Audism

You probably want to know about my journey towards ASL poetry right now, but I want to talk about a concept that affects the Deaf community first. Please read this post, as this really means a lot.

Audism
According to Deaf authors Janice Humphrey and Bob J. Alcorn, Audism is "an attitude based on pathological thinking which results in a negative stigma toward anyone who does not hear; like racism or sexism, audism judges, labels, and limits individuals on the basis of whether a person hears and speaks." I've mentioned before that deafness is not a disability. Audists are people who hold the ideas of audism and believe that hearing people are superior to deaf people. The interesting thing is, audists can be both deaf and hearing, though most are hearing. When deaf people are raised in Hearing communities, they're often told that the fact that they can't hear pulls them to a lower position in society from everyone else, and that they should try their best to be like people who can hear. As a result, they are taught auditory-verbal communication, and they lipread to figure out what someone else is saying and try to make noises until they are told which noise is correct for which word. They constantly receive the idea that they're limited in what they can do because of the way they were born, and they start to think that way as well.
The truth is, that's completely false (that is way too soft of a wording but this has to be school-appropriate, right?). Here is a couple of things relating to Audism that people should know.

"Stop Audism" T-shirt design from handsay.com 

1. Deaf people's level of intellect is nowhere below that of hearing people's. Deaf people, although they can talk, still can't hear what they're saying; they don't have a concept of sound. When hearing people think, they think with a certain voice in their head, but deaf people can't develop that voice in their heads because they don't know what voices sound like. Deaf people who learned sign language, however, can think sign; so they think of themselves signing a certain idea, though they're not actually signing, just as how we think of ourselves talking but we're not really talking. Deaf kids who learn sign language are able to develop this method of thinking, but those who learn auditory-verbal can't develop this mode of thinking as fast as everyone, so that's why some deaf kids seem to fall behind in class. Deafness itself has nothing to do with intellect; in fact, Deaf people have better spatial intelligence than most hearing individuals.
2. Hearing people don't have the power to magically fix a deaf person's speech and grammar. Deaf people who learn auditory-verbal communication has probably went through years and years of education and speech therapy; this is the best they can get. They've been taught to draw with their feet because they don't have hands, and you can't blame them for not being able to draw every single line perfectly.
3. Alexander Graham Bell was a definite audist. In school, when told to do projects on a "Famous figure" or "Hero," many probably chose Bell for being the inventor of the telephone and the educator of the deaf. He did open schools for the deaf, but he did it as audistically (I don't think that's a word) as a human being could. He had a deaf mother and a deaf wife, but his goal wasn't to educate or enhance the Deaf community, his goal was to make deaf people more like hearing people. Why? Because he thought that hearing people were better than deaf people. He thought that there should be no deafness in the world as people think there should be no diseases in the world, and he thought that deaf children were more likely to be born from deaf parents. He broke up the Deaf community as much as possible and tried to get rid of all characteristics of the Deaf community. He even helped pass a law that banned the use of sign language, which drastically hindered deaf children's learning. People falsely credit Bell for being the "teacher of the deaf", but remember that he did it the wrong way.

Another design from handsay.com that says A.G. Bell is "not our father"