Audism: discrimination or prejudice against individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing
Examples include interactions like,
Person A: Hi, my name is…I’m Deaf.
Person B: I’m so sorry!
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Staunton, VA. 1839: We have opened the Virginia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind to help the invalids learn English.
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Hearing person to a HOH individual: Are you sure you can work the cash register? I’m just worried because you’re hearing impaired*.
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According to my instructor who is a CODA, discrimination against the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is based on the idea that they are “broken.” Most Deaf people do not feel this way, and despite being labeled ‘disabled’ by US legal conventions many would not consider themselves so. Thus, audism is a unique form of discrimination that intersects but does not fall under ableism. Yet, given that our higher learning institution is based in the American south, I feel that anti-black racism needs no introduction. “Incidents” at said higher learning institution and the corresponding Collegian articles speak for themselves.
What I ask of the reader today, is to open their mind to the intersection of the two. If I asked you outright, “are there deaf black people?” You would likely say yes. It seems obvious. However, they were rarely included in the conversation around Deaf education, Deaf culture, and how to improve living conditions for the Deaf and HOH community because of their blackness and continue to be discriminated against for both reasons today.
ASL as we know it is the “Standard” sign language used in the United States because of its availability in schools and the amount of linguistics research it has attracted in the last 50 years. However, it is still a predominately “White” language. That is to say, the spread of ASL throughout the United States in the past was a tool for forced assimilation by the majority population of European colonizers just like the English language. I discussed this briefly in an earlier post about Plains Sign Language, also called “Handspeak,” used by the Indigenous American communities in the Midwest. I recognize that the Deaf community at large was, for a long time, forced to learn English as best they could to assimilate into the larger hearing culture. However, ASL was still weaponized against Black and Indigenous Deaf communities for the same reasons.
Black Deaf people, of course, also faced segregation in the Jim Crow south. BEcause they were not allowed to attend White Deaf Schools, they had to make their own and learn to sign on their own which led to dialectical differences. When schools did integrate, the two Deaf communities still could not communicate with each other because they had different signs, used space differently, and had different facial cues. Students who could attend these integrated schools learned ASL to use in class and for their White peers in an act of manual code-switching. Then, at home, they could use the language that was theirs: the language that continues to be a testament to Black innovation.
Dr. Carolyn Mccaskill at Gallaudet University is a Black professor and head of the first ever Black Deaf Studies program. She spoke with ABC news on the subject last year in the first video I have included below. The second is from a prominent social media influencer, Charmay. She is a Black Deaf TikToker who went viral during the height of the pandemic for sharing videos of her and her grandfather signing in BASL to educate the community on this oft-ignored facet of Black American history. I have included her shorter video as an example of the differences between ASL and BASL signs.
*Hearing impaired is a very offensive term to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community today for reasons discussed in my podcast.
