Claudia Gordon was recently appointed as the Public Engagement Advisor for the Disability Community in the Office of Public Engagement at the White House. She is the first deaf African American woman to become an attorney as well as the first deaf student to graduate from the American University (AU) Washington College of Law in Washington, DC in 2000. The discrimination Gordon experienced as a deaf child in Jamaica compelled her to become a lawyer. At age eight, she moved to the United States and attended the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York where she learned sign language.