to now work between the Obama administration and the disability community as the White House’s disability liaison.

Her new title is associate director in the White House Office of Public Engagement. The discrimination Gordon experienced as a deaf child in Jamaica compelled her to become a lawyer. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was a child.

She attended New York’s Lexington School for the Deaf where she learned sign language and later became the first deaf student to graduate from the American University’s Washington College of Law.

Gordon has worked for the National Association of the Deaf Law and Advocacy Center as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  You can learn more about Gordon at the White House website here.

And here she is in a video interview talking about Deaf identity. (you may need to view this on YouTube to see the subtitles)