The People of the Eye: Deaf Ethnicity and Ancestry (10 page)

A deep feeling of belonging characterizes many ethnic groups and that is surely a property of the Deaf-World. After all, many of its members found in the Deaf-World surrogate parents, easy communication, access to information, and a positive identity. The solidarity of DeafWorld members is expressed in many ways; among the most striking are the stress it places on collective action and on marriage partners chosen from the Deaf-World.

The culture of ethnic groups includes rules for behavior based on distinctive values, starting with a high value placed on ethnic membership itself. This is true of the Deaf-World, whose central values include being Deaf and allegiance to the group. The values of ethnic groups underlie their rules of behavior in such matters as appropriate use of language and discourse, conferring names and introducing people, decision making, and pooling of resources. We found each of these behavioral repertories in the Deaf-World.

Ethnic groups have social institutions and we found many of those in examining the Deaf-World, including a network of schools, Deaf clubs, churches, athletic organizations, publishing houses and theater groups, as well as associations focused on profession, leisure, politics, and socializing.

The arts enrich the lives of ethnic groups, bind their members, and express ethnic values and knowledge. The Deaf-World has a rich literary tradition including such forms as legends and humor. There are also theater arts, and plastic arts that recount the Deaf experience.

History and ethnicity are intimately bound up in ethnic groups. The Deaf-World has a rich history that is recounted in many forms-books, films, theater, narratives, and so on. As with ethnic groups, much of that history concerns oppression and it has a familiar rhetorical structure. In the beginning, we were dispersed and isolated; but then our people gathered and built our institutions; there was a Golden Age in which we flourished, followed by the dark ages of oppression; but we rose up victorious and recovered our lost values and prestige.

Ethnic kinship practices vary widely from one ethnic group to the next. In some, kinship is based on a belief in shared ancestry. In others, kinship includes persons who clearly have no genealogical connection but only a physical or cultural resemblance, if that. What is common to various kinship practices is the diffuse enduring solidarity that each individual in the ethnic group owes to the others. Kinship in the DeafWorld is based on physical and cultural resemblance and is characterized by diffuse enduring solidarity. That is true both of members who are hereditarily Deaf and those who are not. In addition, hereditarily Deaf people, who constitute the majority of the Deaf-World, have shared ancestry as Parts II-IV illustrate with some lineages of founding Deaf families.

Socialization of ethnic children may be conducted by other than their biological parents and this, too, is a property of Deaf-World ethnicity. What may be peculiar to the Deaf-World is the commonplace delayed start of socialization, including delayed language acquisition, when parents are unable to inculcate Deaf values and language in their Deaf children.

Ethnic groups frequently have a code of conduct governing encounters with other ethnic groups. Many characteristics of the Deaf-World and of the enveloping dominant ethnicity serve to maintain the boundaries between them. To single out a few issues that sustain boundaries, there are the language barrier, radically different understandings of what it means to be a Deaf person, stigma, employment discrimination, the tendency of hearing people to take charge of Deaf affairs, endogamous marriage, the Deaf code of conduct with hearing people, and the propensity of Deaf people to look to the Deaf-World to meet many of their needs.

Finally we spoke of multilingualism and multiculturalism, properties of most ethnic groups. Deaf people are indeed multilingual and multicultural. Virtually all command at least two languages and cultures and many several more.

We conclude that the Deaf-World in the U.S. is aptly included among the nation's ethnic groups. This conclusion is based on self-ascription, bonding language and culture, societal institutions, boundary maintenance, kinship, and shared physical characteristics.31

We wish to acknowledge our presumption in offering to ASL signers a conception of their minority status and one that may seem far-fetched at that, since it reflects a paradigm change in our understanding of Deaf people. It is only in recent decades that Deaf people in the United States have come to see themselves as the possessors of a distinct natural language and culture.32 The reader may well ask why we are introducing for discussion a different, although related, conceptualization. In part our answer is that we believe in "getting it right"-that appropriate conceptualizations will help Deaf people and their hearing allies to achieve their goals. Was that not the case when ASL was shown to be a natural language? "Ethnicity" is not a rhetorical flourish, any more than "natural language" is. An ethnic group by any other namefor example, "linguistic and cultural minority"-remains an ethnic group.

We live in a pluralistic society, one formed by many ethnic groups, so if it is suitable to include ASL signers in that classification, they stand to gain by traditions and laws protecting ethnic groups and ensuring that they and their languages and cultures flourish. Of course, we are not creating an ethnic group where there was not one, nor would we be able to do so; we are merely calling attention to it. If our Deaf colleagues find merit in construing the Deaf-World as an ethnic group, and decide to make that information more widely accessible to Deaf people (as they did with the concept of "Deaf culture"), we will be very pleased. However, we certainly do not claim to speak for the Deaf. Deaf writers tell about the Deaf-World in numerous articles, books and other media, many cited in the text and endnotes of this essay.

"Mainstream ethnicity," as we have called it, was in the beginning White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity.33 WASP settlers, just as a matter of course, imprinted their ethnicity on America's social institutions, including their English language, cultural rules and values, and religion. Thus, the first Deaf settlers to gather and affirm their Deaf consciousness, the founders of the American Deaf-World, were, with some exceptions, WASPs. In Parts II through IV, we report on the ancestors and descendants of these founders of the American Deaf-World.

First, however, Chapter 3 addresses some opposing arguments, as well as questions and concerns that the reader may have about our conclusion that the Deaf-World is an ethnic group.

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Having just concluded that ethnic group is an apt conceptualization for the linguistic minority of ASL signers, we take on the responsibility of considering countervailing arguments (boldface below) and evaluating each in turn.

On Assimilation

You have said nothing about hearing loss. Not hearing explains a lot about the Deaf-World. For example, it explains why Deaf people commonly do not learn spoken English and become assimilated.' Doesn't that make them different from ethnic groups?

Some ASL signers can and occasionally do speak English aloud, yet few of them are assimilated by the dominant ethnicity. One obvious reason is that Deaf bodies are suited to visual communication, not oral. But there are other reasons: Deaf ethnics have great group loyalty and surveys indicate they are generally happy with the way they are. Moreover, assimilation often involves marrying out of the minority ethnicity but Deaf people usually marry other Deaf people.

Granted that the descendants of many American immigrants have assimilated-but many have not. Ethnicity has proven more enduring in the United States and elsewhere than many scholars anticipated. Resistance to assimilation is not unique to the Deaf-World. We cited earlier the Amish and Gypsies.2 We may add the Mennonites, Chinese residents of older Chinatowns, Native American tribal groups, the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, the Old Believer diaspora in North and South America. Other ethnic groups, such as those in the Swat Valley of northern Pakistan, co-exist in a symbiotic relationship without significant assimilation.3 So the Deaf-World may be among those ethnic groups whose culture and circumstances disfavor assimilation.

If the Deaf-World is limited in assimilation, does that make it less of an ethnic group or more of one? Perhaps more of one as it possesses such a robust boundary with the dominant ethnicity. In any case, all ethnic groups have significant features that differ one to the next. Gypsies (Romas) are a diaspora group and stigmatized; Greek and Chinese ethnic groups in Africa resist assimilation; Chinese-Americans are increasingly marrying outside their ethnic group but this is rare for ASL signers.4 Many Native American languages are dying out or have disappeared; this is not true of ASL which is unlikely ever to die out. So it is not enough to challenge Deaf-World ethnicity based on differences from other ethnic groups. You have to say why such differences are incompatible with viewing the Deaf-World as an ethnic group, based on its physical traits, language, culture, and boundary maintenance. These differences can provide important insights into the nature of ethnicity. In this first stage we have examined the Deaf-World through the lens of ethnicity but in a later phase scholars must look at ethnicity through the lens of the Deaf-World: What does social science have to learn from the unique properties of Deaf ethnicity such as its base in vision?

On Deaf Bodies

Okay, let's say that limited assimilation to mainstream ethnicity is not unique to the Deaf-World. Still, all the members of this group cannot hear, doesn't that make them less of an ethnic group?

Many ethnicities have distinguishing physical traits; you need only look around you. But to get some perspective on this issue, let's go farther afield. Consider the case of the Pygmies of Central Africa whose ethnicity incorporates a distinct physical makeup-as does that of Deaf people and other ethnic groups. The Pygmies' stature, some four-and-a-half feet on average, allows them modest caloric requirements, easy and rapid passage through dense jungle in search of game, and construction of small huts that can be rapidly disassembled and reassembled for self-defense and hunting. Wild game is captured with bows and arrows and hunting nets. A half-dozen families in a forest camp link their individual hunting nets end to end and the women and children drive the game into the nets; the take is shared. Law enforcement, worship, marriage, social events, art, and architecture are all communal, which reflects the collaborative hunt, which reflects in turn the pygmy's physical makeup and environment. The Bantu villagers, farming at the edge of the forest, have contempt for the hunter-gatherer Pygmies because of their "puny" size, and the Pygmies in turn have contempt for the villagers who are "clumsy as elephants" and "do not know how to walk" in the forest, for they are much too tall to move swiftly and silently .5 Each group considers the other handicapped by the physical size of its members. Each fails to appreciate how physical makeup, culture, and environment are intertwined.

Physical difference is part of ethnicity and not just incidental to it. You cannot say that Pygmy culture could be any other culture, that it is purely socially constructed. The physical facts underpin Pygmy ethnicity just as they underpin Deaf ethnicity. It is the correlation of physical makeup and ethnicity that allows us to recognize a newborn Pygmy as a Pygmy and a newborn Deaf child as ethnically Deaf; in both cases, "The human body itself is viewed as an expression of ethnicity."6

How can a newborn Deaf child be ethnically Deaf before he or she knows sign language and Deaf culture?7

How are young members of ethnic groups identified? In Western cultures, at least, we see the newborn as launched on a trajectory that, depending on the child's makeup and environment, will normally lead him or her to master a particular language and culture natively. It is this potentiality in the newborn black or Native American child, for example, that leads us to say that the newborn child is black or Native American (not will be)-although the child has not yet acquired the language and culture that go with that ethnic attribution. In saying that this newborn is African American, for example, we do not need to ask about the parents; it's the child's physical makeup that determines his or her ethnic attribution. The parents' physical makeup and their ethnicity usually agree with the child's but that does not itself decide the child's ethnic assignment. Even with Caucasian adoptive parents or a white surrogate mother, the child with African-American constitution would be called black or African American.

Some years ago, the National Association of Black Social Workers came out formally against programs of transracial adoption of black children on the grounds that the children were being systematically deprived of their black heritage, and black culture was being deprived of its new members, and that is ethnocide-the systematic extinction of an ethnic minority's freedom to pursue its way of life. Many of those adopted black children were too young to have already learned black dialect and culture yet it was clear to everyone that these were ethnically black children, that their life trajectories would normally lead them to black culture and dialect.8 Otherwise, why protest their adoption by whites? On the same principle, Native-Americans have protested transracial adoption of young Native-American children, perceiving them as members of their ethnic group before the children had learned tribal languages and customs.9

So the Deaf child of hearing parents, like the Deaf child of Deaf parents, is ethnically Deaf right from birth?

Yes, or from the moment that the Deaf child has the potential to thrive in an ASL environment. Deaf adults say that such a child "has Deaf eyes." No doubt they refer to the Deaf child's characteristic visual scanning of the environment. A little later in life, these children will look Deaf also because they communicate manually, use codified facial gestures, respond readily to visual events and not auditory ones, and so on.