One of the isolating factors of being hearing-impaired is that you aren't able to communicate with just anyone. Though sign language is a very effective method of communication, most people don't know it. This means that the hearing-impaired are limited to communicating easily only with people who have gone to the trouble of learning the language.
Recently, a Sprint ad went viral because it showed how touching it was when a whole community secretly learned sign language so they can communicate with one hearing-impaired person:
But the left apparently doesn't want people who aren't deaf learning sign language; or at least they don't want non-deaf people teaching the deaf sign language. Why? Because of -- wait for it -- cultural appropriation. Dirk Hillard, the president of Quad-Cities Deaf Club (which serves northwestern Illinois and southeastern Iowa) wrote an op-ed saying that Scott Community College was "oppressive and discriminatory" for hiring people who can hear to teach those who cannot. He wrote:
ASL is the language of the deaf community and only exists because of deaf people. It is cultural appropriation to use the language of the deaf community to make money for your institution without including deaf people in the instruction and provision of those classes. When hearing people are chosen to teach ASL, it is a form of ableism and audism. We must emphasize, hearing people teaching ASL classes when there are deaf people who are willing and able to teach contributes to the systematic oppression of deaf people.
Did you follow that? A person who is able to hear teaching sign language is oppressive.
A spokesperson for the college confirms that some some of the school’s instructors can hear. However, every sign language class has either a deaf adjunct instructor or tutor. “We are extremely proud of our ASL program,” he said. “While other programs in the state of Iowa have closed, we have continued to work to maintain our program, and it is now the only program remaining in the state.”
National Review's Katherine Timpf believes Hillard's complaint is ridiculous:
Scott Community College’s is “the only program remaining in the state,” and Hillard is choosing to complain about who is teaching the classes. Regardless of the instructors, this is still a program that is teaching sign language and training people to become sign-language instructors, both of which objectively benefit deaf people. Are hearing people taking something from deaf culture? Yes, absolutely! But what they are “taking” is the ability to more easily communicate with the people in that culture, and the ability to teach others to be able to do the same thing.
The bottom is that we should encourage as many people as possible to learn sign language and teach it. Suppressing that is choosing radical lefty politics over community.
Photo Credit: Flickr
