Dylan Quick's Matchbox

Pain is represented as something we can perceive

in the sense in which we perceive a matchbox.

Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Philosophical Investigation,

1953

I tried to have a word of explanation about how the pain at Texas Community College should be expressed and examined. I struggled long and hard in deciding how to write this blog. Not only did I want to present, as best my knowledge of being Deaf could tell, why it really happened. This blog is not as an exciting and rewarding reading, but I wanted the blog itself to be a reflection—a challenge I did some deep thinking.

First, Dylan Quick, 20, is deaf and has cochlear implants (CI). Secondly, Quick stabbed 14 students at TCC. Thirdly, the police reported that Quick had begun a wickedly inventive fabulist journey about stabbing as many people as possible at age 8.

I didn’t have to understand, I just knew. When I was young and impressionable then, I talked to my parents who are also Deaf, and they kind of looked at me as if “one doesn’t have this kind of experience, he's foolish.” That’s the kind of thing that we the Deaf (please notice that the uppercase D represents us collectively) say that we know that Quick’s being Deaf is quickly viewed as irrelevant. We don’t believe it, we know it.

One of my ASL students asked me about yesterday’s stabbing incident at Texas Community College so I needed to do a quick, in-class research by pulling up some online articles on Dylan Quick—how social media describes the incident. The police announced that Quick thought a lot about killing people since he was young.

The students were shocked and wondered why the parents didn’t notice his deviance. As the instructor, I tried very hard to account for it.

I told them that no children by the age of seven, who can hear, have a normal speech. They begin to learn to read and speak in school where their grammar teachers would remind them of how to “intone” a little for punctuations—period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation mark, question mark, quotation mark, and the like.

CI is manufactured to pick up only sounds, not these intonations. Deaf children with CI are unable to filter out local noises—cars running by, footsteps tapping down the hall, and even some body noises—to listen to these punctuations. Their speech becomes “funny” or “impaired” or “monotonous,” and this is quickly noticed by their hearing counterparts.

Now my cynicism says, “Well, now, you know, Deaf children with CI can ‘listen and speak.’” For me, CI is simple an annoyance of the deep reluctance. It doesn’t take away from the fact that deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge and communication are conveyed. For the Deaf, our eyes, not our ears, take in everything and then process it to our brain—a different way of thinking.

As for the parents of Quick, they are clearly the victims of a big, huge, enormous CI hoax to believe that Quick can hear. Every morning they might have checked whether Quick was on with CI. Yes, that was it! I know they were not communicating with Quick, they were training Quick "to listen and speak." Unbeknown to them, Quick remains essentially Deaf and has completely different needs. It’s sad that, in our society—our culture, we cannot accept being Deaf better than we can the CI hoax.

Quick must have started out open and spontaneous as a Deaf baby. Yes, but his parents very quickly learned that, due to his being Deaf, he was not to be so open. Fast forward to Quick’s enrollment in Texas Community College where he finally learned to be kind of pseudo-sophisticate and became a Wittgenstein matchbox that was open, and 14 of his college mates got stabbed. It could have been worst but Quick got arrested. Isn’t that painful?

Moral: Deaf children need to live their lives like a painting that is being painted without external interference. They are the painter and they are also the painting. Let Deaf children paint themselves.

CNS

:-)

EAR-CLOSE: Language Bastardization at Gallaudet University

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

 --Ludwig Wittgenstein

About 2,400 years ago, in Athens, Greece, Aristotle enrolled in Plato's Academy where he must have read and critiqued Socrates in one of Plato's earliest books, Cratylus, which is about naming in language. Plato has Socrates question whether signs by the Deaf be equated to spoken words. Aristotle disputed that by arguing that an incapacity of a deaf person to repeat the same words implies imbecility. Aristotle had irrevocably launched an era of language bigotry against deaf people and sign language.

Fast forward to a recent celebration that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the 1988 Deaf President Now Demonstration at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the fraternity of deaf presidents were on a panel, carefully orchestrated to talk about their academic leadership. On the videotape, it shows that these presidents are basically Aristotelian because they sign "EAR-CLOSE," so glossed in uppercase terms when they are talking about deaf people. What do they exactly mean? If a sense of hearing is lacking, how can speaking be an intellectual activity, including intonation—changing pitches in sentence utterances—when no one can lipread it and no amplification and cochlear implants are engineered to pick it up.

In American Sign Language (ASL), being deaf is the raison d'être—the human right. In the surface structure of ASL, the sign DEAF can be linguistically examined to an articulatory bundle, consisting of the hold-movement model, HMH. The first hold consists of the pointing finger to EAR and the second hold is the pointing finger to LIP. Aristotelians, on the other hand, who believe that it is essential that deaf people can speak a language other than ASL came up with the change of sign by replacing the second hold--LIP sign--with the sign CLOSE, before it appears on the surface structure. This is language bastardization; it is an implicit discrimination against deaf people with unintelligible speech.

In the lexicon of ASL, deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge, and communication are conveyed. ASL is a sight-oriented language. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, bastardizing my language means bastardizing my world.


Carl Schroeder, M.Ed.

 

SSA: Cultural Racism against the Deaf

Describe any changes in social activities since

 the illnesses, injuries, or conditions began.
How well do you follow written instructions?

 (for example, a recipe)
How well do you follow spoken instructions?
How well do you get along with authority figures?

 (for example, police, bosses, landlords or teachers)
How well do you handle stress?
When do you need to use these aids?

—items on a questionnaire from Social Security Administration,
(Adult Form SSA-3373-BK)

Social Security Administration (SSA) is an agency that is legendary in contemporary times for perpetuating a type of culturally based racism against the Deaf.  The questionnaire is part of a discourse of language and culture profiling that suggests the theme of the "self as Other."

The last few questions in the federally sponsored survey (Adult Form SSA-3373-BK), distributed by SSA, for example, suggests that we the Deaf are expected to adopt, share, and exhibit these cultural patterns: auditory activities and remedies. This is what is called an "institutional racism"--racism because it involves part of our bodies, i.e., our physical make-up. This keeps the Deaf on the outside of society's institutions by structurally limiting our access to our own developed forms of language and communication. The cultural ways of the larger American society are positioned by this method as being superior to those of our own, and thus our incentive to achieve is negatively affected if we become engulfed in a system built on culturally biased practices.

Herein lies the real insidiousness of cultural racism: we the Deaf who are culturally different must either give up our own ways, and thus, a part of ourselves, and take on the ways of majority culture or remain perpetual outsiders. Cultural, or ethnically based racism makes us uncomfortable if we do manage to gain entry. Hearing society's ways are foreign to us, and we know that our own cultural traits, namely ASL and various modes of communication, are judged harshly or tacitly disapproved of in that context.

It is not unusual that we, the Deaf, react negatively to any suggestion for amplification and cochlear implants.  These are symbols of the dominant culture, and we initially act out our frustrations with those who so systematically negate our cultural ways. Amplification and cochlear implants are about human do-ing, i.e., practice, not human be-ing. Deaf people are not objects to be shaped by human doing, by practice; we are ordinary people who happen to be deaf!


Carl N. Schroeder, M.Ed.

 

Is American Sign Language a Human Right?

Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings,

whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex,

national or ethnic origin, religion, language, or

any other status.  We are all equally entitled

to our human rights without discrimination.

These rights are all interrelated,

interdependent and indivisible.

—www.ohchr.org

When you lose your language,…

you exclude yourself from your past.

—Johan Van Hoorde, 1998,

Let Dutch Die?

Ignorance often leads to hate speech.  People who are ignorant of the language and culture of the deaf think we shouldn’t care about American Sign Language (ASL).  There is a widely held and popular—but nonetheless misconceived—belief that deaf children can be made “to listen and talk,” and that this anti-signing oppression is not a tragedy at all.  The following are discriminatory language statements quoted from various institutes.

Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center:

CID (Central Institute for the Deaf) is a school where children who are deaf and hard of hearing learn to listen, talk and read without using sign language.

DePaul School for Hearing and Speech:

We teach children from birth to age 14 to listen, to speak and to learn without using sign language.

Memphis Oral School for the Deaf:

…NO SIGN LANGUAGE is used, instead using speech and language therapies and audiological services in conjunction with our preschool classes to help profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing children ages birth to six years old.

St. Joseph Institute for the Deaf:

Individual sessions with deaf education therapists, who specialize in early intervention, help you understand the emotional and educational effects of your child’s hearing loss and teach you strategies to help your child develop spoken language without sign language through the auditory-oral method.

Tucker-Maxon School:

Students with hearing loss do not use sign language; instead, with the help of assistive technologies and trained professionals, they listen, talk and learn like their typical hearing peers.

These above illustrative examples are contemporary.  Deaf hate speech begins with language intimidation and intolerance, both of which are not considered distinct in any substantial way from other acts of prejudice and discrimination against the Deaf.  It is important to keep in mind that deaf hate speech has a long historical lineage.  The contemporary dynamics of sign-language-hate-motivated prejudice and discrimination have their origins in historical conditions.

About 2,400 years ago, in ancient Greece, Aristotle, in his attempt to refute Socrates’ question, in Plato’s Cratylus (Reeve, 1998: 67), whether signs by the mutes be equal with spoken words, asserted that an inability of deaf people to repeat the same sounds implies that they are senseless and worthless of human intelligence. As expressions of deaf hate, such acts of sign language intimidation, “involve the assertion of selves over others constituted as Other” (Goldberg, 1995: 270), where the self is thought to constitute an ability “to listen and talk.”  Even with a normal hearing listening is always probable and talking may be just babbling.

The burning question then, when one tries to understand the dynamics of deaf hate speech, Why is it so easy for individuals and institutes to dismiss sign language?  Is ASL a human right?  Is being deaf also a human right?  Will ASL die?

A document prepared by the International PEN Club’s Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee and the Escarre International Centre for Ethnic Minorities and Nations has presented and remarked:

The paradoxical situation is that languages will certainly die unless we do something; but, the reality is that they may also die even if we do something.  Therefore, what do we do? 

The top priority, it would appear, is to raise awareness to stop hate speech against the Deaf.  Although ASL is at risk of being described in another language, it is plain from the above “no sign language” statements that ASL remains in the state of endangerment.

Many people are unaware of a language bigotry that needs to be dispelled, in order to foster the right climate for sign language maintenance.  It has to do with teaching ASL to deaf children.  There is a widespread belief, even in colleges and universities, that being deaf is an automatic qualification for being a good instructor.  Another myth has to do with learning.  Because ASL can be learned naturally, people readily assume that they can acquire ASL from the Internet. 

All in all, it is by no means easy to help people see the consequences of negative attitudes towards ASL, or the consequence to eradicate ASL. To deny deaf children sign language is to exclude them from the history. Language denial and discrimination are therefore a social injustice.

 

 Carl N. Schroeder, M.Ed.

 

 

 

 

We Can Stop!

Hate Crimes and the Deaf

 

Feb. 5, 2010

Some forms of hate lead to war or murder, but hate can also lead to oppression and hegemony.

Carl N. Schroeder, president of the Oregon Association of the Deaf (OAD), gave a lecture last Wednesday called “Hate Crime and the Deaf.” Schroeder’s lecture examined how oppression impacts the Deaf community.

Schroeder moved from Holland to the United States at age 10, where he attended the Maryland School for the Deaf. Deafness has been common in his family since the 11th century.

“I grew up in a Deaf family, a vast Deaf family, and I never realized the world was full of people who hear through their ears until I was 5,” Schroeder said.

In the lecture, Schroeder said that public schools in California teach Deaf children orally—teaching speech and lip reading as opposed to sign language. Many members of the Deaf community, Schroeder said, oppose oralism, not only because they doubt its efficacy, but also because “the Deaf do have language and culture heritage” Schroeder says on the OAD Web site (www.Deaforegon.org).

In discussing the naturalness of signing, Schroeder referenced a study that revealed that many people find it difficult to speak without free movement of their hands. He also mentioned Italians as an example of notorious gesturers.

Schroeder suggested that many crimes against the Deaf begin at birth. According to Schroeder, after doctors diagnose a child as Deaf they tell parents about what is wrong with American Sign Language (ASL) and tend to encourage the use of cochlear implants, also a subject of contention in Deaf culture.

Schroeder recalled one child he taught who had a bad experience with a cochlear implant. He described the implant’s effect as “noise in his head” and, after becoming ill, had it removed.
Schroeder also noted that, while hearing mothers often embrace ASL when they learn that their child is Deaf, many fathers reject signing and consequently have limited interactions with their Deaf children.

Key to understanding Schroeder’s mission is a rejection of audism—a term he defines as “the belief that the ability to hear and speak is better than being Deaf”—and the belief that ASL is in any way less of a language than spoken languages.

Schroeder traces the suppression of sign languages to the International Congress on the Education of the Deaf held in Milan in 1880. The end result was government suppression of sign language. Deaf teachers of the Deaf were replaced with hearing teachers to instruct using oral methods.

To illustrate how the hearing have oppressed the Deaf through the suppression of ASL, Schroeder recounted how, at his first teaching job, a school official reported him for using sign language in the classroom. The school at which Schroeder taught was overtly oratory in its teaching and to get the job, Schroeder had portrayed himself as an oralist and supportive of the school’s goals.

According to Schroeder, another crime against the Deaf is the frequent placement of ASL in Special Education departments, which unfairly implies that the Deaf are learning disabled. PSU is in the process of moving ASL to the foreign languages and literatures department from the speech and hearing department.

“Denying the full status of ASL as a language inspires belittlement and hate crimes,” Schroeder wrote on the OAD Web site.

In an interview after the lecture, Schroeder said, “I want to empower people to discuss what hate crimes are and how they are generated.” He also wants people in the hearing community to recognize “that some of their actions are wrong and they have hurt Deaf people and Deaf children.”

http://psuvanguard.com/uncategorized/hate-crimes-and-the-deaf/

RUMORS Making or Breaking News 1/15/2013

Rumors are nearly as old as

human history, but with

the rise of the Internet,

they have become

ubiquitous.

 

--Cass R. Sunstein,
On Rumors:
How Falsehoods Spread,
Why We Believe Them,
What Can Be Done
  

 

 

Michele Westfall Carl is always trying to stir something up.

 

Don Grushkin I seriously doubt that most of these statements as cited by Carl here are what Tommy Horejes actually said.

 

 

Hate crime can be understood

as a means of sustaining boundaries

between Us and Them, especially

when "they" step out of line,

cross sacred boundaries,

or forget their place.

 

--Barbara Perry,
Silent Victims:
Hate Crimes Against
Native Americans

 

 

Carl Schroeder I am deaf, born that way, born to deaf parents in The Netherlands, and, mostly importantly, born into gebarentaal (signed language, literally translated with a past perfect verb tense).  When I turned 10 years old, my parents made a new home in the United States where I underwent multiple language changes, from gebarentaal to American Sign Language (ASL) and from Dutch to English, which were no easy feat.  I shall never forget my line, sacred boundaries, and place.

 

 

Suddenly, we...became
uncomfortably conscious

of a divide between us.

 

--Ron Takaki,

A Different Mirror:

The Making of

Multicultural America