The Social Neglect in the Deaf Community

           

Over the years, America has gone through many changes in regards to minorities.  Since the civil rights movement, laws and attitudes towards minorities have changed for the better.  In the last forty years the United States has not only made laws to protect minorities from discrimination, but also has made accommodations to limit the language and culture differences between domestic and foreign citizens. However, one culture continues to be neglected—the deaf community. We now live in a country that accommodates cultural and language differences between the common American and most foreign minorities while the deaf community continues to be ignored. The two most common problems that the deaf continues to face outside of their own communities are language barriers and social neglect.

            Multiculturalism in the United States has pushed the importance of a second language on the American youth. All over the country, high schools are offering Spanish, French and German courses. In recent years, Vietnamese and Japanese courses are available in some high schools.  However, ASL (American Sign Language) is not offered as a second language to most high school students. In fact, ASL is considered a college course; yet not all colleges offer it. While all accredited colleges require a foreign language towards any Bachelor of Arts degree, not all schools consider ASL to be a language, foreign or not. Furthermore, while ASL is accepted as a language in some educational industries, it is considered to be an elective in others. This is primarily because not everyone agrees on how to classify it.

Although most experts will agree that language is a system of symbols that allows people to communicate with one another, others insist that language must contain oral transmission. This in turn has created controversy on how to categorize ASL. Because colleges cannot agree on how to classify the language, there underlies a second question. How are credits from ASL courses transferred from one college to another? With so many debates on how to classify the non-oral language, many students will not take the course. Thus, a language barrier between the deaf and the hearing continues to rise across the country.

            Language not only allows communication, it insures the continuity of culture.  To dispute whether or not ASL is considered a second language based upon oral transmission would seem absurd.  Consider the infamous Helen Keller who through an illness was left blind and deaf.  Without these two senses, she was cut off from the symbolic world, which greatly limited her social development.  Only when her teacher, Annie Mansfield Sullivan broke through Keller’s isolation using sign language did Keller realize her human potential (Macionnis 64).  For this reason, ASL should not be considered an elective, but a language and should be treated with the same respect as any language.

            Another problem that many deaf citizens encounter is the social neglect.  This neglect is associated with the language barrier.  Language has a great impact on the social needs of every culture and the deaf are not the exception.  It is common that hearing parents are unable to communicate with their deaf children due to a language barrier, which in turn creates a social neglect.  Often this neglect stems from the act of love.  Frequently hearing parents realize that it would be quite difficult for a deaf individual to survive in a hearing world without proper training.  For this reason, many deaf children are sent off to deaf schools while the parents are left uneducated about the basic needs of their deaf child.  Moreover, many hearing parents do not learn any form of sign language outside of the basic finger spelling, which in turn limits the communication and leaves the child feeling isolated from his/her family.

            Other parents become over protective regarding their deaf child and the hearing world.  Determined to keep them safe, some parents have been known to keep their child secluded from the hearing and in turn, the world.  Tracy Brevozski, an educational interpreter for ASDB in Kingman AZ. stated, “These children are indirectly being harmed by the love of their parents because the child inevitably grows to depend on the parents for all of his/her needs. It eventually becomes too difficult for the deaf child to be self-reliant and able to fit into the hearing world without proper care.”  In both cases, the children become victims of love while being deprived of social experiences in the hearing world.  Consequently, numerous citizens in the deaf community feel isolated from both the hearing society and/or their families.  Thus, various deaf individuals are left with their own small group of where interaction is possible.

            Although some accommodations such as closed captioning, TDD/TTY, and interrupters have been made accessible to the deaf community, there still remains a communication gap between the hearing and the deaf.  This communication gap can be minimized through work and discovery.  “Educating the deaf to interact with the hearing is of great importance. However, it cannot stop there. We must educate the hearing as well.”—Tracy Brevozski.

            The structural-functionalist, also known as an idealist might suggest that the deaf and the hearing communities need to work together as a whole and complete society. Herbert Spencer, an influential English philosopher who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ years before Darwin might have suggested that depriving one community from the other would create a series of social problems, which in turn could have a dramatic effect on both societies. However, W.E.B. Du Bois and Karl Marx might have recognized the inequality of respect given between ASL and other languages. Sociologists such as Du Bois and Marx that use the social-conflict paradigm recognize continuous conflict between dominant and disadvantaged categories of people. Marx might have also compared the deaf community to the capitalist and the class conflict theory. It might also be argued that the hearing keep the deaf oppressed just as the capitalists have oppressed the poor, which would leave the deaf community in a state of alienation.

            No matter what theory one can apply, the facts are indisputable. The deaf culture should not be ignored any longer. It is time to break the walls of the language barrier and social neglect. Only then can both societies live in harmony.

Sandie RH Hart

Prosper, TX

References

Brevozski, Tracy. Educational Interrupter. N. Campus Kingman High School, ASDB. Arizona School Deaf And Blind.

Macionis, John J. Sociology. Congress Cataloging. Saddle River, NJ. 1987. (16-100)

Spradley, Thomas S. and James P. Spradley. Deaf Like Me. NY. Random House Inc. 1978. (15+)