It is a handicap!
It is a handicap because those that are deaf cannot hear others speak.
It is a handicap because they cannot use a telephone without special equipment that slows down the conversation.
It is a handicap because most movie theatres do not currently have closed or open captioning.
It is a handicap because a major(for some) source of music and information is closed to them-radio.
It is a handicap because a deaf person cannot call out to another deaf person in a crowd unless direct eye contact is made.
It is a handicap because a major source of pleasure and inspiration is closed to them-music.
It is a handicap because you are limited to either writing time-consuming notes which are an annoyance to produce at the drop of a hat, or using a non-universal sign language which limits you to conversation with people who understand the same sign language. I will not add lip reading to this list because I have been told by those who practice this esoteric art that it is highly unreliable as a form of comunication.
If by “Culture” you mean,“Pretending that those who can do something we cannot are to be disdained and avoided”, then, yes, it is a culture.
It’s as if some are saying “In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is to be pitied because he is not one of us.”
I’ve been reading this thread with great interest. Back in 1988, I saw both Children of a Lesser God and The Miracle Worker (original version). I got a wild hair to learn sign language. I took some classes that taught the basics and enjoyed it quite a bit. I then wondered what I would do with this new skill. I found that the place where I’d taken the classes had a school for deaf children and they were always looking for volunteers. At the time, I had a job in which I had Wednesdays off. So, I decided to give it a try. I really enjoyed working there. As the school year progressed, I got it into my head that I wanted to become an interpreter for the deaf. At that time, the closest place to learn this was at a community college in Tampa. So, I uprooted my life and moved there. Due to financial and automotive disasters, I was forced to come home after only ten weeks. In that short time, however, it was apparent that being an interpreter was not going to be a reality. I’d done some research and talked with the teacher about how interpreters were reagrded in the deaf “community”. I was surprised at how some deaf people felt. I was told that, regardless of how well I could interpret, I would never be fully accepted by deaf people. I could understand that to a point. Apparently, there are some deaf people who see intrepreters as nothing more than a tool like a calculator or a hammer. They would have nothing to do with you until your services were needed. I hope that not all deaf people feel this way.
I also realized that I could not properly emote while signing. Facial expressions mean a lot. Sort of the equivalent of “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”.
All in all, I guess things worked out for the better.
I lived in Quebec for four years, and there’s definitely a distinct culture there that goes far beyond the language, and includes religion, civil institutions, shared history, and social mores. The language is the front-line of the battle to preserve the culture because a shared language is the strongest line of defense, and the most obvious differentiator. But to argue that the language is the culture shows an incredible poverty of understanding.
While I still have on my asbestos underwear I’m going to ratchet this debate up a notch. My “wheelchair culture” comparison was a little tame, so I’m going to use a much more inflammatory example that has been touched upon previously.
In India and other poverty stricken countries, there is an “amputee culture.” Parents are known to intentionally amputate a limb or limbs from their child in order to make them more effective street beggars. In light of Atreyu’s informative post, I find it extremely difficult not to regard deaf parents who willingly deny their child cochlear implants as amputating a significant part of their child’s sensory anatomy. After lengthy consideration, I’m even beginning to regard it as a form of abuse. Not teaching a deaf child how to speak is most certainly abuse and nothing less.
As nearly always with advanced science, cochlear follicle regeneration appears to hold vast promise in obviating this entire argument. Until such a time, I shall have to feel as though cochlear implants (where deemed effective) should be the norm.
In regards to the cultural debate related to this thread, I asked my husband about culture (He has a post-graduate degree in Sociology). First, let me say that he told me there was no way he could formulate an opinion about the existence of a “deaf culture” in the United States because he does not have enough information about that particular subject. However, he also said that it would take a lot of evidence to convince most sociologists that the “deaf way of life” is not simply a “sub-culture” because there are quite a few theorists who assert that even with groups of individuals in the U.S. who experience incredibly varying realities (women to men; blacks to whites) there is a still a common “U.S. culture” that most of them adhere to, but deviate from on many occassions.
Subcultures, according to him, can be extremely powerful social forces and should not be diminished in importance because of their classification as a sub-culture. So, IF, and that is a big IF, one consludes that the “deaf way of life” is a sub-culture, it does not necessarily diminish the social reality of living as a deaf person. Nonetheless, although many deaf people may experience a different way of life, it is likely they would still consider themselves “American” first and foremost (and thus accepting most of the premises that make up the American culture), thereby making their unique experiences associated with their disability a “sub-culture”.
Let me make it clear that this is not a conclusion, or even an assertion on my part, that the “deaf way of life” is not a separate culture. It is merely an exercise in pointing out the importance of subcultures in society.
In regards to the OP, many in our society have felt that the preservatiuon of a sub-culture is extrememly important- hence the debate over inter-racial adoption. Thus, even if the “deaf way of life” is a subculture, just like the “black/white” way of life in America, it is still a significant social force that could encourage individuals to vehemently protect their belief system.
Nonetheless, for those interested, I asked him to define culture. He chuckled a bit at first because this is a topic that he claims is constantly being debated, explored and explained by eminent Sociologists far more qualified than he.
But, for those more in tune with the realities of life as a hearing imparied person, here are some general guidelines he outlined that may help you in formulating your own opinion about whether or not the deaf constitute a culture separate from the overriding “American” culture…
Culture is an encompasisng way of life for a group of people. It is commonly associated with membership in a society, but this does not make the terms synonomous.
Culture is a plan for living in a group. It is a total package that includes objects and values that individuals acquire by being a member of the group.
Culture consists of the abstract and the real. It includes ideas, morals, mores and roles (among many other things). It is also comprised of tangible objects that are man-made, such as computers and the internet, because these items guide the culture.
Finally, he said that, according to many theorists, culture must have 5 basic components. He racked his brain and could only come up with four of them. He will look for the other one in his office tomorrow. They are:
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A common language that allows the individuals to express abstract thoughts and ideas (communication via symbols- written, spoken, signed).
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A way by which the group can perpetuate itself. This includes ways to provide basic necessities as well as reproductive plans.
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Standardized orientations towards deeper issues such as death.
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Forms and ways by which to experience, understand, and express aesthetic pleasure and delight.
To be considered a separate culture, the group of people would have all four of these characteristics and they would have to be significantly different from the overarching “American” culture. For example, in regards to #3, they would have to have different orientations on the realities of death and sickness.
Hope this helps.
I’m not of a debater, but please forgive a few points I’d like to make (and remake, as part of it Atreyu already touched on.
Being taught to speak is not easy. Period. I am a CI implantee (will get to that), and oralist, but I also remember how hard it was to learn. I was sent to oral school, away from my family, at great expense. I have a huge scar on my arm from punching out a window at school because I simply could NOT understand the difference between the “D” and “TH” sounds. I also have two deaf brothers who could not learn to speak, despite oral school. They just couldn’t learn. There is a failure rate.
There are also socio-economic factors involved. Like Atreuy pointed out, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. Hearing people have not only a stronger belief that their deaf children should learn should learn to speak, but they also are much more likely to have careers that make it possible to afford what it takes to accomplish that. My parents (hearing) are well off, and could afford my implant surgery (which was $15,000+), and to send three children to tuition school. Deaf parents who have deaf children are more likely to not have high paying jobs, and not be able to afford surgery, school, or other interventions to create a ‘more normal’ child. They are also in a position that they see that they survived with the equipment G-d gave them, and their deaf child will be just fine.
One of my deaf brothers has two deaf sons. Neither he or his wife speak. They have sent the older of the two to sign-only school, and will most likely send the younger as well. They do not feel it necessary to have him learn to speak, as neither of them do, and they’re perfectly happy. I’m relatively sucessful in life, and happy that I function the way I do, but I truly do not feel they are depriving their sons of a good life if they don’t learn to speak. And nothing in my mind or heart can make me feel that deaf parents who don’t raise speaking children are doing it to hold them back from anything; they genuinely feel that it’s the right decision for them. I have to respect that.
Now, onto CI. I was implanted as a child when CI implatiation of minors was still experimental surgery. It was hideously expensive, painful, and not sucessful. Basically it destroyed what hearing I did have in that ear, and set me back a bit in my language. I only heard squealing sounds, to the point I couldn’t sleep at night with the sound processor off. I’d break down and cry frequently from it bothering me. After about 6 months, my family had it deactivated. Incidentally, they do not remove implants once put in. I was reimplanted 8 years ago with a much more advanced model and have a better time, but I still don’t like it. My brothers were not implanted because of my initial experience. I know many other implantees; my best educated guess is about 50% of them are pleased with the results. It is most absolutely not substitute for hearing. I had better results with strong amplification (body hearing aid) than I did with the implant. (I rarely wear the external components even now.) Hearing aids and CI are not similar devices. There are still too many risks involved with the surgery, and it doesn’t have a high enough success rate for it to be considered for standardized treatment. Please don’t view not implanting a child as depriving them of hearing. My CI doesn’t allow me to hear anything I missed before, it only creates stimuli for me to recognize as such-and-such a sound. Each family is different, each person has to make the choice for themself, or now that infant implantation is approved, for their child. Until an actual cure for deafness is found, reliable, and affordable, there will not be a definitive ‘solution’ to the problem.
I’d like to second the recommendation for Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices linked to on the first page.
It tells the history of how deaf people have been treated, about the beginnings and development of sign language, and about the creation of schools for the deaf in the last half of this century. It’s very informative as well as being a pleasant read, and will probably give a better idea about deaf sub-culture (I think Lissa’s definitions above are excellent) than a one-hour documentary could.
Dismissing deaf subculture as ‘bullshit’ based on a small sample of people who represent it at it’s most extreme is painting with too broad a brush, wouldn’t you think? Every group has members who give the rest of them a bad name.
I’m deaf, and I have a cochlear implant.
Yes, some of the separatist stuff there is BS. I don’t think that not knowing English is a badge of pride. However…
The vast majority of deaf people will never, ever thrive socially in a hearing world unless the hearing world makes accomodations. Cochlear implants are not a cure (they’re more like static, as another poster said). Television, telephones, parties, etc.–the best I can do without any kind of cues is in a VERY quiet one-on-one setting, and even then, I will be asking “Huh? Can you say that again?” a lot.
Some of what goes on there is BS, but for the most part, the deaf culture exists because of a necessity for friendship and social interaction. The deaf are very, very protective of it, yes… but there’s a reason for it. Throughout history, hearing people have repeatedly tried to steal sign language from deaf people.
It’s very hard to understand why sign language is a necessity unless you’re deaf yourself.
Out of all the posts on this thread, you have beautifully illustrated why deaf people need other deaf people, or those fluent in ASL, to thrive–even if that wasn’t your intention. Deafness is more of a cultural/social handicap than functional–unlike being paralyzed at the legs, being blind, etc.
Thank you.
No, language is not the culture. But try and separate them. Try going back to Quebec and explaining that since they have a distinct culture apart from the French language, they don’t really need to speak French. Good luck with that.
-fh
While I’d say deafness tends to be more of a cultural/social handicap, it is not that exclusively. There are certainly numerous functional aspects to it, not the least of which is the loss of an important means of identifying danger. In theory, many aspects of, for instance, paralysis could be reduced to cultural and social handicaps (unwillingness of our culture to provide the the paralyzed with physical and social structures to accomadate their handicap), but then we are talking semantics, just as with your post. Human culture is heavily based on hearing because hearing is considered a basic ability of humans, not the other way around. One should not willfully deny a child that basic ability, unless there is some overriding good in the denial.
Technical issues with cochlear implants aside (since it seems the moral issue is the real interesting issue here), I think it is abusive to deny a child a remedy for a disability for the sake of introducing them to a culture which exists exclusively as a product of that disability. Analogies to things like black culture are silly because black culture has other components which are not merely products of slavery or Jim Crow. I am sure monstro would agree that if slavery could have been prevented at the expense of the African-American cultural response to it, then as something which is objectively negative, slavery should have been prevented.
I think some things have been conflated here that I’d like to un-conflate:
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The parents’ rationale for not allowing their child to learn spoken English/get an implant/whatever may be bullshit, but that does NOT make deaf culture “bullshit.” Using culture may be a bullshit excuse for this decision (which I don’t approve of either), but that’s different.
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By Lissa’s husband’s definition, there is no gay culture, or deaf culture, or perhaps black culture, etc. But there must be a word for what they are, and I’d say they’re all equally valid.
2a) The fact that deaf culture is derived from a disability doesn’t strike me as relevant. Black slaves had a culture despite (and indeed, because of) the hardships they endured. It was distinct from white Southern culture and black African culture, that’s for sure. Likewise, homosexuality was certainly considered a disability/dysfunction in years past. Doesn’t invalidate gay ‘culture.’
Marley23, you’d have a hard time convincing me that there is a gay culture. There are American subcultures that are primarily composed of gay individuals, but there is no one “gay culture”. Just as there is not one “deaf culture”, but rather an American subculture that is primarily composed of deaf individuals.
I further assert that that subculture has several disquieting elements within it.
KellyM: There is no one American culture either.
The rest of y’all who want to pretend there’s no Deaf culture: you’re showing something about yourselves you’d probably rather not have shown to the world.
An addendum:
I just got an IM asking, “Explain why the SDMB is such a tight-knit community.” My answer was, “Commanality of purpose, that whole ‘eradicating ignorance’ thing.” Think about that for a moment. This online community is a culture or subculture of sorts and that’s because of a common denominator (supposedly) here.
We also speak a similar language. When I say say “cite?” in real life, people laugh at me.
I can’t think of any subculture that wouldn’t be disquieting someone who wasn’t apart of it. Perhaps it’s a deaf thang. You wouldn’t understand.
OK, where to begin. Full disclosure: I have a 10 year old nephew who has been deaf since birth. No one else in his family is deaf.
As has been pointed out, the thing that separates deafness from other disabilities is the social isolation that deafness creates. Sure, deafness is a handicap, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But what makes deaf people into a community, but not blind people? Blind people may have a lot in common with other blind people, they may go to special schools for the blind. But blind people can still TALK normally and easily with sighted people.
Deaf people can’t do this. Even with years of training, deaf people are always going to have difficulty communicating with hearing people. Quebeckers can learn english if they wish. Deaf people can only learn english to a limited extent. Even with great speachreading skills and good results from hearing aids a deaf person is still only going to be able to have good oral communication one-on-one.
Deaf people CAN communicate through writing. There is nothing intrinsic about deafness that makes written communication difficult. BUT deaf people typically have very poor written english skills, and many are almost illiterate. Suprising, until you understand that many deaf children never learned good english. When hearing kids learn to read they are able to translate their already extensive knowledge of english into writing. The phonetic alphabet makes learning to read much easier for hearing kids. For many deaf kids, learning to read and write english is their first exposure to english. Imagine being asked to learn to read and write chinese without ever hearing spoken chinese. This is getting much better as people now realize that english is NOT a deaf child’s native language if they havn’t grown up speaking it. But for years poor literacy was endemic among the deaf.
Many deaf children weren’t diagnosed until late in life. If a child isn’t exposed to language in their early years they will always have language deficits. If a deaf child is exposed to signing and language the language portions of their brains develop normally. But if they never get any sign, and can’t understand spoken english, they will develop permanent language disabilities.
Linguistic isolation means social isolation. Sure, deaf people and hearing people interact socially all the time. But close friendship and trust requires communication. A deaf person is isolated from the hearing world, but included in the deaf community.
Next, the history of deafness in this country. Most deaf children have two hearing parents. And you would not believe how many parents of deaf children cannot communicate with their children beyond the most basic level. Often the mother will learn some signs, but fathers typically learn almost nothing and rely on other family members to interpret. So deaf children are isolated from their own families. Because of this isolation, there is a long history of boarding schools for deaf children. Even 3 or 4 year old kids were often packed away to boarding schools.
These boarding schools are the primary breeding grounds for the “Deaf Culture” activism you see today. Kids were isolated–linguistically as well as physically–from their families. Their primary, sometimes sole social interaction was with other deaf kids and instructors. So deaf kids who grow up in boarding schools naturally feel that their primary identification is with the people they grew up with. Deaf people are often forced into a community where even if they wanted to leave they have tremendous barriers.
And of course, the oralist movement. It was thought that learning sign language and allowing deaf children to sign would hinder their ability to learn to read lips and vocalize. So children in deaf boarding schools, where everyone around them was deaf, were forced to vocalize and lip-read EACH OTHER, or be punished. ASL was something that had to be done in secret. Of course, now we know that learning one language only helps kids to learn another. The better kids sign, the easier it is for them to speach-read, the easier it is for them to learn english. If you can sign fluently to a child you can much more easily train them to vocalize and lip-read.
So ASL has a semi-sacred quality in the deaf community. It is something created and nurtured by deaf people for deaf people, in the face of opposition and indifference from hearing people. It is something that they share with other deaf people that almost no hearing people share, even their own family.
So. Bottom line is that deafness is a disability that creates a neccesarily creates a community. If that community is isolated and and marginalized by the larger community, if there are very few points of contact between the deaf community and the larger community, then a subculture is born. Define it how you want, but there are Deaf Clubs all over the country, where Deaf people meet each other, where they can talk and socialize and interact easily. If you define “culture” for me then I could tell you whether deaf people have a distinct culture or not. But no matter what, it is true that deaf people form a distinct community in a way that other handicapped or disabled people do not.
So think whatever you like about the parent who refused to give their child a cochlear implant. Whether that parent is a jerk or not has nothing to do with whether deaf culture really exists or not. But I’ve never come across in real life a deaf person who was against hearing aids, or learing to read, or lip-reading or vocalizing, even if they were against cochlear implants.
To call opposition to cochlear implants “child abuse” is frankly crazy. My brother and his wife are hearing. They clearly see the benefits of being able to hear. If there was a way to cure my nephew’s deafness they would take it. But they chose not to give him a cochlear implant. Was this child abuse? Should the state remove my nephew from their home and place him in foster care, and declare my brother an unfit parent? Say it to my face, please.
Sure, in the movie the reason the father gives for being against getting a cochlear implant are stupid and pathetic. That doesn’t mean that cochlear implants are the standard of care, and that refusing a cochlear implant is equivalent to taking an ice pick and purposfully deafening a child. Cochlear implants may be out of the experimental stage, but they are far from a “cure” for deafness.
The thing about it is, for you all it is just an academic exercise about what parents “should” do for their hypothetical children. For deaf people and the parents of deaf kids it is real life decisions for real life children with real life consequences. So please back off a step or two before you presume to judge, and make sure you know what you are talking about first. Sure, give your opinion. But it would be nice if you informed yourself first.
monstro, I’m not willing to accept that. I consider separatism disquieting in any community, and will not generally entertain excuses for such an attitude. Bigotry is bigotry without regard to its origin.
Lemur has pointed out some very good issues that are involved in the Deaf community’s interaction with the outside community. What he (or she, I really don’t know) did not mention was the governments, even in the United States until very recently, of sterilizing “undesirables” to include someone born deaf. The hearing community hasn’t been the nicest group of people on the planet as far as the Deaf community’s concerned.