Blog 2 Living as a Deaf person in a hearing world

I found the following Ted Talk on youtube.com given by Rachel Kolb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKKpjvPd6Xo

In her talk, Rachel discusses many of the troubles she faces as a deaf person living in a ‘hearing world’ (hence the title of the talk). In the Rossenblum and Travis reading [Ethnicity, Ethics, and the Deaf-World by Harlan Lane] I was initially skeptical at the claim that Deaf people should be thought of as an ethnic group. Certainly, I thought, not being able to hear is a limitation by definition and thus Deaf people should be thought of as disabled. Personally I may be even more biased than the average person simply because of the extent to which my life revolves around music—I can’t conceive of a world in which I can’t listen to music. However, the collective values, feelings of community, history, social structures, and (of course) the common language amongst Deaf people—as outlined in the reading—communicated to me that defining Deaf people as an ethnic group might be appropriate.  

In the video Rachel says, “Society has a tendency to focus on disability rather than ability, and certainly my abilities are different than many other people’s abilities” (3:45) which outlines the idea that society wants to treat Deaf people as people with disabilities—they ignore the other abilities the Deaf people may have and focus on their inability to hear. More specifically, and this struck me, Rachel cited the following fact: “Deaf children born to deaf parents are less likely to develop fluent written English than children born to deaf parents” (the citation is in the video). This largely supports the idea from the text that Deaf parents hoping for their children to be Deaf isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it turns out that Deaf children are more likely to learn signing at an early age if they are born to Deaf parents, and the earlier a language is learned in a person’s life, the more likely they are to learn that language more fully and thus be more able to communicate.

The text and Rachel Kolb’s ted talk both left me with many questions, but I will focus on one here. If Deaf people are an ethnic group, to what extent can they seek out resources that help them in a ‘hearing world?’ The text discusses how we shouldn’t think of Deaf people as people with disabilities and also that we shouldn’t think of Deaf people jointly as an ethnic group and as people with disabilities. It becomes difficult to allocate resources for people who can’t hear when they want to be defined purely in terms of an ethnic group. The text further admits that Deaf people have secured accommodations in the past due to their classification as people with disabilities. This leads me to wonder if simply defining Deaf people as an ethnic group that communicates visually will allow them to secure any accommodations that may be required outside of those that can be obtained by ethnic minorities.