What's the deal with 'deaf culture' - Handy?

Factual Questions
1

This may end up as a debate, but I thought I’d start it here.

I was watching the tube the other night and I saw something about a documentary in theatres right now called, I believe “Sound and Fury”. It is about a family (family meaning several nuclear families related to each other) that had a large number of deaf people in it, grandparents, kids, grandkids. It also had a fair number of hearing people.

One of the hearing couples had a deaf child. The mother has deaf parents herself, and the father has a deaf brother. They had the option of cochlear implant, and they went for it. This pissed off some deaf family members.

Then the deaf brother and his deaf wife’s deaf child, who was 4 years old at the time, found out about her cousin’s implant, and declared she wanted one. (The father, by the way, admitted wishing that his daughter would be deaf when she was born and had been thrilled when she turned out to be) From what I could see, she seemed pretty clear about wanting to be able to hear. There was one scene where she was reading aloud, or trying to, and her father bitched at her hard about signing it. instead but she wanted to speak.

Well, the deaf dad and mom were not going to let their daughter get the implant, and they spent quite a bit of energy convincing their daughter that she made the decision not to get it. (I don’t have the energy to explain it all, suffice it to say that it was unmistakably plain that they had imposed their will on her and then manipulated her into saying/thinking it was her own idea, yet she is still clear that it was they who denied it to her.) She is now 7 or 8. This decision, combined with his hearing brother’s decision to get the implant for his own son, has caused a huge and painful rift in this family that was once a happy family of both deaf and hearing people. The all-deaf family even moved away.

Now, I have heard, as I’m sure we all have, about “Deaf Culture” - basically, from what I get, it is that deaf people are very proud of their language and don’t want to see it lost, kinda like small tribes of people don’t want their language and culture destroyed by encroaching civilazations… something like that.

I think that’s great. I happen to think that sign language is beautiful, I love to watch deaf people talk to each other. And I think it is wonderful that deaf people have managed to turn what is undeniably a handicap into a positive thing.

However… I think the deaf father was wrong. No matter how deaf-positive the world can be, the deaf culture can be…the fact remains that being unable to hear poses many problems in this society, or even outside society. We have the sense of hearing for a reason, sound has valuable information to give us that oftentimes cannot be given other ways, or at least not without elaborate redesigns of living. There are beautiful sounds, important sounds. Denying his daughter, who clearly wanted to hear, that ability, strikes me as selfish, wrong, and cruel.

So, I ask the deaf themselves: what do you think? Why is it ever morally right to deny a child who has requested it the means to repair what is broken? (Even if deaf people don’t always feel “broken”, the fact is they are. Which doesnt’ mean they should sit around feeling inadequate or miserable about it. I’m just saying there is an ability that human beings are designed to have that deaf people do not. Shouldn’t we all be allowed to have all working parts if we want them and it is possible to have them?)

You may say she can make that decision later, when she is an adult, but I don’t think that is fair either. We all know that children learn things and adjust to things far more easily than adults do. If this little girl received the implant now, her speech would be perfect by the time she is grown.

I do understand the father being unhappy about his child wanting to join the hearing world where he cannot follow, but I thought parents were supposed to put their kids first, no matter what the cost?

So…anyone, hearing or not?

stoid

2

IAND (I am not deaf), but I have bad enough hearing to pay attention to deaf-issues when I come across them in the media.

Galludet University in DC is the “national” deaf college, and news about the school is in the Washington Post on occasion. For example, this past fall there was a homicide of a student on campus. Also, earlier this year, I remember reading about a schism in the deaf community over cochlear implants.

I wish I could give a cite, but I’ll try to keep it general. It seems like those who are in favour of implants and those who are not are very cleanly divided. It seems to be a black/white issue, one that’s very binary.

I’ll go digging in the Post’s archives and see if I can find this article.

3

Cochlear Implants FAQ

http://www.zak.co.il/deaf-info/old/ci-faq.html

http://www.zak.co.il/deaf-info/old/ci-opinions.html#nad_opinion

will answer some of your questions

4

There was a thread in GD about this very subject a while back.

IAND, but from what I’ve heard, some of these deaf people seem to think that there’s something special about their culture that they have a God-given right to preserve it, regardless of the difficulties deafness causes. IMO, they’re just raising arrogance to new heights. It’s as if they want to be isolated from society.

The father, by the way, admitted wishing that his daughter would be deaf when she was born and had been thrilled when she turned out to be

That’s just plain sick. WTF was he thinking (if anything)?

5

I too felt sick when I heard about the father being GLAD his daughter was deaf.

I mean, it doesn’t mean you’re an incomplete person-however, his daughter really wants to hear. I’m listening to music right now…and it’s sad that he’s keeping his daughter from possibly enjoying it.

6

I’m half deaf. Now… keep in mind that there is no “deaf community” per se, in that deaf people’s common thread is just that- being deaf, and nothing more. There are a lot of different minds about some of the issues brought up in this thread.

A few notes- first of all, the student was allegedly murdered because he was gay. Also, IIRC, the implants don’t stimulate “real” hearing.

My experiences with the deaf community have been a bit less than heartening. As pretty much anyone who has ever met me can attest, you can’t tell that I have a hearing problem. I don’t wear a hearing aid, I don’t know more than extremely basic sign language, and six years of speech therapy cured the severe lisp and stutter I had as a young child. Unless I tell someone about my hearing, they generally don’t know, and I don’t often run into problems.

I’m an oral- someone who uses speech as their primary form of communication. In the eyes of quite a few people in the deaf community, I might as well have 100% hearing. They have no place for people like me- something that has been slammed home several times when I have tried to befriend a few deaf people. Now, these were isolated incidents, and I have some wonderful friendships with other deaf people. However… there is an overwhealming sense of being “in the group” or not.

Stoid, I think that what is strange to some people is that it really is a different world. Not just in terms of the compensations that have to be made, but also in terms of communication. Illiteracy is quite common among the deaf- many only read at the very basic level. There are quite a few reasons for this, one of them being the structure of sign language. For example, if I wanted to say something like “The car is red” in sign, I would probably just sign “car red”. If I wanted to talk about the car after that and it was nearby, I would just gesture at it. A lot of people harbor the illusion that sign is a direct translation of English, and it absolutely is not. There isn’t much emphasis placed on the structure or grammar of English.

I think a lot of deaf people would take exception to the idea that they are handicapped. Deaf culture, as it were, is very rich and vibrant, and the implants are viewed by some as a direct affront upon that culture.

I personally think that anyone should get the implant if they so desire it. However, anyone with the implant is, by default, set apart from deaf culture. The father who hoped that his daughter would be deaf- I think it’s because he feared the culture clash of a hearing child raised in a deaf family, among other things. It’s complicated.

Okay. I hope that made some sense.

7

Ah, the old implant debate. I didnt see that film yet so I can’t comment on it. Some implant facts:

  1. surgery costs $60,000 2. often the doctor must cut out all the hearing that was present before for an implant, giving complete deafness 3. The first model was like only 1 tone, today’s models let a person hear 22 tones, which is very little tonality. 4. a person has to wear the implant in order to get any hearing, so no hearing when taking a shower or sleeping, etc. That’s a lot to put a kid through for surgery that isn’t always successful.

A deaf person with deaf culture is identified with the word ‘Deaf’ [big D]. e.g He is Deaf =he is deaf & is culturally deaf.

Quite a lot of deaf people don’t want to be changed because it’s pretty peaceful with all the quiet. It seems to be the only handicap which people don’t want to change.

As for having an implant changing a person’s culturality, I don’t buy it.

8

** Stoidela, ** here’s the thread that RoboDude was referring to that I started in GD after having seen this family featured on ‘Dateline’. The attitude of the death father blew me away too. There was an update in People magazine, of how the young daughter that is being denied the surgery keeps wearing a ‘hearing aid’ that isn’t hooked up, it is so sad.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=43242

9

National Association of the Deaf’s Position Paper on Cochlear Implants.

NAD seems to recognize the changing technologies and advancements made in implants in the past few years. It’s not a ringing endorsement, but not as strident as earlier positions. Working close with the medical community, research, and the recognition of the amount of training and support for the child and parents involved are some of the major concerns as well as recognition that everyone might not be a candidate for implants.

I too saw the Sound and Fury and was disenheartened by the father’s response. It is hard for me to understand that choice but I have always been able to hear and thus can only come from that perspective.

10

" It is hard for me
to understand that choice but I have always been able to hear and thus can only come from that
perspective."
Getting one’s hearing back is not a nice thing usually. It’s major noisy & there is absolutely no way to filter out sounds like you, as a hearing person, can do. The number of deaf people who jump from bridges, so to speak, when they get their hearing back is quite a lot.

There was a wonderful PBS documentary on a deaf lady who got an implant. It was a real person, a real family & a real story. That’s more like it.

11

I didn’t see the show in question, and I have no real opinion on this, but I just wanted to point out that producers are experts at making people seem more radical than they are on those type documentaries. If someone interviewed you several times, for an hour each time, on your spouse and then parsed those interviews into 20 minutes of soundbytes, they could show you as a loving, contented person or make people wonder why you hadn’t resorted to murder. That is why I try to avoid “case study” type forays into any contraversial issue. It is too easy to charecterize the other side as raving loonies (or find a raving looney to represent it).

12

All the more reason, it seems to me, to give implants to children, rather than waiting for adulthood.

stoid

13

Stoidela, some people, like me, only have fuzzy hearing. Having that amplified wouldn’t be much fun. Better that the folks have their hearing nerves cut so they are deaf too.

14

I’ve found an excellent article at http://dww.deafworldweb.org/pub/d/nytimes.html . It is a 1994 article by Andrew Solomon which appeared the NY Times. It seems to be a balanced article, and it’s about the Deaf community and their issues, one of which is cochlear implants. I recommend that everybody read it.

First quote:

The second quote is the only really extreme thing in the article:

15

“children at about age 2.”

A couple things, first how would the growing body cope with a static object inside the skull, second, how would the child speak to tell people how to adjust the implant so that its programmed right? They are programmed on a computer.

16

As far as I can tell, this is not all that rare among deaf couples. Being a hearing person who grew up with exposure to the deaf culture, I can say that these are not “sick” people. I too find that father’s view shocking, but I can kind of understand it.

Check out Anti Pro’s link for the recent Great Debate on this.

17

[aside]
andygirl, after meeting you, I can honestly say you have some of the finest diction I’ve ever heard. (I’m a former radio person, so I tend to listen to how people speak.) I wish more people spoke as precisely as you do.
[/aside]

18

This just seems to drive the fact home to me that the deaf and the hearing impaired are people just like you and I. Examples of both the good and the bad we as people are capable of.

19

OK, a little history.

One of the reasons that Deaf people are so touchy about sign and Deaf culture is that there was a movement 30 years ago or so to not allow deaf children to sign. It was thought that learning to sign would impede the kid’s ability to speechread, read english, etc. So, in order to “mainstream” these kids, sign was forbidden in many deaf-education programs. Kids were punished for signing, for their own good of course.

Some kids were able to do OK in such programs, especially those who were post-lingually deafened, those with a lot of residual hearing, or those that were particularly talented at speechreading (some people have a talent for it, others who work just as hard don’t do as well). But most kids failed. Not only did they not learn sign, they weren’t able to learn much english either. All the learning that we take for granted, things you learn just by being around your parents communicating with each other they missed, because their parents were told not to sign.

And the other problem is that most deaf children have hearing parents, who typically know nothing about sign and will usually do what the first person who makes sense recommends. If the first person steers them into an oral program, that’s what happens. So the question becomes, do the hearing parents of deaf children understand enough about deafness to make informed choices for their deaf children? And often these hearing parents make awful choices out of ignorance.

So, older Deaf people grew up with the idea that they had to fight for the right to sign. That unless they struggled to keep sign, it was something that hearing people could and would take away. Since most deaf people will never be fully fluent in spoken english, they naturally make friends with and hang out with people who can sign. And thus, Deaf culture, which just means that people who can talk with each other are more likely to hang out together than people who cannot. Add in a protective attitude towards sign, and you get people who go over the top like the parent on the show. If you keep in mind what he probably went through his position might seem less bizarre, although still wrong. I mean, we can imagine a black parent being upset that his kid would have white friends. It is still wrong, but we can understand why they might think that way.

20

“after meeting you, I can honestly say you have some of the finest diction I’ve ever heard.”

One of the great hearing person insults is to say to a deaf person ‘you speak well.’

I don’t think andygirl is deaf because she has a full range of hearing with one ear. A person with one eye isn’t blind.