by Henry Kisor
Some of the signing deaf also try hard to communicate with the hearing world on its own terms, learning to speak and to lipread. They seek to move between both cultures, deaf and hearing. Others—perhaps the majority—do not. Achieving intelligibility in speech and learning to lipread accurately has been a difficult, often almost impossible ideal for most prelingually deaf. Hence they prefer to bend their efforts to achievement within the deaf world. If they are going to be segregated from the hearing world, they want it to happen on their terms. They want to control their own lives.
That is a laudable pride. But there is also a certain peril in it: a sometimes bizarre militancy among many of the deaf, especially the young. A short time ago some members of Congress discussed the establishment of a research institute to identify deafness early and to prevent and cure it. Several deaf activists protested that because they are an ethnic group, the government shouldn’t seek to cure their ethnicity. “If I had a bulldozer and a gun,” a Gallaudet student leader was quoted as saying, “I would destroy all scientific experiments to cure deafness. If I could hear, I would probably take a pencil and poke myself to be deaf again.”
This is an advocacy of withdrawal, and it has other manifestations. Many, if not most, deaf organizations have declared that the ideal of mainstreaming deaf pupils in hearing schools has been a failure, that the average seventeen-year-old still reads at a fourth-grade level, just as he did in the bad old days of oralism when he was forbidden to sign. The chief reason for the failure, they say, is that mainstreamed deaf students are forced to make their way in signed English, an artificial language that amounts to pidgin, rather than the American Sign Language they contend is more natural to them. The few mainstreamed students, they add, tend to be lonely because they are rebuffed and ignored by the many hearing pupils, and thus miss participating in many activities that teach social and leadership skills. In a school wholly for the deaf, these organizations contend, pupils compete on equal ground with one another, and thus develop socially and emotionally the same way their peers do. Thus these organizations are demanding that the deaf have their own schools, public and private.
These are powerful arguments. But I am not wholly convinced that the failure, on the average, of the mainstreamed deaf to keep up with their hearing peers is not part of a general failure of American education to serve broad segments of its clientele. It’s the rare inner-city hearing high school graduate who can read even at a fourth-grade level, and his peers who are bused to schools in middle-class neighborhoods don’t do much better. Is a new segregation the solution? Or does the answer lie elsewhere, perhaps in a housecleaning of special education as well as general education? This is a complex and controversial question, and I doubt that another all-or-nothing solution, putting all deaf children in residential schools and teaching them American Sign Language, is going to help matters.
Another disagreement in the world of the hearing-impaired revolves around legislation designed to better our lot. Some of the “radicals” among us, for instance, have been demanding strong laws to provide affirmative action in employment. If the deaf are culturally an ethnic group, they contend, preferential treatment laws designed to benefit other disadvantaged groups such as blacks and Hispanics should be extended to them. At first that might sound reasonable, but the skeptics—and I am one of them—point out that affirmative action is supposed to rectify past discrimination, to help once-victimized groups eventually to succeed in society without special assistance. When affirmative action has done what it is intended to, there will no longer be a need for it. What affirmative action for the deaf really means, therefore, is never-ending entitlements for a never-ending disability.
However we define ourselves, we deaf are, for many practical purposes, disabled people. Our lack of functioning ears will always keep us from professions that require hearing. Who among us, for instance, could be an airline pilot, traffic policeman, or radio operator? Affirmative action cannot change that.
What really will help us, in my view, is anti-discriminatory legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed into law during the summer of 1990. Next to the Gallaudet revolution, the passage of this law promises to be the most important public event of the century for the deaf of America.
I must confess to ambivalent emotions about the act’s provisions against discrimination in employment, as well as its sweeping application to all handicaps. It’s obviously desirable that employers be prohibited from denying jobs to the handicapped on the basis of disability alone. But the law also obligates employers to provide “reasonable accommodation” to disabled workers, and that makes me uneasy. My deep-seated need for independence leads me to loathe the notion that my employer must spend money on me that would be unnecessary for a hearing employee. To me, that’s charity forced by law, and an assault on my dignity.
And the broad language of the act makes me fret that “reasonable accommodation,” a concept strongly advocated by the organized deaf community, will in a few notorious cases be taken too far, a danger inherent in many laws of this kind. Let me posit an example: An ambitious veteran book editor at a metropolitan daily who is deaf but oral decides he’s bored with desk work and applies for the post of city hall reporter. This job requires hours of telephone work each day, including dictating stories to the rewrite desk as well as frequent shmoozing in the corridors with politicians. The paper’s management realizes that the book editor is as knowledgeable about city politics as the hearing reporter who is the other candidate for the post, and that he could acquit himself creditably—if a full-time lipreading and phone interpreter were hired to assist him at $25,000 a year.
Both candidates’ talents are equal. But under the provisions of the disabilities act, management cannot deny the deaf editor the job simply because of the cost of accommodating his handicap. There is an escape clause in the act that allows employers to demur because of “undue hardship,” but the paper is a big metropolitan daily with a staff of hundreds, and makes a decent profit. To claim undue hardship might result in a messy and expensive disabled-rights lawsuit as well as embarrassing stories in the competition. Therefore the paper reluctantly gives the job to the book editor and hires an interpreter. From then on, of course, relations between management and employee are subtly strained.
In my more cynical moods I ruminate that such a case might make management less enthusiastic about hiring deaf applicants for entry-level jobs, because of costly potential “reasonable accommodation” demands that might lie in the future. Management might hire only a few handicapped employees, just enough to showcase in the front window and demonstrate compliance with the act however minimal it might be. That happened, and still happens, with the people the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to emancipate.
Is my hypothetical example really as extreme as it seems, a cranky rationalization born of offended pride? Perhaps. But I believe many young deaf people have grown up expecting a good deal of accommodation. From time to time I have exchanged correspondence with hearing-impaired journalism students. Invariably they ask if it was difficult for me to persuade my newspaper to hire an interpreter to help me do my job. When I tell them I have had none, they are astonished. They have gone through their entire grammar school, high school, and college educations with state-financed interpreters in all their classes, and many of them assume that when they go out into the world to work, somebody will hire interpreters to work side by side with them. In professional journalism that’s unlikely to happen, I have told them, to their dismay and sometimes anger. Nobody wants to hire two people to do the job of one. Now, in theory at least, the Americans with Disabilities Act makes that possible.
Having unburdened myself of this worst-case scenario, I must concede that in ordinary practice “reasonable accommodations” are more likely than not to be economical and acceptable to all parties, and a farsighted employer who cheerfully accommodates disabled employees can win much goodwill among the handicapped—in fact, it may even b
e good for business. For instance, the Sun-Times voluntarily provides me with the occasional phone help (an average of twenty minutes a day) of an editorial assistant as well as a transcript typist a few times a year. The cost is chicken feed, perhaps $1,000 a year. The benefit to the paper for this negligible extra expense is a wider range of reliable work from an experienced staffer with a well-known byline.
I’ve sometimes thought that on some out-of-town assignments, such as conventions and book-awards press conferences, I could use a lipreading interpreter. The paper has told me that it would regard as a reasonable expense the hiring of a local lipreading interpreter for $30 or $35 an hour to help me at a press conference or noisy social gathering for two or three hours. What’s more, the paper has said, it wouldn’t need the coercion of a federal law. While it’d be reluctant to approve a proposed out-of-town assignment involving the expense of a full-time traveling interpreter for several days—“that would shoot hell out of my editorial budget,” my boss said—the paper would be happy to pay for a local interpreter during an author interview. I don’t think, however, that I’d take my bosses up on that proposal. Even though I sometimes have trouble understanding my subject, the presence of a third party at an author interview might subtly alter the sometimes fragile friendliness and trust between interviewer and interviewee. I’d rather rely on my unobtrusive little cassette recorder.
I have absolutely no qualms, however, with the act’s other major provision for the hearing-impaired: mandating telephone services for the deaf that are functionally equivalent to those provided to the hearing. In fact, it gladdens my heart. At the same rates hearing people pay for voice telephone service, the deaf will be able to enjoy not only TDDs but also relay services—specially trained third-party operators who serve as real-time go-betweens for deaf users of TDDs and hearing users of voice equipment.
This service will give me a personal and professional communications flexibility I’ve never had. That, for me, is the real emancipation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (It ought to be mentioned that the act also protects the confidentiality of relayed calls. If, for example, I should want to wager on a horse with a nearby bookie, the go-between operator is enjoined by law from tipping off the cops or the tax men.) Who will pay for these services? The phone companies will, as a normal tax-deductible cost of doing business, and the ultimate bill will be footed by the taxpayer. The yearly cost is expected to be between $250 million and $300 million, or about $1.20 per American telephone customer per year—hardly an onerous figure, and one that’s likely to be somewhat offset by a resulting increase in productivity among deaf workers. It’s less an act of charity than an investment that offers the promise of being paid back at least in part—and perhaps in full.
None of these arguments is to say that the deaf don’t deserve a few breaks. We do. In many ways we are getting them, from the private sector as well as the public one, and we will continue to push for them. Our earning power is beginning to increase, and farsighted corporations are slowly learning that establishing goodwill—such as in sponsoring closed captioning of television programs—is a sensible thing to do. Likewise, the more adventurous companies are discovering, is hiring the deaf for jobs they once had been thought unsuited for. If we are realistic about ourselves, we will continue the public and private progress we have made in raising the world’s consciousness about us that went so far in the 1980s.
And one way to be realistic is to admit that some of the deaf, thanks to varying talents and temperaments as well as happenstance, can successfully communicate with the world of the hearing. It is not always easy for us to do so, but the hearing also can find it difficult to achieve those linkages, not only with us but among themselves as well. It may not often happen, but when two dissimilar people—one perhaps deaf, one perhaps hearing—manage to share their humanity with one another, it can be a beautiful thing.
Only connect! That was a literary tenet of the English novelist E. M. Forster, who is not much read today, and that’s a pity. In his novels he showed how just a modest effort to communicate—to connect—could bridge vast chasms of indifference, bringing together people with little in common on a middle ground of mutual and sympathetic insight and understanding.
For the last forty years, I have visited a single barber in his two-chair shop in neighboring Wilmette. John cut my father’s hair and now he shears my sons’ mops. He is a man to whom talk is mother’s milk; as his scissors snick, he chatters ceaselessly. He cannot bear a conversational vacuum. Nor can he speak to the unresponsive sides and back of my head as he works upon them, but must stop now and then, whirl the chair so that I face him, and ask after my family or inquire about my opinion of a sporting event.
He listens gravely as I reply, nods approvingly or commiseratively as the case may be, and returns to his work. Scarcely two minutes later his face, again thirsting for an exchange, reappears in front of mine with another gentle question. Trimming my sparse shrubbery is a drawn-out affair. Am I impatient? No, for John refuses to let my deafness deprive him of his pleasure. He cuts, and he connects.
Epilogue
During the two decades since this book was published in 1990, my life has caromed down avenues I never anticipated. Of course, time has taken its normal toll. As I approach my seventies, my eyesight isn’t what it once was. My lipreading skills have eroded slightly. Conversations are a little more difficult, especially with strangers. Part of the problem is that American society has become much more diverse than it was when I was growing up. No longer is a white Midwestern accent the norm in my territory, for there has been a huge influx of people who speak English as a second language or with a distinctive national accent. This makes lipreading far trickier.
Partly because of hereditary osteoarthritis that pinched my spinal cord, my sense of imbalance grew more acute; sometimes, when turning a corner or getting up from a chair, I will lurch like a drunken sailor, leading those around me to conclude that I had two or three too many. Recent spinal surgery banished most of the pain, but I must still rely on my eyes to keep a level horizon. No longer do I zip through airport security checks, and that’s not entirely the fault of 9/11. My stainless steel artificial knee, also the result of arthritis, triggers paroxysms in magnetic detectors, every time bringing on a full pat-down search, legs spread and arms wide. A heart attack and triple bypass surgery have further complicated matters. All these things, however, are part of the normal course of life.
Both my beloved parents are gone, having lived into their nineties still fiercely proud of the son they had set on a road not often taken. They had watched eagerly as What’s That Pig Outdoors? opened unexpected doors for me, one of them being a whole new career. So, happily, did my sons, who are now grown and fathers themselves.
Pig was praised beyond my most extravagant dreams, primarily because it was on a subject ordinary readers found fresh and new. Newspapers and magazines small and large liked it. A few grouches in the culturally Deaf world took exception, contending that the book was irrelevant because I refused to accept my deafness and learn American Sign Language—but in my experience most Deaf and hearing-impaired people (more about this seemingly redundant terminology later) simply were delighted that one of us had written a popular book that attempted to explain one person’s life of deafness. Since then there have been other similar memoirs—from both the oral and the signing camps—but mine was first to stake out the territory.
The reviews inflated my sometimes shaky ego, especially during the publicity tour when the media, including radio and television, and groups and institutions of all kinds asked me to speak to them about the issues Pig had raised. This was electrifying. Suddenly people everywhere didn’t care how I spoke. They wanted to hear what I had to say. This was a happy new development for me, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. No longer was I the terrified wallflower capable of faking fatal illness in order to avoid having to stand and deliver. Before long I had turned into a cool and confident speaker before a c
rowd.
The quality of my speech, however, has remained the same: lucid and understandable in calm and quiet situations, distorted and sometimes unintelligible in others. (It has been more than a decade since I had speech therapy at Northwestern. The student therapists helped me as much as they could, but after a few years the returns stopped increasing.)
And I was not entirely unassisted. Debby and occasionally Colin or Conan went along on many of my talks, serving as interpreters (often both ways) when interviewers and audiences had difficulty understanding my speech. Most of all, I reveled in “communication access real-time translation,” or CART for short, in which a professional court reporter, usually with a printed copy of my talk, would keyboard it into a laptop that projected the words on a large screen before the audience at the very instant I spoke them.
Of course I was not entirely successful. A few commercial radio and television producers discarded the results of taped interviews because they feared my imperfect speech would annoy their listeners and anger their advertisers. Many more interviewers, however, used the simple and familiar device of repeating key sentences I had said, apparently to emphasize them but actually to enhance their audiences’ understanding. Noah Adams of National Public Radio and the late Studs Terkel of Chicago’s fine arts station had done this for speakers of broken or dialectical English—why not for a deaf guest? Resolutely they aired our talks. (My appearances, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been most successful on NPR and PBS stations, where producers and hosts are more adventurous than those at commercial outlets.)