Why America Needs Deaf Culture: Cultural Pluralism and the Liberal Arts Tradition

WHY AMERICA NEEDS DEAF CULTURE: CULTURAL PLURALISM AND THE LIBERAL ARTS TRADITION Stephen Wilbers University of Minnesota At the conclusion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,the narrator retreats to the hole of his basement, where he wires the entire ceiling, every square inch of it, with 1,368 lightbulbs. There, brilliantly illuminated yet invisible to the outside world, he contemplates the irony of his existence. A black man in white America, suffering from the ultimate humiliation: non-existence. After some twenty years of searching for his black American identity, the invisible man discovers that in the eyes of white America, mainstream America, he simply does not exist. His dilemma is analogous to the condition of Deaf culture in America today. In the minds of many hearing Americans, the deaf community simply does not exist. While prejudice may be a factor in this perception, the cause, I believe, runs deeper. It has to do with how we see ourselves as Americans. It has to do with our traditional assumptions about who we are as a people, about how we define our national identity. And it has to do with our feelings and thoughts about diversity, about people and cultures that differ from the mainstream. As citizens of a nation characterized by racial and cultural diversity from its beginnings, we have responded to our cultural dissimilarity basically in three ways. According to historian Russell Menard (1986:2), two of them, Anglo-conformity and the ideal of the melting pot, "stressed assimilation, usually ignored non-Europeans, and appeared early in American history." The third, pluralism, is a more recent phenomenon. Rather than assimilation, it celebrates diversity and "at least in some version escapes the Eurocentrism ofAnglo-conformity and the melting @ 1988 by Linstok Press, Inc. 195 ISSN 0302-1475 See note inside front cover. Why America Needs Deaf Culture pot by recognizing the key role of blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and Asians in American life" (Menard, 1986:2). In the 1960s the Eurocentric assumptions and assimilationist thinking of Anglo-conformist and melting pot theorists were "forcefully challenged, first by blacks and later by Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics" (Menard, 1986:3). Menard (ibid.:4)explains how this challenge came to be reflected in the university curriculum: Scholars, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement , more of them moved by the struggles of minority groups forjustice and recognition, became increasingly sensitive to the diversity of the American experience and incorporated that concern into their research and teaching .... By the mid- 1970's, a pluralist approach to the American experience had established a secure place in the university curriculum. Courses across the curriculum recognized the persistent diversity of American culture and went beyond the Eurocentric vision of earlier formulations to acknowledge the key role of people of color in U.S. history and life. In some ways, this change came as an obvious and natural transition. Traditionally, liberal education has been associated with breadth in learning. As Jerry G. Gaff (1983:7) reminds us in GeneralEducationToday, one of the widely accepted attributes of general education as a curriculum is that it -provides students with familiarity with various branches of human understanding as well as the methodologies and languages particular to different bodies of knowledge." To recognize American cultural diversity and declare it a body of knowledge suitable for academic inquiry, then, was not a particularly radical departure. My argument in this article is that the time has come for American higher education to take the next logical step. The time has come for us to extend this same notion of pluralistic recognition and inquiry to the language and culture of the deaf community. SLS 59 Summer 1988 One might even note that, compared to ethnic cultures in American society, Deaf culture offers a unique feature. Like gender, it cuts across all racial and economic lines. One illustration of this is the fact that deaf children (ofwhom over 90%are born to hearing parents) commonly include in their concept of "family" their teachers and deaf schoolmates as well as their parents and relatives. Deaf culture is unique in the sense that it overlays segments of other subcultures and redefines traditional social boundaries and...