A Fair Chance in the Race of Life: The Role of Gallaudet University in Deaf History

2. John Carlin and Deaf Double-Consciousness

2 John Carlin and Deaf Double-Consciousness Christopher Krentz Editors’ Introduction In 1854, John Carlin called for a national college to expand deaf people’s intellectual and professional possibilities and to create an elite deaf class. Fittingly, in 1864, he received the first honorary degree granted by the institution that became Gallaudet University. Yet, as Christopher Krentz shows in this essay, Carlin also belittled “average” deaf people by internalizing mainstream perceptions of deaf persons as below average and incapable of success. Krentz analyzes Carlin’s literary works to explain this seeming contradiction. He writes that Carlin suffered from personal experiences with oppression and agonized over the lack of economic and social mobility for deaf people. The result was a deaf “double-consciousness,” similar to that of educated African Americans during the late nineteenth century. Carlin’s ongoing struggle between feelings of pride and inferiority elucidates a theme found throughout deaf history. The National Association of the Deaf in the 1920s endorsed marriage limitations between congenitally deaf partners, for example, and passed a resolution to work with medical groups to cure deafness. Furthermore, important segments of the American deaf community resisted William Stokoe’s efforts to demonstrate that American Sign Language was a full and complete language, separate from English. Krentz provides a way to understand why “doubleconsciousness ” has persisted, even as historical conditions and attitudes towards deaf people have changed. Significant portions of this essay are reprinted from Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Christopher Krentz. Copyright  2007 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress. unc.edu 12 John Carlin and Deaf Double-Consciousness 13 It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro ; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. —W. E. B. Du Bois DU BOIS’S FAMOUS ASSERTION IN The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that African Americans have a double-consciousness, a psychic split brought about by living among a white majority that views them with “amused contempt and pity,” potentially illuminates the psychology of many oppressed people.1 According to Du Bois, black Americans internalize dominant condescending views leading to a “peculiar sensation” where feelings of self-esteem battle with feelings of inadequacy. This inner division could describe the mental state of many marginalized or minority groups, from Native Americans to women, who struggle to articulate positive identities in a society that routinely deems them inferior. During the nineteenth century, deaf American authors contended with a doubleconsciousness of their own. They had to form their individual and collective notions of self through two distinct frames: their association with each other, through fluent sign language and shared experiences, and their interaction with hearing people, who rarely knew sign language, spoke English, and sometimes responded to them with contempt or neglect . As a result, in their writing deaf American authors often both celebrate deaf identity and reinforce assumptions of deaf insufficiency. This double-consciousness shows up especially clearly in the writings of John Carlin (1813–1891), the deaf leader who played a prominent role in the establishment and early days of the National Deaf-Mute College (now Gallaudet University). Carlin was one of the most accomplished deaf people in mid-nineteenth -century America. Born deaf in 1813 and educated at the Pennsylvania Institution, he went on to a successful career as a painter, writer, sculptor, acquaintance of hearing leaders like Horace Greeley and William Seward, and an orator whose sign language presentations were in demand at deaf events. In 1854 he became one of the first people, if not 14 Christopher Krentz the first, to issue a written call for a national college for deaf Americans. Ten years later, at the inauguration of the National Deaf-Mute College, he delivered the main address and received the college’s first honorary degree in recognition of his accomplishments. Although he used sign language, married a deaf woman, and was a life-long advocate of deaf people, in his written works Carlin displays deep ambivalence toward his deaf identity, oscillating between viewing deaf people as inferior...