True Biz

by Sara Nović

There was a theory among linguists that the brain’s capacity for language learning—language as a concept, a modality for thought—is finite. Scientists called the period from ages zero to five the “critical window,” within which a child had to gain fluency in at least one language, any language, or risk permanent cognitive damage. Once the window shut, learning anything became difficult, even impossible—without a language, how does one think, or even feel? The critical window remained “theoretical,” mostly because intentionally depriving children of language was deemed by ethicists too cruel an experiment to conduct. And yet, February saw the results of such trials every day—children whose parents had feared sign language would mark them, but who ended up marked by its absence. These children had never seen language as it really was, outside the speech therapist’s office, alive and rollicking, had never been privy to the chatter of the playground or around the dinner table.

So it was no surprise that students coming from language-poor environments often arrived with explosive tempers.

It would be much scarier, even dangerous, to give birth in a place where no one knew sign language. The Deaf community was replete with hospital horror stories, particularly of the labor and delivery variety. Her mother’s friend Lu had been wheeled into the OR without anyone telling her that she was about to have a cesarean; a woman down in Lexington had died from a blood clot after nursing staff ignored the complaints of pain she’d scrawled on a napkin.

!!!!

There is a misconception in the hearing world that deaf people are quiet.

Nine out of ten deaf kids had hearing parents, and those parents held Deaf fate in their hands—the fate of their own children, of course, and the future of the Deaf community at large. Problem being, most parents understood deafness only as explained to them by medical professionals: as a treachery of their genes, something to be drilled out.

ASL had likely been withheld intentionally, an attempt to motivate speech. Sign language had been so thoroughly stigmatized that in trying to avoid it parents had unknowingly opted for a modern version of institutionalization, locking their children away in their own minds. To Austin this sounded cruel enough to be against the law, but there were a lot of things about the hearing world that made no sense.

she was slowly becoming accustomed to signing with other deaf people, but she had never had an interpreter before. Now she could focus all her attention on this one man in his rumpled blue shirt—no guessing or ping-ponging between mouths. This, she thought, much more than the filament in her head, must be what it was like to hear.

My heart

Austin sometimes thought that if hearing people ever studied the power and speed of the Deaf rumor mill, they might think twice about classifying deafness as a “communication disorder.”

Hahahaha facts

Deaf Standard Time, a reliable forty-five minutes late for almost any occasion.

Absolutely

“Those who believe as I do, that the production of a defective race of human beings would be a great calamity to the world, will examine carefully the causes that lead to the intermarriages of the deaf with the object of applying a remedy.” —Alexander Graham Bell, 1883

The audacity!

The belief was used to justify the forcible sterilization of disabled people, a program that Hitler admired and is said to have learned from. Bell was against forced sterilization himself, but instead believed getting rid of sign language was the key to eradicating deafness. Without sign, deaf people would integrate into the general population rather than marry one another, thereby producing fewer deaf babies. Besides his ethics, Bell’s actual science was wrong—most deafness isn’t directly hereditary—but his ideas remain prevalent in deaf education circles today.

Where Milan’s resolutions were implemented, deaf children were forbidden from using sign language in the classroom or outside of it. As punishment, hands were tied down, rapped with rulers, or slammed in drawers. The period between 1880 and 1960 is considered the dark ages of deaf education.

In the U.S., the National Association of the Deaf, founded in 1880 in response to the conference, became the first disability rights organization, and was and is run for and by Deaf people.

!!!!

It was hard to imagine what the world might be like if deaf people had as short a fuse about hearing people’s inability to sign, their neglect or refusal to caption TV, or, hell, the announcements on this bus. Of course, that was their privilege—to conflate majority with superiority.

Have you met my mother?

The joke being that hearing people, in their fear, tried to create cures that only made deafness more absolute.