Attitudes Toward Deafness Tolerance and Understanding

By Charmaine Letourneau, Past President of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf

This paper represents an overall view of the core Deaf Community toward the attitudes of the hearing on deafness. It is indeed a rare occasion when a deaf person is asked to discuss anything related to deafness. Such information is usually sought from well-intentioned hearing people who think they know best. I appreciate being given this opportunity to present the "deaf point of view".

What is Deafness?

Communication difficulties are caused more by deafness than any other handicap. All other disabled groups such as the blind, amputees, those confined to wheelchairs, the mentally retarded, can hear. Therefore, deafness is more a communication disability than a physical disability.

Yet so-called "normal" people tend to put all disabled groups under one umbrella and try to solve each problem the same way.

What is the Deaf Community?

We members of the Deaf Community consider our deafness a unifying aspect of our cultural heritage. We liken ourselves more to an ethnic group than to a disabled group. We share a unique language, ASL (American Sign Language), just as any other cultural group. We also share similar experiences of everyday problems encountered in a hearing world and attitudes of the hearing toward the deaf.

Since childhood, members of deaf communities have experienced repeated frustrations in trying to make ourselves understood; embarrassment due to frequent misunderstandings; and loneliness as a result of being left out by family, neighbourhood acquaintances, and others. Such past and present experiences help to strengthen a deaf person's identification with the deaf world.

The hearing often appear to reject the deaf as human beings and reject the language of the deaf, ASL. These rejections have contributed significantly to the creation of a tightly-knit Deaf Community.

Understanding of Deafness

Knowledge of deafness is generally sought through the perspectives of the hearing, not the deaf. If the hearing want to know about deafness, they tend to go to audiologists, speech therapists, doctors and others who are hearing and who give freely of their opinions which are generally based on their own assumptions.

Surely, there can be no explanation for this other than that hearing people believe that deaf people are unable to think and to know what it is like to be deaf. The hearing tend to assume that -- thinking cannot develop without language. Language, in turn, cannot develop without speech. Speech cannot develop without hearing. Therefore, those who cannot hear cannot think.

Negative evaluations of deafness as a mental disability are very difficult to eradicate. This kind of thinking has been around for thousands of years. Therefore, the assumptions and opinions of those who hear have had a devastating impact on the lives of deaf people.

Attitudes of the Hearing Toward the Deaf

As mentioned above, membership in deaf communities is solidified by shared experiences, language and identification with the deaf. I would like to elaborate on the negative perspectives of the hearing toward the deaf:

Employment -- The deaf are often unemployed, underemployed, underpaid, and passed over for promotion because of communication problems.

Sign Language -- Signing often attracts stares and ridicule from the hearing. Even though research done by various linguists shows that ASL is a legitimate language with its own complex structural and grammatical rules, many hearing people refuse to recognize it as a language. They prefer to classify it as a poor approximation of English, or an abbreviation of English.

Speech -- The deaf are often forced to develop speech and speechreading skills in order to be normalized. It is like forcing the blind to see and the crippled to walk. Without speech skills, the deaf are viewed as slightly less than human.

Auditory Training -- Deaf children and their parents are constantly advised of the absolute necessity of purchasing the almighty hearing aid. It is a known fact that speech therapists have told some deaf children that they would be much more clever if they wore hearing aids and had good speech. The Deaf Community has known for many years that this is all hogwash, and that, try as we might, developing intelligible speech is nigh unto impossible - an exercise in futility resulting in deep feelings of inadequacy.

Jokes -- In newspapers, in novels, on radio and television, there are jokes which lend a negative connotation to deafness.

Media -- Deaf people are often portrayed as terrible, stupid, dumb, dangerous, violent, and hateful.

Hearing parents -- Some parents are embarrassed to have deaf children and do not want others to know that their children are deaf. These parents give their children the impression that signing should be suppressed in public, thus inhibiting their language development. They try to normalize their children by forcing them to go to public schools.

Many deaf children are socially impaired because all through their growing years, they are given to believe that there is something wrong with being deaf and that they should try their best to emulate hearing children. In adulthood, these deaf people often gravitate toward the Deaf Community where repairs can begin to be done to their damaged self-images.

It doesn't matter how hard we try to educate parents about deafness, it is very hard for them to accept the benefit of our experiences and all the research pointing to social impairment due to pressure imposed by the hearing in general for normalization. It is very difficult for them to stand back and watch their children being ridiculed and pitied.

Hearing People -- There is a segment of society which treats deaf people as if we were "animals" who can neither read nor write. (I have had lots of experience with this attitude in spite of my university education.)

Modern Technology -- It is of no use to us. Even television, the cinema and telephone have their limitations. Sure, we do have decoders which enable us to watch captioned TV programs, but not all programs are captioned and not all the captioning is accurate. We do have telecommunication devices which enable us to use the telephone, but again, we can call only a very limited number of people -- mainly other deaf people. The devices are expensive for unemployed and underpaid deaf people who form the majority the Deaf Community. It is very difficult to get financial aid to purchase such devices. However, it's no problem at all to get hearing aids which the majority of the deaf do not need and do not find useful, but which hearing people recommend we have.

The Government -- When the Deaf Community asks for something they know they need, the government invariably asks for proof of need and for numbers of potential consumers. (We are not numbers. We are human beings with very real needs.) When hearing people ask the government for something they believe the deaf need, we are more often than not misrepresented, but the government takes action. Here are some examples of provisions made for us against our wishes and often to our detriment:

mainstream education auditory equipment cochlear implants driving privilege restrictions repression of our native language seeing-eye dogs

Deaf people are often discussed as objects requiring maintenance, parts, replacements, etc.

While many hearing people make it their life's work to normalize and mainstream the deaf to prepare us for a society which doesn't accept us anyway, the Deaf Community provides a refuge from the curiosity, ridicule and awkward communication which the deaf face among the hearing. The Deaf Community provides a sense of wholeness and belonging not found in the hearing world. Within the Deaf Community, there is understanding of common frustrations and recognition of successes as well. Only within the Deaf Community can a deaf individual experience a feeling of normalcy and self-worth.

We would like to see more respect shown for our culture, our language, our deafness. Toward this end, we make the following points.

1. We would like to be directly involved in all decision making processes that affect any aspect of our lives. We can no longer tolerate "token" participation.

2. As a general rule, none of the decision makers in the government has enough knowledge of or empathy for the deaf to be in a position to meet the needs of the deaf. In other words, the degree of insensitivity toward deafness is very high mainly due to ignorance rather than malice. We would like to request that an advisory group be established by and for the government to give better insight into the problems of being deaf and that this group be composed largely of deaf individuals.

3. Discourage and remove notations from any materials that suggest or imply that the deaf function at a level below that of other people, i.e. "deaf and dumb" or "deaf mute".

4. Interference and recommendations from outsiders as to what method of communication is best for the deaf must cease. This means that speech, speechreading and aural training must not constitute the "be all and end all" of communication while the preferred and practical language of the deaf, ASL, is suppressed.

5. The language of the deaf, ASL, must be legalized and recognized as a legitimate language just like any other language, i.e. French, German, etc.

6. We do not want government representatives to act on requests or demands of parents or other individuals whose knowledge of deafness is at best superficial. We are asking that input from such people not be considered as necessarily best for deaf people including deaf children. We ask that such one-sided and often misguided input be referred to the Deaf Community for consideration.