oralism &mdash; I Am A Camera https://write.as/jasonpettus/tag:oralism The personal journal of author and photographer Jason Pettus Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:51:04 +0000 https://i.snap.as/keGj2D22.jpg oralism &mdash; I Am A Camera https://write.as/jasonpettus/tag:oralism Deaf culture primer: The "Deaf President Now!" student protests of 1988. https://write.as/jasonpettus/deaf-culture-primer-the-deaf-president-now-student-protests-of-1988?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Today, an extended look at the most crucial event to define the modern Deaf community, and the reasons it's considered so important !--more-- ###### #Deaf #community #culture #history #gallaudet #university #1988 #student #protests #DeafPresidentNow #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #eugenics #PlantationMentality #DeafAndDumb #DeafPrideMovement #JaneSpilman Deaf President Now! student protests [Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.] One of the things I'm most grateful for with this Deaf studies journal I've been maintaining this year is how many hearing people I've now heard from, thanking me for illuminating them to the complex, often infuriating events that have happened over the last two centuries of the Deaf in America, most of which have come as complete surprises to them. I agree, I too had no idea most of these things had happened until starting to study Deaf history; and if you want to understand the one most crucial event that has come to define the modern Deaf community in 2019, then you need to understand the "Deaf President Now!" (DPN) student protests that happened on the campus of the all-deaf Gallaudet University in Washington DC in March, 1988. I actually just read a book devoted entirely to the subject, written back in the mid-1990s by John Christiansen and Sharon Barnartt; but my review of it over at Goodreads was getting so long, I decided to just repackage the entire thing as an essay for the general public and post it here. And the reason it's so long is that we have to go back and look at an entire century of Deaf history before we can understand why this particular week in 1988 was so important; so strap in and get ready for a fascinating ride... The first crucial thing to understand about all this is that for an entire hundred years, literally from the 1870s to 1970s, American Sign Language (ASL) was actually banned from most deaf schools, in favor of the "oralist" school of thought which argued that it's actually much better for deaf people to learn how to speak and read lips, because this way they can integrate back into "normal" society after they've done so, much more than learning a special language that only they and their friends can understand. There are various arguments that were used over those decades for why "manualism" (sign language) is inferior and shouldn't be taught -- it's not a real language but only pantomime, the deaf ghettoize themselves by using it, it's an insult against God because the Bible says that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, etc etc -- but what it really boiled down to is that the oralism proponents had more money and more famous people on their side, led by the unceasing efforts of Victorian Era superstars Alexander Graham Bell and Horace Mann, which is how they came to dominate the conversation all the way up to the countercultural revolutions of the 1960s and '70s. But there's one huge problem with this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work; decades of studies have proven over and over that even the most adept lip-reader (almost always someone who still has a little hearing) only comprehends 30 percent of a spoken conversation, while most Deaf people never learn how to lip-read at all, because it's such a tricky endeavor that's almost destined to fail from the start. (For one famous example, the letters "m," "b" and "p" are made with the exact same lip movement, making it impossible to know if a person is saying "mat," "bat" or "pat" just by looking at their face.) But this being the Victorian Age, instead of seeing these results and concluding that their theories were wrong, oralist proponents instead concluded that most deaf people must be failing at lip-reading because they're mentally retarded, that in fact mental retardation is a natural and related side effect of hearing loss, which is how we get the now shameful and grossly outdated term "deaf and dumb" from those years. (Oralists also believed in several other quack-like medical theories that have since been disproven, such as eugenics -- Alexander Graham Bell in particular tried to get Congress to pass a law banning deaf people from "breeding" with other deaf people, in that he believed that in 100 percent of all cases, this would lead to a deaf baby, a theory already being disproven even in his lifetime.) So armed with all this, what developed within the world of hearing people overseeing deaf institutions was a culture that they considered benignly benevolent, but that we have since come to refer to by the term "plantation mentality," named after the attitude that white plantation owners used to have towards their black slaves in the years before the Civil War; they sincerely believed they loved them, but in reality they "loved" them like one would love a pack of animals, considering them too stupid and feral to ever be able to make good decisions on their own, and thus it being the plantation owner's "burden" to make these decisions on their behalf, even if the sweet dumb creatures in question couldn't understand this and reacted badly to the decisions they made. (In fact, you can still see this attitude in the dean of the deaf high school in the movie Children of a Lesser God, released only two years before the DPN protests.) And thus was it that all the way until the 1960s, most deaf schools were run by an entirely hearing executive board, staffed almost entirely by hearing teachers, and with dorms maintained by almost entirely hearing house-parents, many of whom were notoriously cruel in the style of prison guards, precisely because they had been taught that the deaf children under their care were little more than wild animals and needed to be treated as such. This all started changing during the countercultural era, as an underground but growing "Deaf pride movement" was established in the same years as the similar "gay pride," "black power," and "women's lib" movements; and by the 1980s small but steady strides had been made in hiring more Deaf teachers, getting more Deaf students into PhD programs, getting ASL better acknowledged as a legitimate language, and in general establishing the "Deaf community" with a capital "D" to begin with. (For those who don't know, a "deaf" person is simply someone with hearing loss, while a "Deaf" person is someone who defines themselves through their hearing loss, doesn't consider it a disability, is fluent in ASL, and is actively involved in the community.) And so when Gallaudet's sixth president abruptly resigned in January 1988 to enter the private sector, many in the Deaf community thought this was a perfect opportunity for the school to finally hire its first Deaf president, and to send a powerful message to the nation that Deaf people aren't retarded, that they don't need hearing "superiors" to take care of them, and in fact they can do anything a hearing person can do except hear (a phrase that was to become famous during the protests, and has since gone on to be a defining statement of the modern Deaf community). One of the things I learned from reading this book is that this groundswell support for a Deaf president actually started long before the protests themselves; for example, a rally on the subject a few weeks before the decision drew over 2,000 wildly enthusiastic participants, and the movement managed to collect pre-decision letters urging for a Deaf president from an insanely bipartisan coalition of politicians, including no less a combination than George Bush and Jesse Jackson. So you can understand this group's despair and fury when, after the board of trustees made the unprecedented step of boiling the finalists down to two Deaf people and one hearing person, they indeed decided during a secret meeting to hire the one hearing finalist over the two Deaf ones, badly misreading the public mood on the subject and virtually ignoring the advice being given to them by nearly everyone involved; and how this community's fury simply grew when learning that every Deaf board member had voted unanimously for a Deaf candidate, but were overturned by the hearing board members because of being outnumbered 10 to 4, with all 10 of the hearing board members unanimously voting for the hearing candidate. Did board chair Jane Spilman actually say during a closed meeting afterwards that "deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world?" That's a matter for debate, as I learned from the book; but it's undeniable that she displayed such a naked plantation mentality in the years leading up to this week, she might as well have been standing on a veranda holding a whip. In two decades of being involved with an all-deaf university, not only did she never bother to learn sign language, she often wouldn't even provide an ASL interpreter when delivering speeches on campus; she had no deaf friends, had no deaf people on her staff, and refused to upgrade the president's house on campus to be deaf accessible (for example, by having the doorbell blink the lights as well as make a noise). So it should be no surprise that the campus erupted in indignant anger when the announcement of yet another hearing president was sneakily announced via paper press release at 9:00 at night, and by the next day the student population had barricaded the front gates of the school and was refusing to let anyone in. (The Gallaudet campus was established in the 1860s in a Washington neighborhood that has since gone on to be a dangerous one, which has necessitated the building of a high security fence around the entire school, which made it particularly easy to block access.) You can read the Wikipedia page for a blow-by-blow look at the events that happened during the seven days of the protest; but the tldr version is that the protesters achieved all four of their demands (the resignation of Spilman; the hiring of a Deaf president; the restructuring of the board into 51 percent Deaf members; and no reprisals for anyone involved), virtually unheard of in the history of angry student protests. And the reason, as I think I've now demonstrated, is that this was way more than simply a student protest; it was a national rallying cry for all Deaf people in the entire United States, a moment when they could all stand as one and declare that it's time for the way they've traditionally been treated to finally end. To be frank, a lot of what made the protest successful (many of the board members admitted afterwards) was simply seeing how professional and accomplished the Deaf community was at organizing the protest in the first place -- they managed to set up a bank of TTY phones and get hundreds of newspapers nationwide to do stories on the subject (most of whom then did related interviews with local deaf citizens, thus increasing the visibility of the community even more), managed to raise $30,000 in donations in a single week, managed to convince Ted Koppel to devote an entire episode of Nightline to the subject, managed to organize a rally on the steps of the Capitol that drew thousands of people. And all of this before the internet, mind you. The very act of pulling off the protest was proof that the protesters had a valid point, many of the board members said after the fact; and it was at this point that other dominoes started quickly falling, including the Supreme Court ruling one year later that ASL is a legitimate language that is required to be recognized by American schools, courts and police, then one year after that the Americans With Disabilities Act being passed, which finally provided the same civil rights to the disabled that people of different races were afforded in the '60s. It was a 1-2-3 combo that forever changed not only the way the Deaf are treated in this country but the way the Deaf see themselves, to the point now in the late 2010s where ASL has become the second most popular foreign language for hearing people to learn in schools after Spanish, and Deaf characters now regularly populate mainstream movies, TV shows, and Broadway plays. We now take it for granted that Deaf people have the same range of low- to high-intelligence as the rest of the population, because now that ASL has become the default communication of the Deaf population, they can finally prove it; and this goes double for Deaf schools, nearly all of which now require their teachers and other staffers to pass an annual ASL competency exam, and are nearly all now led by Deaf C-level corporate professionals. It's a humbling and inspirational story that makes me cry every time I read about it, and something so important to the Deaf community that all of us owe it to ourselves to at least understand its basics. For literally centuries, the Deaf in the United States were treated in such a shameful, criminally negligent way that it makes one's jaw drop to hear about it now. The more all of us can understand what has transpired in the past, the more we can ensure that it will never happen again. --- The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/23: It's been harder than I thought it would be to find good sign language partners. 4/19: Book review: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by William Stokoe 4/15: ASL Adventures: "Game of Thrones" night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first "signing in the wild." 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.]]> Today, an extended look at the most crucial event to define the modern Deaf community, and the reasons it's considered so important
#Deaf #community #culture #history #gallaudet #university #1988 #student #protests #DeafPresidentNow #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #eugenics #PlantationMentality #DeafAndDumb #DeafPrideMovement #JaneSpilman

Deaf President Now! student protests

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

One of the things I'm most grateful for with this Deaf studies journal I've been maintaining this year is how many hearing people I've now heard from, thanking me for illuminating them to the complex, often infuriating events that have happened over the last two centuries of the Deaf in America, most of which have come as complete surprises to them. I agree, I too had no idea most of these things had happened until starting to study Deaf history; and if you want to understand the one most crucial event that has come to define the modern Deaf community in 2019, then you need to understand the “Deaf President Now!” (DPN) student protests that happened on the campus of the all-deaf Gallaudet University in Washington DC in March, 1988.

I actually just read a book devoted entirely to the subject, written back in the mid-1990s by John Christiansen and Sharon Barnartt; but my review of it over at Goodreads was getting so long, I decided to just repackage the entire thing as an essay for the general public and post it here. And the reason it's so long is that we have to go back and look at an entire century of Deaf history before we can understand why this particular week in 1988 was so important; so strap in and get ready for a fascinating ride...

The first crucial thing to understand about all this is that for an entire hundred years, literally from the 1870s to 1970s, American Sign Language (ASL) was actually banned from most deaf schools, in favor of the “oralist” school of thought which argued that it's actually much better for deaf people to learn how to speak and read lips, because this way they can integrate back into “normal” society after they've done so, much more than learning a special language that only they and their friends can understand. There are various arguments that were used over those decades for why “manualism” (sign language) is inferior and shouldn't be taught — it's not a real language but only pantomime, the deaf ghettoize themselves by using it, it's an insult against God because the Bible says that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, etc etc — but what it really boiled down to is that the oralism proponents had more money and more famous people on their side, led by the unceasing efforts of Victorian Era superstars Alexander Graham Bell and Horace Mann, which is how they came to dominate the conversation all the way up to the countercultural revolutions of the 1960s and '70s.

But there's one huge problem with this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work; decades of studies have proven over and over that even the most adept lip-reader (almost always someone who still has a little hearing) only comprehends 30 percent of a spoken conversation, while most Deaf people never learn how to lip-read at all, because it's such a tricky endeavor that's almost destined to fail from the start. (For one famous example, the letters “m,” “b” and “p” are made with the exact same lip movement, making it impossible to know if a person is saying “mat,” “bat” or “pat” just by looking at their face.) But this being the Victorian Age, instead of seeing these results and concluding that their theories were wrong, oralist proponents instead concluded that most deaf people must be failing at lip-reading because they're mentally retarded, that in fact mental retardation is a natural and related side effect of hearing loss, which is how we get the now shameful and grossly outdated term “deaf and dumb” from those years. (Oralists also believed in several other quack-like medical theories that have since been disproven, such as eugenics — Alexander Graham Bell in particular tried to get Congress to pass a law banning deaf people from “breeding” with other deaf people, in that he believed that in 100 percent of all cases, this would lead to a deaf baby, a theory already being disproven even in his lifetime.)

So armed with all this, what developed within the world of hearing people overseeing deaf institutions was a culture that they considered benignly benevolent, but that we have since come to refer to by the term “plantation mentality,” named after the attitude that white plantation owners used to have towards their black slaves in the years before the Civil War; they sincerely believed they loved them, but in reality they “loved” them like one would love a pack of animals, considering them too stupid and feral to ever be able to make good decisions on their own, and thus it being the plantation owner's “burden” to make these decisions on their behalf, even if the sweet dumb creatures in question couldn't understand this and reacted badly to the decisions they made. (In fact, you can still see this attitude in the dean of the deaf high school in the movie Children of a Lesser God, released only two years before the DPN protests.) And thus was it that all the way until the 1960s, most deaf schools were run by an entirely hearing executive board, staffed almost entirely by hearing teachers, and with dorms maintained by almost entirely hearing house-parents, many of whom were notoriously cruel in the style of prison guards, precisely because they had been taught that the deaf children under their care were little more than wild animals and needed to be treated as such.

This all started changing during the countercultural era, as an underground but growing “Deaf pride movement” was established in the same years as the similar “gay pride,” “black power,” and “women's lib” movements; and by the 1980s small but steady strides had been made in hiring more Deaf teachers, getting more Deaf students into PhD programs, getting ASL better acknowledged as a legitimate language, and in general establishing the “Deaf community” with a capital “D” to begin with. (For those who don't know, a “deaf” person is simply someone with hearing loss, while a “Deaf” person is someone who defines themselves through their hearing loss, doesn't consider it a disability, is fluent in ASL, and is actively involved in the community.) And so when Gallaudet's sixth president abruptly resigned in January 1988 to enter the private sector, many in the Deaf community thought this was a perfect opportunity for the school to finally hire its first Deaf president, and to send a powerful message to the nation that Deaf people aren't retarded, that they don't need hearing “superiors” to take care of them, and in fact they can do anything a hearing person can do except hear (a phrase that was to become famous during the protests, and has since gone on to be a defining statement of the modern Deaf community).

One of the things I learned from reading this book is that this groundswell support for a Deaf president actually started long before the protests themselves; for example, a rally on the subject a few weeks before the decision drew over 2,000 wildly enthusiastic participants, and the movement managed to collect pre-decision letters urging for a Deaf president from an insanely bipartisan coalition of politicians, including no less a combination than George Bush and Jesse Jackson. So you can understand this group's despair and fury when, after the board of trustees made the unprecedented step of boiling the finalists down to two Deaf people and one hearing person, they indeed decided during a secret meeting to hire the one hearing finalist over the two Deaf ones, badly misreading the public mood on the subject and virtually ignoring the advice being given to them by nearly everyone involved; and how this community's fury simply grew when learning that every Deaf board member had voted unanimously for a Deaf candidate, but were overturned by the hearing board members because of being outnumbered 10 to 4, with all 10 of the hearing board members unanimously voting for the hearing candidate.

Did board chair Jane Spilman actually say during a closed meeting afterwards that “deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world?” That's a matter for debate, as I learned from the book; but it's undeniable that she displayed such a naked plantation mentality in the years leading up to this week, she might as well have been standing on a veranda holding a whip. In two decades of being involved with an all-deaf university, not only did she never bother to learn sign language, she often wouldn't even provide an ASL interpreter when delivering speeches on campus; she had no deaf friends, had no deaf people on her staff, and refused to upgrade the president's house on campus to be deaf accessible (for example, by having the doorbell blink the lights as well as make a noise). So it should be no surprise that the campus erupted in indignant anger when the announcement of yet another hearing president was sneakily announced via paper press release at 9:00 at night, and by the next day the student population had barricaded the front gates of the school and was refusing to let anyone in. (The Gallaudet campus was established in the 1860s in a Washington neighborhood that has since gone on to be a dangerous one, which has necessitated the building of a high security fence around the entire school, which made it particularly easy to block access.)

You can read the Wikipedia page for a blow-by-blow look at the events that happened during the seven days of the protest; but the tldr version is that the protesters achieved all four of their demands (the resignation of Spilman; the hiring of a Deaf president; the restructuring of the board into 51 percent Deaf members; and no reprisals for anyone involved), virtually unheard of in the history of angry student protests. And the reason, as I think I've now demonstrated, is that this was way more than simply a student protest; it was a national rallying cry for all Deaf people in the entire United States, a moment when they could all stand as one and declare that it's time for the way they've traditionally been treated to finally end. To be frank, a lot of what made the protest successful (many of the board members admitted afterwards) was simply seeing how professional and accomplished the Deaf community was at organizing the protest in the first place — they managed to set up a bank of TTY phones and get hundreds of newspapers nationwide to do stories on the subject (most of whom then did related interviews with local deaf citizens, thus increasing the visibility of the community even more), managed to raise $30,000 in donations in a single week, managed to convince Ted Koppel to devote an entire episode of Nightline to the subject, managed to organize a rally on the steps of the Capitol that drew thousands of people. And all of this before the internet, mind you.

The very act of pulling off the protest was proof that the protesters had a valid point, many of the board members said after the fact; and it was at this point that other dominoes started quickly falling, including the Supreme Court ruling one year later that ASL is a legitimate language that is required to be recognized by American schools, courts and police, then one year after that the Americans With Disabilities Act being passed, which finally provided the same civil rights to the disabled that people of different races were afforded in the '60s. It was a 1-2-3 combo that forever changed not only the way the Deaf are treated in this country but the way the Deaf see themselves, to the point now in the late 2010s where ASL has become the second most popular foreign language for hearing people to learn in schools after Spanish, and Deaf characters now regularly populate mainstream movies, TV shows, and Broadway plays. We now take it for granted that Deaf people have the same range of low- to high-intelligence as the rest of the population, because now that ASL has become the default communication of the Deaf population, they can finally prove it; and this goes double for Deaf schools, nearly all of which now require their teachers and other staffers to pass an annual ASL competency exam, and are nearly all now led by Deaf C-level corporate professionals.

It's a humbling and inspirational story that makes me cry every time I read about it, and something so important to the Deaf community that all of us owe it to ourselves to at least understand its basics. For literally centuries, the Deaf in the United States were treated in such a shameful, criminally negligent way that it makes one's jaw drop to hear about it now. The more all of us can understand what has transpired in the past, the more we can ensure that it will never happen again.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/23: It's been harder than I thought it would be to find good sign language partners. 4/19: Book review: A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, by William Stokoe 4/15: ASL Adventures: “Game of Thrones” night at Deaf Planet Soul. 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL Adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks

3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

]]> https://write.as/jasonpettus/deaf-culture-primer-the-deaf-president-now-student-protests-of-1988 Wed, 24 Apr 2019 18:09:53 +0000 ASL Adventures: "Game of Thrones" night at Deaf Planet Soul. https://write.as/jasonpettus/asl-adventures-game-of-thrones-night-at-deaf-planet-soul?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[A field report from my very first Chicago Deaf community social event, plus some sobering thoughts about my fellow late-deafened adults !--more-- ###### #asl #signlanguage #Deaf #community #chicago #social #events #DeafPlanetSoul #GameOfThrones #history #oralism #LateDeafenedAdults #middleage #mortality #advice #moralcourage Game Of Thrones night at Deaf Planet Soul [Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.] So the day finally arrived this week; the day I finally went out and attended an event in Chicago designed specifically for Deaf people to have fun with other Deaf people. As regular readers know, I've been feeling a bit of trepidation about this, for reasons I went into detail about in my last journal entry -- how although I'm proud of the surprisingly large amount of ASL I've learned in just six weeks now of studying it, I still don't want to be some beginner pest to native signers who are trying to have a normal conversation at a party, plus I want to be mindful of the history of hearing people barging into the Deaf community and forcing them to change their ways to better accommodate their "hearing superiors." Let's never forget, all the way up to the 1990s, not only was ASL almost exclusively known only by native Deaf people, but it was actively banned from most Deaf classrooms (but read about the shameful history of "forced oralism" for more on this subject), which means that sign language was largely an insular and secret activity that helped define the "us" part of the "us versus them" equation among the Deaf. So although I'm sure that most native signers would be patient and tolerant of my terrible beginner skills, I also want to be hyper-vigilant about the idea of barging my way into non-educational social events and being all, "Hi! My signing is horrible and I'm slow and I use the wrong grammar and word order, but I'd appreciate it if you all could modify your own speech to mollify me, the wonderful noble hearing person who is deigning to learn your language (yay me!), instead of me doing the hard work of actually learning your language well enough to speak it correctly back to you. THANKS!" But still, there's only way to become conversational in any new language, and that's by forcing yourself into actual conversations as much as possible; so when I discovered that the local Deaf advocacy group Deaf Planet Soul (DPS) was having a Game of Thrones season-premiere viewing party as a fundraiser for their organization (something they're doing with every episode this season), I thought this would be a great opportunity for my local Deaf community "coming out" moment, not least of which was because for an hour of it, I could sit there in silence and not have to worry about chatting at all. DPS is a pretty cool organization; founded by two people of color (Puerto Rican Gallaudet University grad Gregory Perez, and Iraqi-American Muslim Zaineb Abdulla, who you might remember from her 2016 self-defense tips against hijab-grabbing alt-righters, which became a viral hit after Trump's election), it's a group that advocates not only for Deaf accessibility but accessibility among those who typically get most overlooked by society, and they're particularly well known for traveling to refugee camps every year and providing things like hearing aids and sign-language lessons to deaf kids who otherwise live in a solitary world of silence. Usually on Sundays I'm down in Hyde Park, having dinner with my friend Carrie and her teen sons, so I will probably miss the rest of the Game of Thrones parties; but certainly I plan on getting involved with DPS's other events a lot more as the year continues, and also plan on talking with them about their refugee work and whether it might be something I'd be eligible to participate in too. The party itself went fine, although I was surprised to see that most of the attendees were actually hearing people who didn't sign, I suppose friends of the staff who were there to help financially support the organization. Still, though, I wanted to get in at least a little conversation, so I approached Gregory and Zeineb after the show was over. "Hi!," I started. "I want to say hello. I'm Jason." (I still don't know how to properly sign, "I wanted to introduce myself;" this is something I need to learn soon, if I'm going to keep going out to events like these.) "Hi, Jason!", Zee responded. "Thanks for coming out!" "I want to warn you, I don't know a lot of sign language yet. I'm a student right now." "Oh yes? Where are you studying?" "C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A College." "Oh, C-C! They're great." (Believe it or not, this was the very first time I learned the "name sign" for Columbia College; not even the teachers there had shown me at this point.) "I learned sign language in a class too." "Oh, are you hearing?" "Hard of hearing," Zee started speaking while simultaneously signing. "I grew up in the hearing world and thinking of myself as disabled, but it was after going to fjkld ajs difl;a jfjld fjdlow jdjmdk jldkfa....." "Whoa, sorry," I said when she took a pause. "Could you maybe repeat everything you just said, slower and louder? Sorry!" The whole group laughed. "Sure, sorry!" Zee said, and began again. This is the main problem I'm having right now at these kinds of events; although I'm meeting way more people than I expected who can both sign and speak at the same time, my hearing loss prevents me from being able to follow them in large crowded rooms, while I don't know enough ASL yet to be able to completely follow them in sign language either. It's certainly proof that I'm doing the right thing by learning ASL in the first place, but it leads to these frustrating experiences where I can't exactly communicate with anyone right now, either hearing or Deaf. I'm glad for the experience, and I can definitely feel myself getting a little better at signing after every single evening like this most recent one; but I have to admit, I still have to really force myself at this point to go out to these events in the first place, because I know in advance how difficult it's going to be for me to converse well no matter which language I pick. But on the other hand, I've also started having this sobering experience online that, although it's kind of a downer to actually witness, has definitely been producing positive emotions when it comes to the efforts to stick with the immersion events here in the city, where I just throw myself into situations where everyone around me can sign much better than I can, and I futilely try to keep up with the few isolated words I can pick out of their conversations. Namely, now that I've reactivated my Facebook account for the first time in three years (which I had to do in order to stay in touch with my fellow Columbia College students), and have started to join a bunch of other Deaf culture groups there, I'm starting to meet more and more "late-deafened adults" (LDAs) exactly like me; for those who don't know, this is a special term within the Deaf community to describe those who grew up hearing just fine, but are only now losing their hearing in middle-age. (Here's an alarming statistic for you hearing folks -- two-thirds of all elderly people on the planet are functionally or profoundly deaf, so now you know that you've got that to look forward to. You're welcome!) Unfortunately, the vast majority of the LDAs I'm meeting online display the exact set of stereotypes that LDAs are known for within the Deaf community. Since they grew up hearing, they see their increasing deafness as something "being taken away from them," with the resulting grieving and anger that that phrase implies. They've often spent decades now cultivating a group of hearing friends and family members, and rising through the ranks of a corporate job; now their hearing loss is putting an end to that, and at the age of 35, 40, 45, 50, they find themselves without the enthusiasm or energy to go out there and start all over again. They find sign language extremely difficult to learn in middle age, and feel despondent over the idea of putting in all that work and having no one around to use it with in the first place, so most LDAs never bother to learn ASL at all, cutting themselves off from ever being able to get involved in the Deaf community to begin with. And so most LDAs just resign themselves to the idea of counting down the clock of their elderly years in a state of loneliness and confusion, no longer able to communicate effectively with their existing social circle but not capable of making a new one either, their lives dwindling and narrowing into the space of a single room and the giant TV that keeps them constant company in the years before death. Most of the LDAs I meet online fit this description to a T; and while it always saddens me, it also strengthens my resolve to not let this be my eventual fate too. I mean, certainly it helps that I'm a freelancer and small-business owner who works by himself from home, and definitely it helps that I have few physical friends in Chicago I meet up with regularly, no hearing spouse or children to have to worry about, end-of-life parents who I only see a handful of times a year. But part of it, I acknowledge, is that I simply work harder at this stuff than a lot of other LDAs do; I force myself at the age of 50 to see the world in a growth mindset, force myself to see my hearing loss in terms of the positive new opportunities it's presenting, instead of the negative doors it keeps closing with each successive year. I force myself to practice sign language four hours a day, force myself to stay upbeat when I can still only recognize 1 word out of every 10 when someone signs. I force myself to be this way, because I think it's a healthier way to confront a world that is often shitty and unfair, instead of crawling back into my lair with my tail between my legs, admitting that this shitty unfair world of ours has beaten me for good. Lord knows I'm a fuck-up in many other areas of my life -- just take a glance at my credit score sometime if you doubt it, or note the unending trail of failed businesses and bitter ex-girlfriends that drag behind me like tornado damage. But as I was reminded this week by one of my online ASL practice partners, a perpetually sunny grade school teacher in Texas whose name is literally Joy, overcoming the depression and stagnancy that comes with the failing health of middle age is something that takes legitimate courage and legitimate work, and I'm glad that I've somehow been able to summon up that courage and discipline when it has eluded me in so many other areas of my life. So yes, I will keep throwing myself into Deaf community events, and yes, I will keep messing up royally at them, and yes, I will keep begging for forgiveness from those bemused, exasperated native signers who must deal with my fumbling, glacially slow, mistake-riddled attempts at communicating with them. Yes, I will keep doing all of that. Because life is still worth putting in that kind of effort, even a middle-aged life full of compromises and problems and a trailer park full of destroyed dreams, strewn about like so much garbage and just waiting for a FEMA clean-up crew. I hope you too will have a chance to remember all this, the next time you're forced to confront your mortality as well. --- The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first "signing in the wild." 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.]]> A field report from my very first Chicago Deaf community social event, plus some sobering thoughts about my fellow late-deafened adults
#asl #signlanguage #Deaf #community #chicago #social #events #DeafPlanetSoul #GameOfThrones #history #oralism #LateDeafenedAdults #middleage #mortality #advice #moralcourage

Game Of Thrones night at Deaf Planet Soul

[Need to get caught up on the entire saga of me learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved in the Chicago Deaf community this year? The complete set of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So the day finally arrived this week; the day I finally went out and attended an event in Chicago designed specifically for Deaf people to have fun with other Deaf people. As regular readers know, I've been feeling a bit of trepidation about this, for reasons I went into detail about in my last journal entry — how although I'm proud of the surprisingly large amount of ASL I've learned in just six weeks now of studying it, I still don't want to be some beginner pest to native signers who are trying to have a normal conversation at a party, plus I want to be mindful of the history of hearing people barging into the Deaf community and forcing them to change their ways to better accommodate their “hearing superiors.”

Let's never forget, all the way up to the 1990s, not only was ASL almost exclusively known only by native Deaf people, but it was actively banned from most Deaf classrooms (but read about the shameful history of “forced oralism” for more on this subject), which means that sign language was largely an insular and secret activity that helped define the “us” part of the “us versus them” equation among the Deaf. So although I'm sure that most native signers would be patient and tolerant of my terrible beginner skills, I also want to be hyper-vigilant about the idea of barging my way into non-educational social events and being all, “Hi! My signing is horrible and I'm slow and I use the wrong grammar and word order, but I'd appreciate it if you all could modify your own speech to mollify me, the wonderful noble hearing person who is deigning to learn your language (yay me!), instead of me doing the hard work of actually learning your language well enough to speak it correctly back to you. THANKS!”

But still, there's only way to become conversational in any new language, and that's by forcing yourself into actual conversations as much as possible; so when I discovered that the local Deaf advocacy group Deaf Planet Soul (DPS) was having a Game of Thrones season-premiere viewing party as a fundraiser for their organization (something they're doing with every episode this season), I thought this would be a great opportunity for my local Deaf community “coming out” moment, not least of which was because for an hour of it, I could sit there in silence and not have to worry about chatting at all.

DPS is a pretty cool organization; founded by two people of color (Puerto Rican Gallaudet University grad Gregory Perez, and Iraqi-American Muslim Zaineb Abdulla, who you might remember from her 2016 self-defense tips against hijab-grabbing alt-righters, which became a viral hit after Trump's election), it's a group that advocates not only for Deaf accessibility but accessibility among those who typically get most overlooked by society, and they're particularly well known for traveling to refugee camps every year and providing things like hearing aids and sign-language lessons to deaf kids who otherwise live in a solitary world of silence. Usually on Sundays I'm down in Hyde Park, having dinner with my friend Carrie and her teen sons, so I will probably miss the rest of the Game of Thrones parties; but certainly I plan on getting involved with DPS's other events a lot more as the year continues, and also plan on talking with them about their refugee work and whether it might be something I'd be eligible to participate in too.

The party itself went fine, although I was surprised to see that most of the attendees were actually hearing people who didn't sign, I suppose friends of the staff who were there to help financially support the organization. Still, though, I wanted to get in at least a little conversation, so I approached Gregory and Zeineb after the show was over.

“Hi!,” I started. “I want to say hello. I'm Jason.” (I still don't know how to properly sign, “I wanted to introduce myself;” this is something I need to learn soon, if I'm going to keep going out to events like these.)

“Hi, Jason!”, Zee responded. “Thanks for coming out!”

“I want to warn you, I don't know a lot of sign language yet. I'm a student right now.”

“Oh yes? Where are you studying?”

“C-O-L-U-M-B-I-A College.”

“Oh, C-C! They're great.” (Believe it or not, this was the very first time I learned the “name sign” for Columbia College; not even the teachers there had shown me at this point.) “I learned sign language in a class too.”

“Oh, are you hearing?”

“Hard of hearing,” Zee started speaking while simultaneously signing. “I grew up in the hearing world and thinking of myself as disabled, but it was after going to fjkld ajs difl;a jfjld fjdlow jdjmdk jldkfa.....”

“Whoa, sorry,” I said when she took a pause. “Could you maybe repeat everything you just said, slower and louder? Sorry!”

The whole group laughed. “Sure, sorry!” Zee said, and began again.

This is the main problem I'm having right now at these kinds of events; although I'm meeting way more people than I expected who can both sign and speak at the same time, my hearing loss prevents me from being able to follow them in large crowded rooms, while I don't know enough ASL yet to be able to completely follow them in sign language either. It's certainly proof that I'm doing the right thing by learning ASL in the first place, but it leads to these frustrating experiences where I can't exactly communicate with anyone right now, either hearing or Deaf. I'm glad for the experience, and I can definitely feel myself getting a little better at signing after every single evening like this most recent one; but I have to admit, I still have to really force myself at this point to go out to these events in the first place, because I know in advance how difficult it's going to be for me to converse well no matter which language I pick.

But on the other hand, I've also started having this sobering experience online that, although it's kind of a downer to actually witness, has definitely been producing positive emotions when it comes to the efforts to stick with the immersion events here in the city, where I just throw myself into situations where everyone around me can sign much better than I can, and I futilely try to keep up with the few isolated words I can pick out of their conversations. Namely, now that I've reactivated my Facebook account for the first time in three years (which I had to do in order to stay in touch with my fellow Columbia College students), and have started to join a bunch of other Deaf culture groups there, I'm starting to meet more and more “late-deafened adults” (LDAs) exactly like me; for those who don't know, this is a special term within the Deaf community to describe those who grew up hearing just fine, but are only now losing their hearing in middle-age. (Here's an alarming statistic for you hearing folks — two-thirds of all elderly people on the planet are functionally or profoundly deaf, so now you know that you've got that to look forward to. You're welcome!)

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the LDAs I'm meeting online display the exact set of stereotypes that LDAs are known for within the Deaf community. Since they grew up hearing, they see their increasing deafness as something “being taken away from them,” with the resulting grieving and anger that that phrase implies. They've often spent decades now cultivating a group of hearing friends and family members, and rising through the ranks of a corporate job; now their hearing loss is putting an end to that, and at the age of 35, 40, 45, 50, they find themselves without the enthusiasm or energy to go out there and start all over again. They find sign language extremely difficult to learn in middle age, and feel despondent over the idea of putting in all that work and having no one around to use it with in the first place, so most LDAs never bother to learn ASL at all, cutting themselves off from ever being able to get involved in the Deaf community to begin with. And so most LDAs just resign themselves to the idea of counting down the clock of their elderly years in a state of loneliness and confusion, no longer able to communicate effectively with their existing social circle but not capable of making a new one either, their lives dwindling and narrowing into the space of a single room and the giant TV that keeps them constant company in the years before death.

Most of the LDAs I meet online fit this description to a T; and while it always saddens me, it also strengthens my resolve to not let this be my eventual fate too. I mean, certainly it helps that I'm a freelancer and small-business owner who works by himself from home, and definitely it helps that I have few physical friends in Chicago I meet up with regularly, no hearing spouse or children to have to worry about, end-of-life parents who I only see a handful of times a year. But part of it, I acknowledge, is that I simply work harder at this stuff than a lot of other LDAs do; I force myself at the age of 50 to see the world in a growth mindset, force myself to see my hearing loss in terms of the positive new opportunities it's presenting, instead of the negative doors it keeps closing with each successive year. I force myself to practice sign language four hours a day, force myself to stay upbeat when I can still only recognize 1 word out of every 10 when someone signs. I force myself to be this way, because I think it's a healthier way to confront a world that is often shitty and unfair, instead of crawling back into my lair with my tail between my legs, admitting that this shitty unfair world of ours has beaten me for good.

Lord knows I'm a fuck-up in many other areas of my life — just take a glance at my credit score sometime if you doubt it, or note the unending trail of failed businesses and bitter ex-girlfriends that drag behind me like tornado damage. But as I was reminded this week by one of my online ASL practice partners, a perpetually sunny grade school teacher in Texas whose name is literally Joy, overcoming the depression and stagnancy that comes with the failing health of middle age is something that takes legitimate courage and legitimate work, and I'm glad that I've somehow been able to summon up that courage and discipline when it has eluded me in so many other areas of my life. So yes, I will keep throwing myself into Deaf community events, and yes, I will keep messing up royally at them, and yes, I will keep begging for forgiveness from those bemused, exasperated native signers who must deal with my fumbling, glacially slow, mistake-riddled attempts at communicating with them. Yes, I will keep doing all of that. Because life is still worth putting in that kind of effort, even a middle-aged life full of compromises and problems and a trailer park full of destroyed dreams, strewn about like so much garbage and just waiting for a FEMA clean-up crew. I hope you too will have a chance to remember all this, the next time you're forced to confront your mortality as well.

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/14: Book review: Inside Deaf Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 4/8: ASL adventures: The Chicago Inclusive Dance Festival, and my first “signing in the wild.” 4/4: Book review: The Mask of Benevolence, by Harlan Lane 4/4: Book review: Train Go Sorry, by Leah Hager Cohen 4/3: He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

]]> https://write.as/jasonpettus/asl-adventures-game-of-thrones-night-at-deaf-planet-soul Mon, 15 Apr 2019 19:47:55 +0000 He speaks! He speaks! ...Er, he signs! He signs! https://write.as/jasonpettus/he-speaks-he-speaks-er-he-signs-he-signs?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[In which I hold my very first conversation in American Sign Language, and channel the spirit of Harry freaking Potter !--more-- ###### #asl #signlanguage #lifeprint #startasl #fingerspelling #ASLInstitute #ColumbiaCollege #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #history #ToiletWhere #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #LipReadingMyth #Gallaudet #DeafPresidentNow #LateDeafenedAdult #Hogwarts #Magic Columbia College's ASL Institute [Need to get caught up on my saga this year of learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved with Chicago's Deaf community? The full list of links is at the bottom of the page.] So after a month now of self-studying ASL at home through two different websites (Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com), and building up a decent but not impressive vocabulary list (around 700 terms at this point, plus I can fingerspell at a rate of around two letters per second), the time finally came last night for me to go out into the world and interact with other signers for the very first time. And that's because it was time for the ASL Institute, a six-week series of conversation workshops sponsored by Columbia College here in Chicago, and taught by their award-winning Deaf Studies faculty as part of their nationally admired academic program. There's a ton of undergraduates all over the Midwest who come to Columbia to study ASL; but apparently the school discovered that there are also a ton of people like me in the general community who want to learn ASL too, but who don't want to make the financial or time commitment of full-time enrollment. So they now offer this $100 workshop that meets once a week in the evening for six weeks, actually a series of three workshops that last 18 weeks if you go through the whole thing, and which very roughly correspond with the ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes the school offers during the day as a sort of core curriculum for gaining conversational fluency. (For what it's worth, my online classes are structured under a three-semester 1, 2, 3 curriculum too, a fairly standard practice among groups that teach ASL.) That's an important thing to understand about sign language, that like any foreign language, the key to becoming conversational is to throw yourself into actual conversations with actual humans as much as possible; so while I've been happy to discover that you can actually get a fairly decent education on ASL just through solo home study alone, I knew there would be something missing if I didn't challenge myself to get out into the real world as much as possible too, which is why I signed up for these workshops. Plus, as regular readers know, the whole goal of me learning ASL in the first place is not as some academic experiment, but because I plan on transitioning my social life into the Deaf community more and more as I get older, and continue losing more and more of my hearing; so I figured that a fairly safe way of gently entering this community would be by starting with people who professionally teach the hearing how to sign in the first place, and becoming friends with those people first before then slowly branching out into the city at large. After all, a very real fear of mine -- and something that should be a legitimate concern for any hearing person learning ASL -- is throwing myself into the local Deaf community too early, making a jackass out of myself, and alienating everyone involved before I've ever had a chance to make any friends. Like any population of native speakers, no matter what the language, most Deaf people will be bemusedly tolerant of someone like me who's just starting to learn the language, but will quickly grow annoyed with my fumbling attempts interfering with their desire to simply talk with their friends at a normal pace. ("So I was at Tom's party, and you'll never guess what happened..." "Me go now toilet! Where toilet where? TOILET WHERE???" "[Sigh] Anyway, like I was saying...") And now add to this the special situation when it comes to the Deaf community and ASL, which for those who don't know was a language that was quite literally outlawed among most Deaf schools all the way from the 1880s to 1980s, when a noble but heartbreakingly misguided competing theory about language called "oralism" instead became the new norm. Championed most notably by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (spoiler alert: don't bring up his name at a party full of Deaf people), and aggressively pushed by the same repressive Victorian Christians who also banned Welsh in the same time period, it was basically a two-pronged attack against sign language: the first argument being that it's better for the deaf to learn how to speak and read lips, because this helps them integrate back into "normal" society better than learning their own special language that no hearing person understands; and the second argument being that ASL is not actually a language at all, but rather a series of crude pantomimes that is unable to express abstract concepts like the future and past or philosophical thoughts, something that will never be able to hold a candle to the rich and sophisticated possibilities of English. And this is not to mention (the Christian oralists argued) that ASL is an abomination against God, since the Bible clearly states that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, meaning that any Deaf person who refuses to do so is essentially spitting in God's face. But there's one big problem with all this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work, or at least not the way that oralists used to claim that it does; for while functionally Deaf people with some hearing can eventually after years of intense study come to speak and lip-read fairly well, a century of scholarly studies has proven over and over that even in the best-case scenario, the most adept lip-readers still only catch about 30 percent of a hearing person's conversation, the rest basically guessed at through context, gestures and facial expressions. And that's best case; for most people who can't hear, reading lips is a complete disaster that never works, which then in the repressive 20th century got these people labeled by their hearing caretakers as mentally challenged, and relegated to remedial classes and then factory or farm work for the rest of their life. This is how we got the outdated and now shameful term "deaf and dumb," because for a long time it was just assumed by the hearing world that most people who were deaf were also "mentally retarded" (another outdated term I'm deliberately using here to prove a point about its awfulness), and that the few who thrived at oralism were the rare genius exceptions that proved the rule. As recently as the 1980s -- i.e., as recently as me and my peers already being in college -- it was still quite common for Deaf elementary schools to literally tie their childrens' hands behind their backs during class, so to force them through tear-filled eyes to practice the largely useless oralism instead of signing to each other; and so this led to ASL becoming a secret, contraband language that the Deaf used with each other only when no hearing people were around, an underground railroad of communication that tightened and solidified the insular intimacy of their community. So yes, when you're a hearing person in the 2010s learning ASL yourself, you drag this entire luggage rack of baggage behind you wherever you go, which is why so many in the Deaf community are suspicious of you when you show up to "their" events and try to speak "their" language and fumble around and get "their" words wrong. You can complain about it if you want, but that won't do anything about getting rid of that century-old luggage rack of baggage you unconsciously drag behind you at all times; so it's better to simply acknowledge the luggage rack and try to be as empathetic as you can about learning ASL, for example by paying Deaf teachers to gently and slowly tutor you into fluency, instead of just showing up to a Deaf dinner party one night and start barging around yelling, "ME GO NOW TOILET!!!" My instructor for the next six weeks is A., who surprisingly turns out to be a graduate of the prestigious Gallaudet University, a school with a fascinating history: first authorized by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in the 1860s, to this day it still remains the one and only accredited four-year liberal-arts college in the US to cater exclusively to Deaf students, and it was the 1988 student protests there over the lack of a Deaf president that kickstarted the modern Deaf Pride movement, "Stonewall"-style, which makes me feel lucky to have an instructor who comes out of that environment. But man, am I glad I decided to start studying ASL on my own for a month before showing up, because she just threw us into the heat of things with no warning -- after repeating the fingerspelling alphabet just three times, she was already spelling out entire words in class and expecting us to comprehend, and literally covered close to 50 ASL terms in two hours, which would've had me dumbfounded if I hadn't already practiced most of them at home over and over and over for the last four weeks. This is something I first learned when attending a computer coding bootcamp back in 2015, neither a good nor bad thing on its own but simply an objective fact that exists -- that in late middle-age, my brain simply can no longer operate at the same speed as someone in their twenties (the age group that constitutes most of the other 30 people in my workshop, who seem to mostly be undergraduates taking this evening course for extra credit), and that I have to work harder and longer than everyone else if I expect to keep up at their pace. And in this I take inspiration from the Deaf community itself, as often expressed in the Disney Family television show Switched at Birth I became an obsessive fan of earlier this year (but see my blog entry specifically on that subject for more); how at one point in the show's run, the main Deaf character Daphne decides to major in pre-med at college, gets frustrated by a series of hurdles that develop around her (technical terms with no equivalent signs, surgeons wearing masks that cover their lips, doctors who dismissively scoff at the very idea of her interning for them), and is reminded by her peers and family that if she wants to do something ambitious like that, she simply has to work harder at it than hearing people, and that there's no point whining about it because complaining won't change the situation. It's a powerful example of why Deaf people hate being referred to in victim terms like "disabled" or "handicapped;" they don't see themselves that way, no more than we would consider a person with high blood pressure to be "disabled," but rather as someone with a bodily imperfection that can be easily compensated for through intelligence (less salt), discipline (daily exercise), and community involvement (convincing restaurants to offer heart-healthy menu items). I'm what's known in the community as a "late-deafened adult" (LDA) in that I grew up as a hearing person, think in the word order and grammar of English, and see my hearing loss as something "being taken away from me," with all the resulting emotional grieving that that statement implies. In addition to studying the Deaf community, I've been doing a little bit of studying about the LDA community in the last month too, and have quickly come to learn that most late-deafened adults never successfully learn ASL or transition into the Deaf community; they simply count out the clock in their old age within a world that becomes increasingly narrower and lonelier, unable to make new friends and with it increasingly difficult to communicate with their old ones. I'm determined that this will not be my fate, because the very thought depresses me to a point of despair; but that means I simply have to want it more than the people around me, have to put in the extra work, have to put in the extra time, have to practice four hours a day like I've been doing this month, have to burn through a book every day or two like I've been doing this month. The workshop itself last night mostly consisted of A. instructing us through Powerpoint slides and demonstrations of individual terms, which we basically practiced as a group without actually having any conversations; but still, I was determined to have at least one back-and-forth talk with someone before I left, so I approached her after class. "Excuse me," I started in sign. "I wanted to say hello and thank you." "Oh, you're welcome," A. replied. "For a month I've been self-studying at home online," I continued. "But this here is my first time chatting people. Or, er," I corrected, "chatting with people." "That's great," she said. "You're good! You said you're hard of hearing?" (This came up earlier in the evening, when she played a DVD and I had to request that she turn on the closed-captioning.) "Yes," I confirmed. "I have a hearing aid, but my hearing is decreasing each year. This ear" -- I pointed to the left one -- "surgery, year 2000. This ear" -- pointing to the right -- "Too much music when younger." I paused, then spelled out "P-U-N-K," and we both laughed. "Okay," I concluded. "I see you...L-A-T-E-R?" "Later," she showed me in sign. "Great. Later!" And there it was -- the first-ever ASL conversation I've had in my life. And I have to admit, it felt like freaking magic, like I was a Hogwarts student and had just successfully performed an Expelliarmus spell for the very first time. The moment I got done with my first-ever ASL conversation, the thing I most wanted to do was immediately have another ASL conversation, which made me profoundly appreciate the stories in these Deaf culture books I've been reading this month (especially the ones written in the 1970s and '80s), relaying the stories of Deaf kids who grew up without knowing that ASL even existed, and how they went through a lightning-fast explosion of intellectual curiosity the moment as adolescents that they learned how to sign. That's simultaneously the most heartbreaking and the most uplifting thing of all about the shameful history of forced oralism in the 20th century; when so-called "dumb," so-called "retarded" Deaf kids were finally allowed to learn ASL, most of them blossomed within literally months from a remedial learning level to above-average, yet this wasn't seen by their hearing caretakers as proof that everyone should learn sign, but rather they were considered "rare miracles" that merely proved that not every single deaf person was fated to be a janitor or a maid. At the age of 50, I'm starting to get a taste of what this so-called "miracle" must've felt like; and I have to admit, I want more. EXPECTO PATRONUS! --- The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus 4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.]]> In which I hold my very first conversation in American Sign Language, and channel the spirit of Harry freaking Potter
#asl #signlanguage #lifeprint #startasl #fingerspelling #ASLInstitute #ColumbiaCollege #chicago #Deaf #community #culture #history #ToiletWhere #oralism #AlexanderGrahamBell #LipReadingMyth #Gallaudet #DeafPresidentNow #LateDeafenedAdult #Hogwarts #Magic

Columbia College's ASL Institute

[Need to get caught up on my saga this year of learning American Sign Language (ASL) and getting involved with Chicago's Deaf community? The full list of links is at the bottom of the page.]

So after a month now of self-studying ASL at home through two different websites (Lifeprint.com and StartASL.com), and building up a decent but not impressive vocabulary list (around 700 terms at this point, plus I can fingerspell at a rate of around two letters per second), the time finally came last night for me to go out into the world and interact with other signers for the very first time. And that's because it was time for the ASL Institute, a six-week series of conversation workshops sponsored by Columbia College here in Chicago, and taught by their award-winning Deaf Studies faculty as part of their nationally admired academic program.

There's a ton of undergraduates all over the Midwest who come to Columbia to study ASL; but apparently the school discovered that there are also a ton of people like me in the general community who want to learn ASL too, but who don't want to make the financial or time commitment of full-time enrollment. So they now offer this $100 workshop that meets once a week in the evening for six weeks, actually a series of three workshops that last 18 weeks if you go through the whole thing, and which very roughly correspond with the ASL 1, 2 and 3 classes the school offers during the day as a sort of core curriculum for gaining conversational fluency. (For what it's worth, my online classes are structured under a three-semester 1, 2, 3 curriculum too, a fairly standard practice among groups that teach ASL.)

That's an important thing to understand about sign language, that like any foreign language, the key to becoming conversational is to throw yourself into actual conversations with actual humans as much as possible; so while I've been happy to discover that you can actually get a fairly decent education on ASL just through solo home study alone, I knew there would be something missing if I didn't challenge myself to get out into the real world as much as possible too, which is why I signed up for these workshops. Plus, as regular readers know, the whole goal of me learning ASL in the first place is not as some academic experiment, but because I plan on transitioning my social life into the Deaf community more and more as I get older, and continue losing more and more of my hearing; so I figured that a fairly safe way of gently entering this community would be by starting with people who professionally teach the hearing how to sign in the first place, and becoming friends with those people first before then slowly branching out into the city at large.

After all, a very real fear of mine — and something that should be a legitimate concern for any hearing person learning ASL — is throwing myself into the local Deaf community too early, making a jackass out of myself, and alienating everyone involved before I've ever had a chance to make any friends. Like any population of native speakers, no matter what the language, most Deaf people will be bemusedly tolerant of someone like me who's just starting to learn the language, but will quickly grow annoyed with my fumbling attempts interfering with their desire to simply talk with their friends at a normal pace. (“So I was at Tom's party, and you'll never guess what happened...” “Me go now toilet! Where toilet where? TOILET WHERE???” “[Sigh] Anyway, like I was saying...“)

And now add to this the special situation when it comes to the Deaf community and ASL, which for those who don't know was a language that was quite literally outlawed among most Deaf schools all the way from the 1880s to 1980s, when a noble but heartbreakingly misguided competing theory about language called “oralism” instead became the new norm. Championed most notably by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell (spoiler alert: don't bring up his name at a party full of Deaf people), and aggressively pushed by the same repressive Victorian Christians who also banned Welsh in the same time period, it was basically a two-pronged attack against sign language: the first argument being that it's better for the deaf to learn how to speak and read lips, because this helps them integrate back into “normal” society better than learning their own special language that no hearing person understands; and the second argument being that ASL is not actually a language at all, but rather a series of crude pantomimes that is unable to express abstract concepts like the future and past or philosophical thoughts, something that will never be able to hold a candle to the rich and sophisticated possibilities of English. And this is not to mention (the Christian oralists argued) that ASL is an abomination against God, since the Bible clearly states that the difference between humans and animals is our ability to speak, meaning that any Deaf person who refuses to do so is essentially spitting in God's face.

But there's one big problem with all this, which is that oralism simply doesn't work, or at least not the way that oralists used to claim that it does; for while functionally Deaf people with some hearing can eventually after years of intense study come to speak and lip-read fairly well, a century of scholarly studies has proven over and over that even in the best-case scenario, the most adept lip-readers still only catch about 30 percent of a hearing person's conversation, the rest basically guessed at through context, gestures and facial expressions. And that's best case; for most people who can't hear, reading lips is a complete disaster that never works, which then in the repressive 20th century got these people labeled by their hearing caretakers as mentally challenged, and relegated to remedial classes and then factory or farm work for the rest of their life. This is how we got the outdated and now shameful term “deaf and dumb,” because for a long time it was just assumed by the hearing world that most people who were deaf were also “mentally retarded” (another outdated term I'm deliberately using here to prove a point about its awfulness), and that the few who thrived at oralism were the rare genius exceptions that proved the rule.

As recently as the 1980s — i.e., as recently as me and my peers already being in college — it was still quite common for Deaf elementary schools to literally tie their childrens' hands behind their backs during class, so to force them through tear-filled eyes to practice the largely useless oralism instead of signing to each other; and so this led to ASL becoming a secret, contraband language that the Deaf used with each other only when no hearing people were around, an underground railroad of communication that tightened and solidified the insular intimacy of their community. So yes, when you're a hearing person in the 2010s learning ASL yourself, you drag this entire luggage rack of baggage behind you wherever you go, which is why so many in the Deaf community are suspicious of you when you show up to “their” events and try to speak “their” language and fumble around and get “their” words wrong. You can complain about it if you want, but that won't do anything about getting rid of that century-old luggage rack of baggage you unconsciously drag behind you at all times; so it's better to simply acknowledge the luggage rack and try to be as empathetic as you can about learning ASL, for example by paying Deaf teachers to gently and slowly tutor you into fluency, instead of just showing up to a Deaf dinner party one night and start barging around yelling, “ME GO NOW TOILET!!!”

My instructor for the next six weeks is A., who surprisingly turns out to be a graduate of the prestigious Gallaudet University, a school with a fascinating history: first authorized by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War in the 1860s, to this day it still remains the one and only accredited four-year liberal-arts college in the US to cater exclusively to Deaf students, and it was the 1988 student protests there over the lack of a Deaf president that kickstarted the modern Deaf Pride movement, “Stonewall”-style, which makes me feel lucky to have an instructor who comes out of that environment. But man, am I glad I decided to start studying ASL on my own for a month before showing up, because she just threw us into the heat of things with no warning — after repeating the fingerspelling alphabet just three times, she was already spelling out entire words in class and expecting us to comprehend, and literally covered close to 50 ASL terms in two hours, which would've had me dumbfounded if I hadn't already practiced most of them at home over and over and over for the last four weeks.

This is something I first learned when attending a computer coding bootcamp back in 2015, neither a good nor bad thing on its own but simply an objective fact that exists — that in late middle-age, my brain simply can no longer operate at the same speed as someone in their twenties (the age group that constitutes most of the other 30 people in my workshop, who seem to mostly be undergraduates taking this evening course for extra credit), and that I have to work harder and longer than everyone else if I expect to keep up at their pace. And in this I take inspiration from the Deaf community itself, as often expressed in the Disney Family television show Switched at Birth I became an obsessive fan of earlier this year (but see my blog entry specifically on that subject for more); how at one point in the show's run, the main Deaf character Daphne decides to major in pre-med at college, gets frustrated by a series of hurdles that develop around her (technical terms with no equivalent signs, surgeons wearing masks that cover their lips, doctors who dismissively scoff at the very idea of her interning for them), and is reminded by her peers and family that if she wants to do something ambitious like that, she simply has to work harder at it than hearing people, and that there's no point whining about it because complaining won't change the situation. It's a powerful example of why Deaf people hate being referred to in victim terms like “disabled” or “handicapped;” they don't see themselves that way, no more than we would consider a person with high blood pressure to be “disabled,” but rather as someone with a bodily imperfection that can be easily compensated for through intelligence (less salt), discipline (daily exercise), and community involvement (convincing restaurants to offer heart-healthy menu items).

I'm what's known in the community as a “late-deafened adult” (LDA) in that I grew up as a hearing person, think in the word order and grammar of English, and see my hearing loss as something “being taken away from me,” with all the resulting emotional grieving that that statement implies. In addition to studying the Deaf community, I've been doing a little bit of studying about the LDA community in the last month too, and have quickly come to learn that most late-deafened adults never successfully learn ASL or transition into the Deaf community; they simply count out the clock in their old age within a world that becomes increasingly narrower and lonelier, unable to make new friends and with it increasingly difficult to communicate with their old ones. I'm determined that this will not be my fate, because the very thought depresses me to a point of despair; but that means I simply have to want it more than the people around me, have to put in the extra work, have to put in the extra time, have to practice four hours a day like I've been doing this month, have to burn through a book every day or two like I've been doing this month.

The workshop itself last night mostly consisted of A. instructing us through Powerpoint slides and demonstrations of individual terms, which we basically practiced as a group without actually having any conversations; but still, I was determined to have at least one back-and-forth talk with someone before I left, so I approached her after class. “Excuse me,” I started in sign. “I wanted to say hello and thank you.”

“Oh, you're welcome,” A. replied.

“For a month I've been self-studying at home online,” I continued. “But this here is my first time chatting people. Or, er,” I corrected, “chatting with people.”

“That's great,” she said. “You're good! You said you're hard of hearing?” (This came up earlier in the evening, when she played a DVD and I had to request that she turn on the closed-captioning.)

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I have a hearing aid, but my hearing is decreasing each year. This ear” — I pointed to the left one — “surgery, year 2000. This ear” — pointing to the right — “Too much music when younger.” I paused, then spelled out “P-U-N-K,” and we both laughed.

“Okay,” I concluded. “I see you...L-A-T-E-R?”

“Later,” she showed me in sign.

“Great. Later!”

And there it was — the first-ever ASL conversation I've had in my life. And I have to admit, it felt like freaking magic, like I was a Hogwarts student and had just successfully performed an Expelliarmus spell for the very first time. The moment I got done with my first-ever ASL conversation, the thing I most wanted to do was immediately have another ASL conversation, which made me profoundly appreciate the stories in these Deaf culture books I've been reading this month (especially the ones written in the 1970s and '80s), relaying the stories of Deaf kids who grew up without knowing that ASL even existed, and how they went through a lightning-fast explosion of intellectual curiosity the moment as adolescents that they learned how to sign. That's simultaneously the most heartbreaking and the most uplifting thing of all about the shameful history of forced oralism in the 20th century; when so-called “dumb,” so-called “retarded” Deaf kids were finally allowed to learn ASL, most of them blossomed within literally months from a remedial learning level to above-average, yet this wasn't seen by their hearing caretakers as proof that everyone should learn sign, but rather they were considered “rare miracles” that merely proved that not every single deaf person was fated to be a janitor or a maid.

At the age of 50, I'm starting to get a taste of what this so-called “miracle” must've felt like; and I have to admit, I want more. EXPECTO PATRONUS!

The Complete ASL Saga of Jason Pettus

4/1: Book review: Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks 3/31: Book review: The Other Side of Silence, by Arden Neisser 3/28: Those sexy deaf teens sure are courageous! 3/27: Book review: Shouting Won't Help, by Katherine Bouton 3/25: Book review: Deaf in America: Voices From a Culture, by Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 3/22: Book review: A Deaf Adult Speaks Out, by Leo Jacobs 3/22: Book review: Don't Just Sign...Communicate!, by Michelle Jay

]]> https://write.as/jasonpettus/he-speaks-he-speaks-er-he-signs-he-signs Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:53:11 +0000