Growing up without the ability to use sign language not only presents a huge barrier for a deaf individual to fully communicate, but it can also prevent someone from fully entering the culture, experts say.
As students at Gallaudet University continued to protest incoming president Jane Fernandes over the weekend and the standoff between students and administrators appears to have solidified into a deadlock, an international dialogue is emerging about deaf culture, identity and how the deaf move within the hearing world.
Questions over whether someone was deaf from birth or later became that way — and how they adapted — can largely influence identity. So, too, can nuances over whether a child is raised in a deaf family learning American Sign Language or with hearing parents who promoted the use of hearing devices and mainline schools influence a deaf person’s abilities or desire to embrace the deaf culture, said Alan Hurwitz, dean of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology.
“One cannot represent the deaf community with one brush stroke — it’s very individual,” Hurwitz said.
Those differences are sometimes overlooked by the hearing world, and there is much that might never be understood between the two cultures, said Lawrence Fleischer, chair of the deaf studies department at California State University at Northridge.
“That’s a reality, that’s life,” Fleischer said. “What’s important is that we respect that idea that we’ll never understand each other fully and have a dialogue.”
Fernandes has been deaf her entire life, but did not learn sign language until age 23. That has lead some to question her understanding of deaf culture and is at the crux of how many deaf students feel about her, Fleischer said.
“It is consciousness, not awareness,” Fleischer said. “I think what we’re seeing in Washington, D.C., is a resistance because her level of consciousness.”
Fleischer likened it to “a great big communication mess within the deaf community.”
“ASL is a strong identifier for people who are deaf,” Fleischer said, equating Fernandes’ leadership akin to hiring a white person, or someone who is black but lacking a strong black identity, to lead Howard University.
“My point of view of the world, my worldview is much different than hers,” Fleischer said. “She’s on the right track if she becomes more attentive to the student’s feelings, and then she’d be a lot more aware and know more of what they’re saying.”
