So this is something that has been picking up recently. It feels like an aggressive cultural surge is forming in the deaf community. The last one I was cognizant of was almost 15-20(?) years ago where there was this large push to try to eliminate initialized signs from ASL because they viewed as being too connected to English, which AFAICT was being viewed by some as a type of undue influence or control over, or oppression of, ASL.
This surge finally died down seemingly with the realization that an initialized handshape is an important and intrinsic part of certain signs, and probably should be left alone. That is not to say that some changes were not made, for example, I remember the sign for LIVE/LIFE changing so that it no longer uses an L handshape, while LIBRARY still uses the L handshape. For example: FAMILY, CLASS, and GROUP all have similar movement and hand involvement, and they all express a type of “sharedness,” or association, but GROUP has a meaning that is quite different from FAMILY – some people may be in the same GROUP, but they may not be FAMILY. It might have saved a lot of time and trouble if this was looked at as simply coincidence or the natural evolution of the language, instead of colonization, or the history of hearing English-speaking audists trying to unduly influence ASL.
But things like this can quickly escalate, sometimes to a point where certain arguments just do not make practical sense. Currently, there is a growing surge against hearing people having any involvement with ASL, or outright attempts to completely control its use, with claims of cultural appropriation being thrown everywhere. From my POV, this has all the makings of a Cultural Trap in its early stages. It also brings the concept of Ideology into the conversation.
The term Cultural Trap was mentioned by Paddy Ladd in Understanding Deaf Culture and cites How Culture Works, by P. Bohannon, 1995. And Ideology being defined (as in The Problem of Ideology, by S. Hall, 1983) as the "actual site of struggles within a culture" and is responsible for "producing the consciousness of the self."
This initially started with accusations bring thrown at hearing users of ASL that make money either directly or indirectly through their use of ASL. I will mention that early on, it looked like no one really cared all that much until money was being made. Once a dollar-sign got attached to it, it immediately became cultural appropriation.
This resulted in people that have things like monetized YouTube videos being the first targets, as well as legitimate, actual hearing ASL instructors. (I will mention that I am all for native/deaf ASL instructors over hearing ones, but that is not the point of this post.) However YouTubers were easier to find and they got the brunt of it first. Eventually, ASL interpreters got dragged into it, and were being accused of simply making money off of someone else’s culture, which is a very simplified view of it, but it had its effects.
Imagine being a long-time interpreter, who experienced the Deaf World at an early age, took the time and effort to study ASL and deaf culture for years, got certified, is involved with the community and gives back to it whenever they can by volunteering your services at a church or at local deaf events, and is generally well liked by the community – they have DEAF HEART.
Now, you are suddenly getting yelled at by someone less than half their age, in some other state, barely out of high school that accuses the ‘terp of shamelessly feeding off of the deaf community just because ASL is literally their job and their passion.
It is worth pointing out that this kind of behavior places ‘terps in an extremely unfair position when you stop to think about it – they either stand by and get attacked silently, or withdraw from environments like that, or they speak out and risk getting blacklisted – they no longer have DEAF HEART but now have BAD ATTITUDE – and risk loosing out on work opportunities. It is a position that can easily be abused by overly-aggressive people that just want to lash out at someone because of their own situation.
Luckily people appeared to realize the actual value of interpreters to the community and somewhat backed off. But now people started looking for a new target and the message changed to fit. Now it was cultural appropriation if you were hearing and used ASL but did not make money from it, which brought ASL students into the fray. Within a year or so, that message quickly changed from simply accusing ASL students of cultural appropriation, even though they had not really done anything wrong yet, to controlling access to ASL, and/or controlling what are the appropriate uses of it.
Now first, understand that restricting a language from others willing to learn it, or trying to control is use, is relatively unheard of outside of a set of people being conquered and/or colonized (and even that that is only when a the native/conquered language is being eliminated completely) and of course in the case of audists trying to keep deaf from accessing ASL. In both cases, it is wrong to do so.
Today, anyone is freely allowed to learn just about any language they want. If you want to learn Spanish, you can find Spanish courses at just about every community college, online course, self-study, etc. Same goes for French, Arabic, Swahili, Navajo, Farsi, etc.
But now I have read comments (on Quora, I believe) that go so far as to say that anywhere ASL is used without deaf people are involved, is cultural appropriation. They literally said that two hearing ASL students should not even be allowed to practice with each other by signing to one another. Really? I have even seen ASL students openly mocked or complained because someone encountered a student’s video on YouTube, not realizing that maybe the teacher wanted videos submitted that way, and no one intended those videos to be for others to learn or model ASL. Some of the videos even stated that the signer was an ASL student and was practicing their expressive skills to solicit feedback from the deaf community, only to be attacked instead. (And if the hearing person says anything about it, they are labeled “fragile.”)
From the outside looking in, it feels like an attempt to turn the tables on the audists out there and the history of what they have done. Essentially: “you withheld and controlled our language, but now we are taking control and it is our turn to withhold and control it!”
The problem is that they are keeping it from the wrong people. A first year ASL student, or even someone not yet a student and is just interested, does not need to be the target of this turnabout.
They are not the audists that held ASL back from you or your ancestors.
They did not force you to sit on your hands or rap your knuckles with a ruler if you tried to sign.
They were not at the Milan Conference/Congress speaking out against the use of signed languages in education.
And they do not need to be told that their genuine interest in ASL is tantamount to cultural appropriation.
They should not be expected to pay the price for those sins – they had nothing to do with them. Indeed, they are likely completely ignorant of those things because they are early learners of the Deaf World – they literally do not understand why you appear mad at them! And then they get shouted down when they try to figure out or ask why.
Another thing that is starting to develop is exclusionary behavior about this and other deaf-related issues. If a hearing person says anything about a Deaf-related topic, they get shut down with a statement like “well, you are not deaf so you don’t get to say anything,” or “I am native deaf, you do not get to talk to me about ASL or deaf culture.” The reason this is bad is because it shuts down what might be useful dialogue and information sharing from both sides, and it makes deafies look like they just do not want to have any conversations, they just want to yell about how bad all hearies are, and any attempt to defend oneself is met with “you just don’t want to listen” or other dismissive statements.
This behavior discounts the possibility of a hearing person having actual knowledge that might be beneficial to a particular conversation or scenario. The interpreter I mentioned above might actually know something about Deaf Culture or the linguistics of ASL that some fresh-outta-college kid might be ignorant of, and it might benefit them to actually take the time to learn something new about their own culture, history or language… from a better-educated and experienced hearing person.
As a related example, Gallaudet has an English major program. This means that a deaf person can graduate with a degree in English. English is my language. I was born into it and speak and read/write it natively with a high level of proficiency. That said, is it possible that this deaf graduate, who did not grow up a native English speaker, might know something about English that I do not? Is it appropriate for them to call attention to and/or correct something English-related that they know is wrong?
Abso-fucking-lutely – there is a reason hearing English speakers still take English classes in school: because we do not automatically know everything there is to know about English simply because we were born into it. Also, I did not graduate with a degree in English, so it is entirely possible someone that is deaf might know something I do not. Just because I am “native hearing English” does not confer some magical powers on my opinion that automatically outweighs others’ nor does it mean that I have a complete, innate and infallible knowledge of English – that is why we need open and respectful conversations.
But what if this educated, degree-earning deaf person wanted to say something about English that they learned but other hearing people just told them “you are not hearing, you are not native English, so you do not have the right to talk to me about English, so just shut up.” How do you think that deaf person would feel? How would they feel about the hearing people they just encountered? Wondering why they are being met with aggression when they were only trying to help by adding some actual knowledge, or an educated opinion on something that they happen to be knowledgeable about?
I personally have studied the Deaf World (culture and history) for almost 30 years, and have been a student of ASL and the linguistics and evolution of ASL for the last 10 or so years. I have watched Veditz’s video (multiple times) and can appreciate the importance of the “beautiful sign language” to the deaf community, and I can speak confidently on some of the linguistic rules of ASL (i.e. what makes a moving two-handed sign valid or invalid).
But on a Facebook group I was talking about a story I once signed where I intentionally created an invalid sign as part of storytelling. That somehow devolved into an argument about how could I know that the sign was invalid, and after a brief back-and-forth ended with a dismissive and off-the-mark comment like “these hearing people trying to tell deaf about ASL!” by some twenty-something that has no idea who I am nor of my experience and knowledge. But I guess that is where we are moving toward: a lack of civil discourse involving ASL and/or the Deaf World when both deaf and hearing people are involved. And unless something happens, I bet it is gonna get worse.
If you are deaf, consider this – what if I woke up tomorrow and decided that, as an duly-appointed-by-no-one-representative-of-English-speakers that deaf people shall not be allowed to use written English unless they are communicating with a hearing English speaking person. Sure, you may have been forced to learn it in school, but you really learned it to be able to interact with hearing English speakers in the hearing world, right? Not other deafies. So since you learned it for hearing benefit, using MY native language to communicate amongst yourselves is for deaf benefit and a form of cultural appropriation. If all cultures are to be treated equal then would I not have the right to set boundaries and/or state acceptable usages?
And what if I reminded you that you do not HAVE to use written English amongst yourselves because here are writing systems like SignWriting which has been around for decades and is even supported in Unicode, meaning it can be used with all modern computers and browsers (and even some phones), so there is no excuse not to use it! No one is stopping you from learning it, right? So why not start using it instead of my language? What if I got a bunch of other hearing people to agree with me? Would that make it right?
You might look at that and want to say, “that’s different, English was forced upon us long ago!” but before you can finish the sentence I tell you that “since you are not a native English speaker, you do not get to talk about it,” or tell you that you just do not want to listen, and then block you from commenting while other hearing people basically all chime in with the same message. The feelings you are having right now thinking about that are the same ones hearing ASL users and students are dealing with trying to interact with some overly-aggressive deafies.
So we all have to decide – is this something we want to talk about together, and have real discussions about, or is it something to exclude and/or control, throw blame around, and leave no room for outside opinions on it?