Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Masur

Masur is doing the classic celebrity two-step: establish proximity, then cash it in as authority. "I know deaf people" is meant to sound like humility, but it functions as a credential. The line builds a ladder of legitimacy - contact, conversation, contemplation - and ends with the payoff: "so I have some insights" that outrun those of people without that contact. It is less a claim to expertise than a claim to be taken seriously in rooms that often treat performers as ornamental.

The subtext is defensive and anticipatory. He can feel the pushback coming: Why is an actor weighing in? So he preemptively argues that lived adjacency counts. That move is culturally familiar now: the personal relationship as a substitute for institutional knowledge, the "I have a friend in that community" rhetoric that tries to inoculate against accusations of ignorance. It also quietly positions the deaf community as an object of study - "the issues", "contact with the...community" - rather than as agents speaking for themselves.

Context matters because actors frequently become advocates around disability access, representation, captions, casting, and sign language visibility. Masur is likely signaling allyship, maybe even trying to shift an industry conversation. The sentence works because it's earnest, not slick; you can hear someone trying to navigate a moral minefield in real time. It also exposes the modern tension between intention and impact: wanting to amplify a marginalized group while still centering your own voice as the interpreter of their experience.