Kanisha Ffriend was a high school senior when the idea of writing a children’s book first came to mind.

She was searching for creative scholarships she could apply for and came across one that challenged students to write a book highlighting an underrepresented population or group of people. There was one problem: whether or not she won the scholarship, she would not be able to keep the rights to any material she submitted to the organization.

“That just didn’t sit well with me, because I knew that this — my book — had potential,” Ffriend said.

After revisiting the idea during her college years, the senior dual major in social justice education and disability studies has now self-published a children’s book called “I, Too, Am a Dancer.” It tells the story of Anika, a young girl of color who is hard of hearing.

“(Anika) challenges her hearing classmates to rethink what a hard of hearing person can do. It’s not really a sappy story in the end — that’s never revealed,” Ffriend said. “I didn’t want that whole pity party, and we reworked to take that out of it. It’s really just presenting the issues in the classroom and all the myths.”

But even though Ffriend, who has been involved in the Disability Student Union and will now be the president of the Student Advisory Council at the Disability Cultural Center, believes she has been fairly educated on deaf culture and disabilities, she admits to feeling guilty about speaking her voice and creating a platform for herself.

“I have to make sure that I’m not so forceful in my message, that I don’t let myself become so loud that I’m drowning out the voices of the people who actually deserve to speak,” she said.

Ffriend also said it wasn’t easy to get funding for her book, particularly because she is a first-time author who is still in college and can’t identify as part of the community she’s writing about. But she eventually gained funding this past semester through the Raymond von Dran IDEA Awards held at the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

Although there were a lot of great ideas in the social category in which she competed, Ffriend said, none of them were geared toward children or education.

“We’re focused so much now on trying to correct ‘the bad things’ that we taught teenagers and young adults, but we forget that we have this great opportunity to teach our youth and transform and reimagine different ideas of identity,” Ffriend said. “We have all these topics that are not addressed in schools, but we can use this book as a tool for that.”

When Ffriend increased her involvement in the Disability Student Union, she created a connection with Diane Weiner, the director of the Disability Cultural Center. Weiner, who gave Ffriend feedback and acted as a mentor, said she was thrilled and honored to be a part of the project because it combined Ffriend’s “investment in social justice with her deep commitment to creativity and entrepreneurship.”

As a hearing person who is fluent in American Sign Language, Weiner added that she has a strong and long-standing connection to the deaf cultural world, and Ffriend wanted to discuss the book with her because of that close connection.

“The most important part of the book is the message directly to children — it’s not a matter of overcoming. It’s not the stereotyping of disabilities that often happens with media and this triumph over adversity,” Weiner said. “But rather, the child accepts who she is and that she is part of the world in the way that she is. She refuses to be silent, she refuses to be treated shabbily, and in fact she winds up educating other people.”

Weiner added that the book sends a deep message to young children and explains that people come from different backgrounds simultaneously and that personal identity is not adding facets of one identity to another.

“A lot of times, representations of people with disabilities make it seem like all people with disabilities are white, but people with disabilities are from all over the world and from different cultural backgrounds,” she said. “The book really highlights that African American children with disabilities are part of the disability rights movement and part of the experience of living with a disability on this planet.”

Published on July 2, 2015 at 6:41 pm

Contact Clare: clramire@syr.edu