What's That Pig Outdoors? (33 page)

But it seems difficult, even impossible, for some of the leaders of cultural deaf organizations to recognize that there is a plurality among us. Contrary to the New Orthodoxy, some of us who are born deaf or who lose our hearing early in life do manage to become secure, achieving members of the wider culture while relying only on speech and lipreading for communication. We are few, it is true, but we exist, and we believe our successes every bit worth celebrating as are the advances of the larger world of the deaf. Are we elitist? We must admit we are more fortunate in our circumstances than most. But I for one do not consider myself superior to my signing brothers and sisters. I owe them too much for improving our common lot in the last decade. Why, then, do I not set myself to learning their culture?

For many of us middle-aged oral deaf, taking the considerable time required to learn to sign so that we can join the National Association of the Deaf makes as much sense as mastering Serbo-Croatian in order to become members of the Sons of Yugoslavia—unless we are deeply interested in that culture. It may be hard for some people to believe, but not to be more than casually interested in the culture of the signing deaf does not mean that we look down upon it.

I'll try an analogy: In the literary profession, the school of “magical realism,” which embraces many of the great Latin American novelists, has of late become influential among those who write in English. Magical realism, a kind of fantasy involving elevated language that is grafted onto everyday occurrences, isn't my particular cup of tea. In fact, it puts me to sleep, as it does many other critics. Still, we acknowledge its growing importance among the many postmodern literary movements. It is one of many valuable new ways writers look at the world about them, but it is not the only one.

And so I end this book as I began it, with the uprising at Gallaudet University. The Old Orthodoxy of oral-or-nothing paternalism has died a richly deserved death. But the triumph of the Gallaudet students, who are
almost all members of the signing deaf culture, may lead to a widespread enshrinement of that New Orthodoxy we nonmembers find so alarming. As with so many social movements throughout history, the oppressed can become oppressors.

The danger, I believe, is that the signing deaf may attempt to carry their revolution so far that it turns upon them, as the French citizenry, weary of his murderous excess, repudiated the fanatic Robespierre. It has to do with the way members of the deaf culture define themselves. There is a strong movement among them to declare themselves an ethnic culture with a capitalized name, like African-Americans (formerly blacks) and Hispanics. The Deaf world, they say with pride, is founded on a common, established language with its own grammar and syntax, a language that has given birth to a rich visual culture. In short, they define themselves as members of a language-based culture, not as physically handicapped people. In many ways this idea makes sense. It also has the strength of forcing the hearing majority to treat the deaf not as an outcast group but as a legitimately achieving and deserving unit of a pluralist society, just as are, for example, Vietnamese-Americans and Mexican-Americans.

Some of the signing deaf also try hard to communicate with the hearing world on its own terms, learning to speak and to lipread. They seek to move between both cultures, deaf and hearing. Others—perhaps the majority—do not. Achieving intelligibility in speech and learning to lipread accurately has been a difficult, often almost impossible ideal for most prelingually deaf. Hence they prefer to bend their efforts to achievement within the deaf world. If they are going to be segregated from the hearing world, they want it to happen on their terms. They want to control their own lives.

That is a laudable pride. But there is also a certain peril in it: a sometimes bizarre militancy among many of the deaf, especially the young. A short time ago some members of Congress discussed the establishment of a research institute to identify deafness early and to prevent and cure it. Several deaf activists protested that because they are an ethnic group, the government shouldn't seek to cure their ethnicity. “If I had a bulldozer and a gun,” a Gallaudet student leader was quoted as saying, “I would destroy all scientific experiments to cure deafness. If I could hear, I would probably take a pencil and poke myself to be deaf again.”

This is an advocacy of withdrawal, and it has other manifestations. Many, if not most, deaf organizations have declared that the ideal of mainstreaming deaf pupils in hearing schools has been a failure, that the average seventeen-year-old still reads at a fourth-grade level, just as he did in the bad old days of oralism when he was forbidden to sign. The chief reason for the failure, they say, is that mainstreamed deaf students are forced to make their way in signed English, an artificial language that amounts to pidgin, rather than the American Sign Language they contend is more natural to them. The few mainstreamed students, they add, tend to be lonely because they are rebuffed and ignored by the many hearing pupils, and thus miss participating in many activities that teach social and leadership skills. In a school wholly for the deaf, these organizations contend, pupils compete on equal ground with one another, and thus develop socially and emotionally the same way their peers do. Thus these organizations are demanding that the deaf have their own schools, public and private.

These are powerful arguments. But I am not wholly convinced that the failure, on the average, of the mainstreamed deaf to keep up with their hearing peers is not part of a general failure of American education to serve broad segments of its clientele. It's the rare inner-city
hearing
high school graduate who can read even at a fourth-grade level, and his peers who are bused to schools in middle-class neighborhoods don't do much better. Is a new segregation the solution? Or does the answer lie elsewhere, perhaps in a housecleaning of special education as well as general education? This is a complex and controversial question, and I doubt that another all-or-nothing solution, putting
all
deaf children in residential schools and teaching them American Sign Language, is going to help matters.

Another disagreement in the world of the hearing-impaired revolves around legislation designed to better our lot. Some of the “radicals” among us, for instance, have been demanding strong laws to provide affirmative action in employment. If the deaf are culturally an ethnic group, they contend, preferential treatment laws designed to benefit other disadvantaged groups such as blacks and Hispanics should be extended to them. At first that might sound reasonable, but the skeptics—and I am one of them—point out that affirmative action is supposed to rectify past discrimination, to help once-victimized groups eventually to
succeed in society without special assistance. When affirmative action has done what it is intended to, there will no longer be a need for it. What affirmative action for the deaf really means, therefore, is never-ending entitlements for a never-ending disability.

However we define ourselves, we deaf are, for many practical purposes, disabled people. Our lack of functioning ears will always keep us from professions that require hearing. Who among us, for instance, could be an airline pilot, traffic policeman, or radio operator? Affirmative action cannot change that.

What really will help us, in my view, is
anti-discriminatory
legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law during the summer of 1990. Next to the Gallaudet revolution, the passage of this law promises to be the most important public event of the century for the deaf of America.

I must confess to ambivalent emotions about the act's provisions against discrimination in employment, as well as its sweeping application to all handicaps. It's obviously desirable that employers be prohibited from denying jobs to the handicapped on the basis of disability alone. But the law also obligates employers to provide “reasonable accommodation” to disabled workers, and that makes me uneasy. My deep-seated need for independence leads me to loathe the notion that my employer must spend money on me that would be unnecessary for a hearing employee. To me, that's charity forced by law, and an assault on my dignity.

And the broad language of the act makes me fret that “reasonable accommodation,” a concept strongly advocated by the organized deaf community, will in a few notorious cases be taken too far, a danger inherent in many laws of this kind. Let me posit an example: An ambitious veteran book editor at a metropolitan daily who is deaf but oral decides he's bored with desk work and applies for the post of city hall reporter. This job requires hours of telephone work each day, including dictating stories to the rewrite desk as well as frequent shmoozing in the corridors with politicians. The paper's management realizes that the book editor is as knowledgeable about city politics as the hearing reporter who is the other candidate for the post, and that he could acquit himself creditably—if a full-time lipreading and phone interpreter were hired to assist him at $25,000 a year.

Both candidates' talents are equal. But under the provisions of the disabilities act, management cannot deny the deaf editor the job simply because of the cost of accommodating his handicap. There is an escape clause in the act that allows employers to demur because of “undue hardship,” but the paper is a big metropolitan daily with a staff of hundreds, and makes a decent profit. To claim undue hardship might result in a messy and expensive disabled-rights lawsuit as well as embarrassing stories in the competition. Therefore the paper reluctantly gives the job to the book editor and hires an interpreter. From then on, of course, relations between management and employee are subtly strained.

In my more cynical moods I ruminate that such a case might make management less enthusiastic about hiring deaf applicants for entry-level jobs, because of costly potential “reasonable accommodation” demands that might lie in the future. Management might hire only a few handicapped employees, just enough to showcase in the front window and demonstrate compliance with the act however minimal it might be. That happened, and still happens, with the people the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to emancipate.

Is my hypothetical example really as extreme as it seems, a cranky rationalization born of offended pride? Perhaps. But I believe many young deaf people have grown up expecting a good deal of accommodation. From time to time I have exchanged correspondence with hearing-impaired journalism students. Invariably they ask if it was difficult for me to persuade my newspaper to hire an interpreter to help me do my job. When I tell them I have had none, they are astonished. They have gone through their entire grammar school, high school, and college educations with state-financed interpreters in all their classes, and many of them assume that when they go out into the world to work, somebody will hire interpreters to work side by side with them. In professional journalism that's unlikely to happen, I have told them, to their dismay and sometimes anger. Nobody wants to hire two people to do the job of one. Now, in theory at least, the Americans with Disabilities Act makes that possible.

Having unburdened myself of this worst-case scenario, I must concede that in ordinary practice “reasonable accommodations” are more likely than not to be economical and acceptable to all parties, and a farsighted employer who cheerfully accommodates disabled employees can win
much goodwill among the handicapped—in fact, it may even be good for business. For instance, the
Sun-Times
voluntarily provides me with the occasional phone help (an average of twenty minutes a day) of an editorial assistant as well as a transcript typist a few times a year. The cost is chicken feed, perhaps $1,000 a year. The benefit to the paper for this negligible extra expense is a wider range of reliable work from an experienced staffer with a well-known byline.

I've sometimes thought that on some out-of-town assignments, such as conventions and book-awards press conferences, I could use a lipreading interpreter. The paper has told me that it would regard as a reasonable expense the hiring of a local lipreading interpreter for $30 or $35 an hour to help me at a press conference or noisy social gathering for two or three hours. What's more, the paper has said, it wouldn't need the coercion of a federal law. While it'd be reluctant to approve a proposed out-of-town assignment involving the expense of a full-time traveling interpreter for several days—“that would shoot hell out of my editorial budget,” my boss said—the paper would be happy to pay for a local interpreter during an author interview. I don't think, however, that I'd take my bosses up on that proposal. Even though I sometimes have trouble understanding my subject, the presence of a third party at an author interview might subtly alter the sometimes fragile friendliness and trust between interviewer and interviewee. I'd rather rely on my unobtrusive little cassette recorder.

I have absolutely no qualms, however, with the act's other major provision for the hearing-impaired: mandating telephone services for the deaf that are functionally equivalent to those provided to the hearing. In fact, it gladdens my heart. At the same rates hearing people pay for voice telephone service, the deaf will be able to enjoy not only TDDs but also relay services—specially trained third-party operators who serve as real-time go-betweens for deaf users of TDDs and hearing users of voice equipment.