How the Deaf Community is Committing Cultural Suicide

Today I received a fantastic comment to my Deaf by Choice article. I wrote it about a month ago and since then it’s been receiving numerous daily hits and getting a lot of people thinking. But this particular comment was so well articulated that I have to include it into this post. Below, you can read my response to Mary-Anne’s words.

I am also a CODA AND the parent of a Deaf child with a cochlear implant. While my parents went nearly insane when I told them that I was going to have my daughter implanted, I did it anyway because it is my duty as a Mother to give my daughter every advantage possible. It has been shown that the earlier a child is implanted the better the results. Taylor was implanted at 3 and is doing great. Does she sound like a hearing child? Does she hear just as well as a “normal” kid? Do I think she is a hearing child? Absolutely not! She is deaf, no if, ands or buts.
The deaf community cries that CIs are killing their culture, when they themselves and their attitude of big D deaf is what is doing it. The deaf kids I grew up with had mostly deaf children themselves and they completely disowned me and my daughter when they found out she was getting a CI. My daughter goes to a mainstream school with 70 D/HOH kids and not one parent has had the Deaf community reach out to them. Oh, and by the way, out of the 30 or so implanted kids I know, not a single parent was told that their kid could not use sign or an interpreter. We use everything we have.

Implant families did not turn their backs on the deaf culture, the culture turned its backs on us. And the whole culture and their big lists of successful deaf leaders is a joke. I grew up surrounded by deaf adults who either had low paying, manual labor jobs or collected disability. The women often stayed in abusive relationships because they could not afford to leave and did not have the resources or education to make their lives better. The deaf CEO is a rare occurance.

Don’t even get me started about the “implants don’t work” crap! Deaf people have spread that lie amongst themselves to help argue their point. Sure, the ones made years ago are no where near as successful as the newer ones. That is how technology grows. So, here we are 5 years post implant and my daughter has hearing friends and deaf friends and my own deaf Mother tells me she is proud of me because I made the right decision.

Stories like this are so important in shattering the myths put forward by a bunch of arrogant “activists” who have an agenda about ruining others’ opportunity to live the best life possible.

Now that Mary-Anne mentioned it, do I ever remember all of the abusive relationships my mother’s deaf friends talked about. Our family wasn’t exempt from physical violence either, as my father found it easier to express himself that way. And yes, most of them were in very low-income professions - factory worker, tailor-by-order to other deaf people, cleaning woman. My father was one of a minuscule few to have a professional job, and that was only because he was lucky enough to get a teacher’s degree and teach at deaf schools.

With all the pre-natal and genetic engineering going on, I do believe that there will be less and less deaf people in the developed world out there in the decades to come. No matter what people with agendas say, deafness IS a disability, and as such, research is going into eliminating it.
But the way to preserve sign language (which on its own is the only viable marker of deaf “culture”)isn’t to prevent others from having a better life, but to open it up to others, to hearing people, to the world.

There is, however, a deep distrust/suspicion of the “outside” world, of hearing people spying in and their motives for learning to sign. Deaf people just don’t understand why any hearing person would want to sign. It is this deep distrust that is going to kill sign language, NOT the cochlear implant. Even as a CODA, I am seen as one of their own - but still feel like an outsider - kind of like the bastard cousin in the family.

I also believe that people with cochlear implants will soon outnumber those without - at least in the developed world. Even jaded old activists can’t brainwash every naive new parent with their politically-correct, save-our-culture-by-not-giving-your-kid-an-implant drivel.

The division between those who have the implant and those who don’t, is what is really going to kill the “deaf community” - from within. It is because of the negative, suspicious attitudes of stubborn people with old mentalities, who refuse to change or allow others to improve their chances at achieving all their dreams in life.

By shunning those with cochlear implants, the deaf community has effectively committed suicide. Not only has it resisted the intrusion of hearing people who want to learn sign language into their precious little world, but it believes that people with cochlear implants aren’t really deaf - and should be excluded. Why? Because they WILL interact with hearing people - they will straddle two worlds - and are therefore dangerous. In the deaf community you MUST swear allegiance to your deafness. Any grey area and you are a potential traitor (a go-between to the hearing world) and must be excluded.

So THAT is why the deaf community is going to pieces - because they are committing cultural suicide.