True biz (adj./exclamation; American Sign Language):
really, seriously, definitely, real-talk
I almost quit reading this book because it felt so harsh in the beginning. I am glad i stuck with it, because it tells an interesting story. I think that harshness was an unrelenting realism, true to the title. This book is a coming of age story about a Deaf girl who is growing up in a blighted community. In many ways she is profoundly unprivileged. She has a bad cochlear implant and suffers language deprivation and behavioral problems.
This book is educational in multiple ways. There is some overlap between True Biz and Deaf Utopia [1], but they are very different kinds of books. Both books are personal and have lessons about Deaf culture and history. Deaf Utopia is more autobiographical and has a decided focus on the author's life. True Biz is fiction and felt to me like it had a more expansive scope, giving a stronger, starker vision of Deaf community.
What follows are interesting excerpts from the book.
Those who are born deaf all become senseless and incapable of reason. --Aristotle, 384-322 BCE
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
A manufacturer of amazing medical devices known as cochlear implants, which restore hearing to the deaf, sold defective implants to young children and adults for years--even after learning that a significant number of the devices had failed. --NBC News, March 14, 2014
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.
There was no reason assistive technology and sign language should be an either-or-affair; time and time again some of her strongest students proved that, when it came to language, more is more. Often when she found herself in pedagogical arguments with fellow administrators across the district, she put it this way: imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid's English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It /did/ sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages has been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.
February had been born on the edge of East Colson in her family's blue clapboard house, in the back bedroom that would later become her own. ...
February's mother was slight and asthmatic and would certainly have benefited from some medical oversight during labor, but she had long made up her mind to have her baby at home. 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 of a blood clot after nursing staff ignored her complaints of pain she'd scrawled on a napkin. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which would mandate that hospitals provide accommodations to deaf patients, was still more than a decade away. So February's mother wasn't taking any chances--if she couldn't have an epidural, at least she would know what the hell was going on.
Eyeth--get it?
In the Deaf storytelling tradition, utopia is called Eyeth [2] because it's a society that centers the eye, not the ear, like here on Earth.
In the Deaf world, there's a famous story about a utopian planet where everyone signs and everything is designed for easy visual access. In some tellings, hearing people are the minority and learn to conform to the majority sign language, in others the planet is completely Deaf. Have any of you seen an Eyeth story?
Eyeth may be a pun, but it's not a joke--it's a myth.
Myth (N):
---------
1. a traditional story that reveals part of the worldview of a
people, or embodies the ideals and institutions of a society
2. parable; short ficticious story that illustrates a moral
attitude or principle
The importance of Eyeth in Deaf culture is twofold. First, it highlights the things we value: sign language, communication, accessibility, community. It expresses our dreams: equality, a special place to call our own free from the demands of hearing society, recognition of our culture.
Eyeth is also important because it reinforces Deaf culture as a culture. Storytelling and myths are an important part of what makes us human and a common thread across all kinds of ethnic groups.
Deaf scholars have proven that Deafness meets the requirements to be considered an ethnicity.
Historically this was the common view before oral education nearly eradicated sign languages.
Even Alexander Graham Bell, who wanted to rid society of deafness, spoke of "a race of Deaf people."
In education, like everything in America, money ruled the day, and Deaf education had been hyperstratified by the rise of the cochlear implant. Wealthier kids whose parents could pay out-of-pocket for surgery and rehabilitative therapies often found success in the mainstream; kids whose families couldn't pay stayed deaf. But even as a shift in Medicaid coverage meant access to the device itself increased, access to the therapies and educational resources didn't. The hearing world was shocked to find that the working-class kid of a single mom who couldn't stay home and funnel practice sounds into his head, or drive him to countless therapy appointments all day, was not "cured" as the implant sales reps had promised. Those kids often wound up back at Deaf schools only now with vast cognitive deficits. The more vulnerable her student body was, the less politicians cared, or even pretended to care, about their fate. She wrote to the new legislators anyway, but seldom heard [ha ha] back.
In the late 19th century, manual language versus oral communication for deaf children was a hot topic of debate among educators, embodied by Thomas H. Gallaudet, the cofounder of the American School for the Deaf, and your friendly neighborhood eugenecist, Alexander Graham Bell.
Gallaudet, who'd learned sign language from French teacher of the deaf Laurent Clerc, had seen the success of signing Deaf schools firsthand in France, making him a strong proponent of signed languages. But Bell believed deaf people should be taught to speak, and sign language should be removed from Deaf schools.
Q: Why would a man with a deaf wife and mother want to eradicate sign
language?A: Eugenics
In his words:
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
Eugenics was a popular pseudoscience at this time in the U.S., and Bell was a big advocate. 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.
Delegates At The Milan Conference In 1880
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Hearing: 163
Deaf: 1
In 1880, educators gathered in Milan, Italy, to discuss the state of deaf education. The delegates had been handpicked by the oralist society sponsoring the conference with the express goal of eliminating manual language from schools.
The conference passed eight resolutions, effectively banning signed language from schools for the deaf around the world for about 80 years. Some schools, including the school that would become Gallaudet University, pushed back against the resolutions, but most adopted them.
The Convention, considering the incontestable superiority of articulation over signs in restoring the deaf-mute to society and giving him a fuller knowledge of language, declares that the oral method should be preferred to that of signs in education and the instruction of deaf-mutes (Passed 160-4)
The Convention, considering that the simultaneous use of articulation and signs has the disadvantage of injuring articulation and lip-reading and the precision of ideas, declares that the pure oral method should be preferred (Passed 150-16)
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 age 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 by Deaf people.
Worried that ASL would become extinct, they also used brand-new film technology to document the language, making some of the earliest recordings of their kind.
The last point creates a feedback loop, returning to the second.
In the U.S., eugenics became unpopular after it was associated with Nazism. Subsequent deaf education conferences have apologized for the harm done by the Milan resolutions. Science has proven ASL is a fully realized language, and that its use does not inhibit the learning of speech. Nevertheless, the shadow of eugenics persists in medicine and education today. The Alexander Graham Bell Association continues to advocate for the pure oral method of educating deaf children.
author: Nović, Sara, 1987-
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Sara_Novic
title: True Biz