There are 141 students enrolled in SHS 101: American Sign Language I on the Tempe campus this semester. Another 103 have signed up for SHS 102 (ASL II) and 68 are in SHS 201 and another 68 in SHS 202 (ASL III and ASL IV, respectively). Overall, that is 380 ASU students.
On the other hand, the National Center for Health Statistics projects that approximately 600,000 people in the United States meet the legal definition of "deafness," and more than 35 million people have some degree of hearing trouble, all with varying severity.
The Deaf community is growing.
But for some reason, the number of those who care about assimilating the Deaf community into the hearing world is not growing fast enough. Though classes are at capacity, just 380 people, no matter how amazing they are, will hardly help people with deafness feel completely welcome in our overly auditory world.
We care for people with deafness as much as we care about anyone else. They are our friends, our family members and our peers. We find Deaf culture to be a wonderful thing … on its own, without our interference.
Obviously, we want people who are deaf to feel comfortable, to not feel like the outsiders.
And spending your Monday mornings sitting in COOR taking an American Sign Language class, though an excellent idea, isn't the only way. Instead, we can start by not viewing deafness as a "disability" or an "impairment."
According to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, "Deaf people do not perceive themselves as having lost something (i.e., hearing) and do not think of themselves as handicapped, impaired, or disabled. They celebrate and cherish their culture because it gives them the unique privilege of sharing a common history and language."
Nevertheless, students with deafness are still taken care of through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and non-students with deafness are covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act. While the services they receive are great, the language is not.
Furthermore, people with deafness also find trouble in terms of the capitalization of the word "deaf" itself. Generally, deafness as a physical condition is treated with lowercase billing, while Deaf culture is given uppercase. But even our journalistic bible, the AP Style Guide, says that the word "deaf" is never to be capitalized in any situation.
That's a sad story: The Deaf community is proud. They have their own culture, and they see their deafness as a link between themselves rather than a barrier between them and us. If they want a capital "D" to celebrate that identity, and want us to see an important aspect of their identities not as a disability, they should get that, right?
Just like American Sign Language, the answer speaks for itself.
