I Was Bullied For Having Deaf Parents

- Alexis Reliford

“HEY, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR MOM?” The question hit then 8-year-old Grace Byers like a slap. She had never thought her family had anything “wrong” with it — but that day at school, she was suddenly aware that to much of the outside world, it did. Both her parents were deaf, her father since birth and her mother since age 2, from complications of pneumonia. “My sister and I learned American Sign Language before we could speak,” says Grace, now 33, who stars on the Fox hit series Empire. “To us, it was normal. But a lot of the kids didn’t know how to process it and took to bullying.”

From that point on, school became a stress zone for Grace. “Most days I was ostracized,” she says, with kids sometimes hurling slurs that she was “weird.” Once, Grace was kicked in the face; another time, she was choked. “As a child, if you don’t know how to get out of that situation, you begin to think it’s normal to be treated like that, which is terrifying,” she says.

Grace’s peers also pounced on her family structure. Her parents had split when she was a toddler, and “I was bullied simply for coming from a different household,” says Grace, who was raised in the Cayman Islands.