The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (11 page)

Not all ethnicities have telltale physical traits.

True, but the Deaf do. Just as the physical difference of the Pygmies goes hand in hand with their ethnicity, so the child who is born Deaf or who early becomes Deaf is a member of the Deaf-World, and that child's life trajectory will normally assure that he or she acquires a sign language and Deaf ethnicity. The Deaf child can be deprived of the opportunity to acculturate to the Deaf-World, as black or Native -American children can be deprived of the opportunity to acculturate to their ethnicities. However, the child's potential for acculturation to that unmarked world, rooted in his or her physical difference, remains, so we consider the child with that difference Deaf, black, or Native American right from the start. That explains why members of those ethnicities feel a strong emotional investment in the welfare of young children physically like themselves and why they identify and empathize with them, even when they are not related to them.

What about those who become Deaf in childhood? They started out in some hearing culture, so what are they-bicultural?

Yes, these are the children that are "adopted" into the Deaf-World, on the basis of physical features and language that they share with all the rest. As soon as the language of Deaf ethnicity is what the children require for communication, they are ethnically Deaf. Those children will have two ethnicities at least. A college student who had become Deaf when she was three explained: "I need the hearing world for it is the world in which I was born, but I need the Deaf-World because it is the world that gives my life meaning."10

What about hearing spouses and children of Deaf adults? Are they Deaf? Are Codas ethnically Deaf?

Persons at the margins of our fundamental categories usually intrigue us, as they should for they cast light on the categories themselves. In one movie scenario that tests such categories, Indians attack a group of settlers and ride off with an Anglo baby; she is raised among the Indians and learns their language, culture, and values.1" Is she ethnically Native American or Anglo? Physically she is Anglo but culturally she is Indian. She might be seen as almost Indian, but not Indian plain and simple, no matter how fluent she may be in their language. Her normal Anglo ethnic trajectory had been deflected but her ethnic identity was still Anglo.

Codas, with their native command of both ASL and English and their knowledge of both cultures, are viewed as virtually Deaf, but not Deaf plain and simple. That, at least, is the answer given by numerous Deaf people, although not all, and by many Codas themselves. We are told that Codas do not have the right physical makeupand that is instructive, confirming that physical makeup is involved in identifying ethnic membership. In addition to lacking the right physical makeup for ethnic membership, Codas have different language and school experiences from Deaf people and they often marry hearing people; Codas march to a different drummer. "The history of Codas suggests they see themselves as part of the Hearing world not the Deaf-World," writes one Coda scholar.12 And Tom HumphriesD, expressing the view of other Deaf leaders, writes: "Hearing children of Deaf parents have blood ties to Deaf people, as well as knowledge of the customs and language of the group. However, in matters that really count, they are not considered Deaf people."13

On Socialization

Deaf children of hearing parents are in large part socialized by Deaf people and not their parents. In ethnic groups, though, parents and children have the same ethnicity and the parents do the socializing. So doesn't that difference set Deaf ethnicity apart?14

As we have seen, some ethnic groups adopt many foster children and socialize them. Among the Inupiat in Alaska, most adults have been adopted or have lived in a household where children have been adopted; 40 percent of all children are either adopted in or adopted out.15 In effect, the Deaf-World does likewise, socializing all the Deaf children whose parents cannot play that role. At the same time, the Deaf child receives a measure of socialization into the hearing world from several sources: from Deaf people, who are after all multiethnic; from hearing siblings, parents, and other relatives; and from formal education. The bottom line in socialization is that the Deaf-World assures transmission of its ethnicity from generation to generation. What may well be unique about Deaf-World ethnicity is not foster socialization but the delay in that socialization that often occurs.

On Other Challenges to Deaf Ethnicity

There is more to challenge in Deaf ethnicity. Start with this: compared to other ethnic groups, the Deaf-World is too rarely autonomous and in control of its own institutions.16

We gave earlier a list of social institutions conducted by the DeafWorld primarily for its members, institutions such as Deaf-run schools, churches, places of business, and Deaf athletic and political organizations. But autonomy has its limits; few ethnic minorities in the United States (and many other countries) can be said to "control" their own primary institutions. Take the Francophone ethnic group in the United States, for example. More than 1.5 million Americans speak French at home, most of them in New England. Typically, they celebrate their ethnic identity and traditions but their children attend mainstream schools and places of worship and work in mainstream businesses and there is no central authority structure.

Okay, limited autonomy is not unique to the Deaf-World but here is a feature that is unique-Deaf ethnicity is only one generation "thick."17 It is not intergenerational and historically deep, as are other ethnic groups.

We disagree. Let's go back to the fact that a majority of ethnically Deaf people are hereditarily Deaf. In Parts II through IV we trace numerous Deaf people to their seventeenth-century ancestors who settled in New England. Many of those progenitors came from the English county of Kent. For countless Americans who are hereditarily Deaf today, there is evidence that the trait has been passed down to them through the generations for more than 400 years. The physical component of Deaf ethnicity can be found in every generation of their ancestry, sometimes expressed-those ancestors are visual people, sometimes underlying-those ancestors are hearing people, carriers of the Deaf trait. Granted, it may seem odd to count carriers as evidence of intergenerational transmission, yet their role in transmitting Deaf ethnicity is indisputable.

Deaf language and culture are also passed down through the generations. Deaf children with Deaf parents receive that cultural heritage from their parents. Deaf children with hearing parents receive Deaf heritage from their peers and Deaf adult role models. But who transmits the heritage is less important than that it be transmitted. If the Deaf trait is expressed in the Deaf child but not in his or her parents, there is nonetheless a means for socializing that child to the Deaf-World, where a sense of common history, language, and culture unites successive generations.

Where in Deaf ethnicity are such ethnic properties as traditional clothing, distinctive cuisine, marriage and burial rites, and an ethnic homeland?18

In many ethnic groups today, distinctive dress, cuisine, and rituals are absent or greatly diminished, overwhelmed by those of mainstream ethnicity. We have cited some Deaf-World rituals earlier, but there is no reason to expect ASL signers to have developed an exotic cuisine or ethnic clothing, the more so as they do not live gathered together in any specific region or locale and they grow up in hearing homes where they have little opportunity to develop distinctive dress and cuisine. Put it down as a difference if you will, but is it criterial? We would argue that these ethnic properties are not prerequisites for identifying an ethnic group. What features are prerequisite? A sense of belonging, a distinctive culture, and ethnic boundaries.

Belief in a common ethnic homeland is linked to another, related belief, namely that members share an ancestry; both beliefs should be understood as cultural symbols and both are changeable. For example, many immigrants to the United States saw their significant territory as their village; they did not embrace a European nation as their homeland until after living in the United States. The Deaf-World, comprised of ASL signers, has its homeland in North America, as do Native Americans. Some American ethnic groups have no single associated homeland-such as Jewish Americans and Hispanic Americans.

On Scholarly Recognition

If there is such an excellent fit between the Deaf-World and ethnicity, why wasn't that accepted long ago?

Some scholars did advance the concept of Deaf ethnicity as many as fifty years ago (see the Introduction), but many have been misled, it seems, by ethnocentrism. For centuries, speakers of signed languages in the Western world were not considered to be using a natural language, in part because the modality was unfamiliar-using hands and eyes instead of tongues and ears-and in part because sign-language structure was so unfamiliar, so unlike the grammars of Romance and Germanic languages (of which English is the fruit). Linguists know that grammars can take many forms, so when hearing and Deaf linguists became interested in the study of ASL, they were open to discovering that ASL is an independent natural language, unrelated to English. Note how they did it: they started with criteria for "natural language," such as evidence for rules of word and sentence formation; they applied those criteria to ASL, and found that it conforms. Then, they passed on the word of their discovery and Deaf people began to talk about it publicly.'9

In the same vein, due to ethnocentrism, we failed to see how Deaf children who were not hereditarily Deaf could still be considered kin to those who were because we missed the cultural component to kinship found most markedly in other societies; that is, we failed to realize that kinship in ethnic groups need not be based exclusively on procreation.20 Again, socialization by other than one's parents troubled some scholars because they failed to see that it is one means among others to ensure intergenerational transmission of language and culture, a means to be found in other ethnic groups.21 Once we recognize that ethnicity takes many forms worldwide, we can see that the DeafWorld, although its ways are unfamiliar, can be characterized as an ethnic group. We started with the criteria for "ethnic group"; we applied them to ASL signers in Chapters 1 and 2, and we found that their culture conforms.

There are further reasons for the delay in recognizing Deaf ethnicity. There was all along a competing construction of Deaf identity among hearing scholars and laymen-namely, disability, which we turn to next. Then, too, those concerned with shared ancestry in ethnic groups asked about heredity in Deaf children generally, rather than about the heredity of ASL signers and they did not recognize hereditary transmission in the Deaf-World when some of a Deaf child's forebears were carriers of Deaf genes but not Deaf themselves.22

Finally, since the case for Deaf ethnicity had not been presented fully, these obstacles were enough to leave unchanged the practice of referring to Deaf people as the "Deaf linguistic and cultural minority."

On Disability

Most people think of Deaf people not as members of an ethnic group but as people with a disability. Surely the inability to hear is a disability.

It is widely accepted among scholars that disability categories are socially constructed; in other words, disabilities arise when a society fails to accommodate its physical and social environment to the range of human variation that it contains. Despite all the evidence that disabilities vary from one culture to the next and, within a culture, from one era to the next 23 some writers, apparently unaware of disability studies and medical anthropology, simply adopt the naive materialist view when it comes to disability and hearing.24 An ethicist writes: "I maintain that the inability to hear is a deficit, a disability, a lack of perfect health."25 States one ear surgeon: "Almost by definition deaf persons ... have a disability."26 And another states that Deaf people must have a disability for "deafness is the loss of one of the most important adaptations ... to improve survival."27 The effort to decide disability status outside of culture with speculations about survival value is not likely to be helpful and is too close for comfort to eugenic theories.28 The fact that a biological function such as hearing is typical of our species today may reflect, more than any present survival value, the prehistoric vicissitudes of evolution.

So it's naive to think that Deaf people have a disability?

In Deaf cultures being Deaf is seen as normal human variation, while in hearing cultures it is seen as a disability.29 There is no point in asking who is right. Is it better to have three gods and one wife or one god and three wives?30 We suspect that all ethnic groups find in their cultures a positive value assigned to their unique physical traits. If a group of Pygmies were to visit the United States, would their entire ethnic group be considered disabled by short stature? No, in their eyes and in ours, they would be seen as short compared to us but normal for their ethnic group, not disabled. Likewise for Deaf ethnics; most are gifted in vision and limited in hearing, but normal for their ethnic group, not disabled.

It is not necessary to add disability to Deaf ethnicity in order explain, for example, why the Deaf speak a visual language. Deaf people are "The People of the Eye"-that given is a foundation of their ethnicity. In societies where signed language use is widespread because of a substantial Deaf population-on Martha's Vineyard and Bali for examplebeing Deaf was apparently seen as a trait, not a disability.31 Deaf scholars nowadays such as MJ BienvenuD, Tom HumphriesD, and Katherine JankowskiD in the United States and Paddy LaddD in Britain are among those who are on record as rejecting the disability construction of ethnically Deaf people.32 The National Association of the Deaf portrays accurately the view of Deaf-World members that "there is nothing wrong with them, and that their culture, language, and social institutions are just as fulfilling as the ones experienced by the mainstream society."33 Urban and rural Deaf interviewees in six countries of the European Community have called for recognition of Deaf people as a linguistic minority rather than as a disabled group.34 The World Games for the Deaf (now "Deaflympics") has, for much of its history, declined incentives to join the Paralympics. For most Deaf ethnics, as Tom HumphriesD so aptly put it, the idea that all Deaf people are deficient "simply does not compute."35 HumphriesD explains: