Signing a Path Forward
If you were offered one million dollars would you take it? Now here’s the one catch: you’d have to give up your hearing. To the average hearing person, they’d most likely tell you that there's no price you can put on your hearing but to a panelist of legally deaf people, they’d all tell you that they’d take the million dollars over their hearing.
It sounds shocking to most, but Rebecca McMillion, American Sign Language Professor at Elon University, poses this question at every deaf panel she attends in order to raise awareness about the deaf community.
“If a hearing person lost hearing, we think we would give anything to have it back,” McMillion said. “But, the majority of Deaf people are thinking about how one million dollars will pay the bill.”
While a panel is just a small portion of the community, they serve as a symbol for the rest of the deaf community and how, at times, they are deeply misunderstood by the hearing community.
McMillion, when she first started studying American Sign Language, with no personal experience other than an interest in deaf education, saw these two worlds as vastly different but soon learned that they’re very similar.
“I thought, probably like a lot of people think, that deafness defines their lives and they're always thinking about it and they wish they could hear. But it doesn’t,” she said. “They're thinking about the same stuff we are.”
In an effort to set these misconceptions straight and offer an unbiased portal into educating the hearing community about the deaf language and culture, classes are offered at universities across the country.
Classes at universities like Elon University, offer the opportunity for hearing students to learn both the language of ASL and the culture that comes within the deaf community. These classes both educate and bridge the gap between the hearing and the deaf.
Taylor Turgeon, a sophomore at Elon University, was able to gain insight to what being deaf is through her participation in the classes.
“There’s a different way of life about the deaf community and that’s why they call it deaf culture,” Turgeon said. “It’s not that they just can’t hear, it’s much more than that.”
The difference of these two worlds--one full of noise and the other silent--can seem astronomical but there are people like Carlene Boozier, who work to serve as a connection between these two worlds.
As an interpreter of ASL, she bridges the gap between the different ways of life.
“I enjoy being able to bridge that gap in communication because this is a hearing world but they are deaf so helping them be inclusive is important; I think that's the biggest thing,” Boozier said.
While inventions like the cochlear implant exist to try and better the hearing of deaf people, many deaf people opt out of receiving the implant. The push for hearing people to help people they know who are deaf impacts how deaf people look towards the larger community.
However, the determination and will that the deaf community has is greatly visible to those in and around the community.
Even Boozier, who has been privileged to become, in a way, a member of the deaf community, fails to understand how someone could live without their hearing. With this comes an amazement and appreciation of a community she’s proud to know and understand.
“For most of the deaf people I’ve met their demeanor was just they had a great demeanor,” she said. “If I were to lose my hearing I would probably feel like my world came to an end.”
But that’s not the case for the deaf community. They are a group of people rich in culture who stand strong in the face of misunderstanding, misconceptions and discrimination. They remain a resilient and vibrant group that is proud of how they are.