Deaf Community Quotes

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.

I do think my story is very unique because having a partial disability, you are deemed by society as someone who is born to fail. This alone had made me more determined to succeed not just for myself but for the Deaf community as well. Hence my motto in life is to live a purpose driven life, be an example to the lost in the world and to leave a legacy.

Kept apart from one another, deaf children frequently receive not only substandard education without full access to language, but a suppressed understanding of the self that can only be righted by representation and a sense of larger community belonging.

There is already pushback by some in the deaf community against erasing deaf culture by curing deafness.

That was one thing about the Deaf community I always admired beyond belief—they were the most accepting lot I’d ever come across. It didn’t matter what else you had to deal with, blindness, mental challenges, fetal alcohol syndrome, autism, whatever else you were dealing with, if you were culturally Deaf, they accepted you as one of their own. Even, apparently, if you had supernatural sight.

Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in precontact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.9 With the arrival of white settler colonialism, things changed, and not in a good way. For many sick and disabled Black, Indigenous, and brown people under transatlantic enslavement, colonial invasion, and forced labor, there was no such thing as state-funded care. Instead, if we were too sick or disabled to work, we were often killed, sold, or left to die, because we were not making factory or plantation owners money. Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best, we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities—from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities.

In the symbiotic community of the forest, not only trees but also shrubs and grasses—and possibly all plant species—exchange information this way. However, when we step into farm fields, the vegetation becomes very quiet. Thanks to selective breeding, our cultivated plants have, for the most part, lost their ability to communicate above or below ground—you could say they are deaf and dumb—and therefore they are easy prey for insect pests.12 That is one reason why modern agriculture uses so many pesticides. Perhaps farmers can learn from the forests and breed a little more wildness back into their grain and potatoes so that they’ll be more talkative in the future. Communication

There is a persistent belief amongst abled people that a cure is what disabled people should want. To abandon our disabled selves and bodies and assimilate into a perhaps unachievable abled skin. Pushback to this idea often comes in the form of the social model of disability, which states that we are disabled by society and lack of access rather than by our bodies. For many, the social model can be liberating: by locating the cause of our problems outside our bodies, we can begin to love ourselves again. Tackling systemic ableism may feel like tilting at windmills, but it is still easier to address than some kind of failing within ourselves. There is a criticism of the social model of disability, located in the idea that some disabled people may want a cure. Particularly with matters like chronic pain/chronic illness, a cure is seen as something that can itself be liberating: a way to simply be in one’s body without feeling pain, for example. There is a danger in the cure mentality, as it can be a slippery slope toward eugenics when it is applied by abled people. Many in the Deaf and autistic communities do not want a cure and feel that those who advocate for a cure are advocating that they not exist anymore. Sometimes it comes down to how we see our individual disabilities: Are they an intrinsic part of who we are? Or are they an identity that comes with a side of agony we would gladly give up? How do we feel when abled people start advocating for “cures”—which may come in the form of eliminating our people entirely—rather than when the desire for a cure comes from disabled advocates?

Deaf, signing parents will “babble” to their infants in sign, just as hearing parents do orally; this is how the child learns language, in a dialogic fashion. The infant’s brain is especially attuned to learning language in the first three or four years, whether this is an oral language or a signed one. But if a child learns no language at all during the critical period, language acquisition may be extremely difficult later. Thus a deaf child of deaf parents will grow up “speaking” sign, but a deaf child of hearing parents often grows up with no real language at all, unless he is exposed early to a signing community.

Giving laws, bettering, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on….” We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.

I don't know what kind of man I would have grown to be had I not served time at The Wilkinson Home for Boys. I don't know how those months and the events that occurred there shaped the person I became, how much they colored my motives or my actions. I don't know if they made me any braver or any weaker. I don't know if the illnesses I've suffered as an adult have been the result of those ruinous months. I'll never know if my distrust of most people and my unease when placed in group situations are byproducts of those days or simply the result of a shy personality. I do know the dreams and nightmares I've had all these years are born of the nights spent in that cell at Wilkinson. That the scars I carry, both mental and physical, are gifts of a system that treated children as prey. The images that screen across my mind in the lonely hours are mine to bear alone, shared only by the silent community of sufferers who once lived as I did, in a world that was deaf to our screams.

yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climbs of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ears to all kinds of opinion; what good is all that?! There is only one way, and that is your way; you seek the path. I warn you away from my own, it can be the wrong way for you, may each go his own way. I will be no savior, no law giver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children one should not turn people into sheep, but rather sheep into people. Giving laws, bettering, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way; the way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore, give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the godhead is blind, the one ear of the godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos, so be patient with the crimplenes of the world and do not over value its consummate beauty.

yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climbs of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ears to all kinds of opinion; what good is all that?! There is only one way, and that is your way; you seek the path. I warn you away from my own, it can be the wrong way for you, may each go his own way. I will be no savior, no law giver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children, one should not turn people into sheep, but rather sheep into people. Giving laws, bettering, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way; the way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore, give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the godhead is blind, the one ear of the godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos, so be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not over value its consummate beauty.

Woe beside those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul, You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way. I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children. Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways. Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous. Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it. Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way. The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.

God kept me on this Earth so that I could be a light for Him, a warrior, a source of inspiration for people struggling. He also equipped me to be a bridge between the hearing and deaf communities.

Among athletes, the unlikely source is the stathead who’s spent time in uniform, satisfying Sarason’s condition that the ideal go-between be embedded in the community, “rendering some kind of service within the schools, requiring that in some way they become part of the school.” These rare birds of baseball, fluent in front office and dipped in dugout wisdom, are “perfect conduits to get a message from high theoretical guys down to guys who are just used to grinding it out on the baseball field,” San Diego Padres manager Andy Green said in 2017. “Unless that message gets translated where a guy speaks both languages, it usually ends up falling on deaf ears. It can be the perfect game plan laid out by the front office, but if it doesn’t run through one of those conduits, it tends to, one, not be understood, or two, not be implemented at all or maybe even spurned altogether.

Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me. I didn’t notice the causality of the change, how living with her turned my life around. I didn’t notice that my grades began to improve immediately after I moved in. And I couldn’t have known that I was making lifelong friends. During that time, Mamaw and I started to talk about the problems in our community. Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), a reclusive, near-deaf, self-taught rural schoolteacher who, working alone and having almost no contact with the wider scientific community, invented ingenious engineering designs for multistage rockets, orbiting space colonies, and interplanetary craft. Though

he and a good part of the Deaf community are against cochlear implants because they don’t believe that being deaf is a disability or that they need to be fixed. He says it would be like white people trying to paint African American people white. Some deaf people also view the use of cochlear implants as a loss of their Deaf Culture.

It never ceased to amaze Lacey how ignorant people were about deafness. Forget understanding Deaf Culture. Forget hearing people respecting them as a linguistic community with a shared history, language, and pride. That was way beyond most hearing people’s understanding. Their perspective was that of pity, impairment, and fixing. Lacey was proud to be a Deaf woman, wouldn’t want to become hearing for anything in the world.

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.

People with dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia, and a myriad of other conditions (christened “Cousins” in the early days of ANI) were also welcome to join the list. The collective ethos of InLv, said writer and list member Harvey Blume in the New York Times in 1997, was “neurological pluralism.” He was the first mainstream journalist to pick up on the significance of online communities for people with neurological differences. “The impact of the Internet on autistics,” Blume predicted, “may one day be compared in magnitude to the spread of sign language among the deaf.

Much like the deaf community, we autistics are building an emergent culture. We individuals, with our cultures of one, are building a culture of many.

Given these benefits, it might be surprising to hear that the National Association of the Deaf did not see this medical device as a miracle. In 1991, the organization wrote an official statement that derided the research and the device. The statement raised a number of concerns, but most relevant for us is this: There is now abundant scientific evidence that, as the deaf community has long contended, it comprises a linguistic and cultural minority. Many Americans, perhaps most, would agree that as a society we should not seek the scientific tools nor use them, if available, to change a child biologically so he or she will belong to the majority rather than the minority—even if we believe that this biological engineering might reduce the burdens the child will bear as a member of a minority.45

Some deaf people view themselves as connected to other deaf people through the shared experience of the absence of hearing and the way they navigate the world as a result. The hearing impairment creates relationships that in turn give way to a sense of community, and this community provides social identity.

spelling doesn’t count THE ASL MANUAL ALPHABET: FINGERSPELLING DO’S AND DON’TS Use fingerspelling for proper nouns, like people, places, and brand names borrowed from English or other languages. Many people and places have sign names, too—introduce these words by spelling first, then signing. The signed name can be used thereafter. Use your dominant hand and try not to bounce. While reading fingerspelling, learn to look at the overall shape of the word instead of individual letters. Don’t conflate knowledge of the manual alphabet with fluency in ASL. Spelling is a very small part of any ASL interaction, and is used mainly for vocabulary borrowed from elsewhere. Don’t use fingerspelling as a shortcut back to English syntax or vocabulary. Try thinking of a synonym instead. DID YOU KNOW? Sign languages aren’t universal. They weren’t “invented” by any one person—instead they grew organically out of Deaf communities. They’re grammatically unrelated to spoken language, so countries that have the same spoken language may have different signed ones. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are very different—they even use different manual alphabets! ASL’s closest linguistic relative is French Sign Language (LSF) because of Deaf teacher and Frenchman Laurent Clerc’s role in founding the American School for the Deaf.

Many individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing tend to identify with the Deaf community. They contend that they should be viewed not as deficient or pathological, but as members of a different culture with its own language, traditions, values, and history. For these individuals, their deafness provides a sense of pride and helps shape their self-identity (Owens & Farinella, 2019). The Deaf culture does not embrace the term hearing impaired. Its adherents view spoken English as an optional second language with ASL as the language of choice.

On March 1, 1996, twenty-one scholars and historians from various universities throughout Italy published a statement in defense of free speech and historical research. The professors courageously criticized the enactment of “Holocaust-denial” laws in France, Germany and other countries, specifically citing a French government ban on a book authored by Jürgen Graf simply because it denied the “Holocaust.” The scholars pleaded for reason to prevail over repression: We are appealing …to the scholarly community to which we belong, and also to the political world and to the press, so that they react to this state of affairs, and put an end to a tendency that wherever it develops, may put freedom of speech, press and culture in European countries at risk.[47] Needless to say, the sensibly worded appeal fell upon deaf ears, for the milieu in which “Holocaust denial” laws were first devised was precisely in those areas alluded to by the Italian professors - the political arena and the world press. Thus, “Holocaust-denial” laws were purposely designed to curtail freedom of speech and subvert other fundamental human rights. Practically speaking, human rights in Europe were no longer ‘at risk’ – they were in fact in headlong flight under attack by tyrants posing as moderate liberals.

When I see disability justice flourishing, it comes from years of relationship building and building trust, from fucking up, making repair, learning from mistakes, and showing up for each other. In Toronto, hearing disabled people and Deaf people built relationships with each other for years, including creating community-controlled queer ASL classes so hearing crips could communicate with D(d)eaf and Hard of Hearing queers, resulting in powerful community connections. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because disabled and Deaf people organized together, showed up at each other’s protests. When hearing disabled people learn ASL so they can communicate with Deaf folks, we are creating the rock-bottom tools we need to talk, laugh, hang out, disagree, organize, break isolation, and fall in love. And that is the opposite of a well-meaning but relationshipless access provision.