Is Deafhood a tool for Discriminatory Profiling? Well, it is either yes or no, as it vary from one person to another, depending on the development and functioning of personality within social contexts of the deaf person.

As Dianrez pointed it out the “Deafhood began as a social theory, in the tradition of Maslow, Adler, Erickson and others. It became developed further by the Californians Lentz, Eberwein, and Gertz into a philosophy that some considered cult-like….”

All deaf persons will go or live through various stages of deafhood and its final stage “self-actualization” of accepting their deafness without any prejudged feeling toward themselves and others.

It seems like everyone has their own ideal final stage of “self-actualization.” I think no individual have the right to impose others to conforming to their individual’s or group of individuals’ expectation.

The Gestalt Prayer

I am I, and you are you. I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine.

If by chance we meet, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped. –

Fritz Perls, M.D.

Ann C and I already corresponded via email about this, and I explained to her why I held her comment up, and moved it to the next blog entry. I also asked for her patience as there are things happening in my life… hectic right now, especially with the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend that is here. I am not sure when the next blog will be posted. Her comment had me thinking in different directions, so that is why I wanted to move her comment.

Others are welcome to respond to your lengthy comment. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to you!

Responding to Mr. John Egbert’s comment:

I have been with Internet since late 1985 and I have seen people making mistakes in the discourses. I will not try to be too judgmental on these people for I also made same mistakes. It is my hope that they will reduce the frequency of making same mistakes.

There is a lot of truth to what you said about anonymity. When a person makes a comment in an anonymous way, one very immediate effect is that the readers have no personality and personal conflicts with the anonymous person. Because the readers do not know the anonymous person, the only thing that they can judge is the comment itself made by the anonymous person. It is like carrying no baggage. This principle can be applied to the commenters who are not anonymous. It takes practices to focus only on the message rather than thrashing the messenger that conveys the message.

One side effect of communicating with the anonymous people is that it makes you recognize your stereotypes and preconceptions.

But, not all uses of anonymity are helpful and beneficial. Some anonymous comments can be harmful but there are ways to deal with them. I am sure that the readers are very familiar with this dark side of anonymity.

Responding to Ms. Linda Slovick’s comment:

It would be nice that I would participate in the process to improve or change the definition of Deafhood. However, whether this will be possible will depend on how open the leaders and scholars are to the deaf people who have very diverse experiences.

I will go over three angles to demonstrate how difficult the process of defining Deafhood will be. Throughout my comment, I inserted some questions. These questions are not to provoke or aggravate anyone but are my attempts to understand the contour of Deafhood and how it is used in different contexts.

Deafhood within the context of sociology:

Ideally, the scholars in sociology should be completely objective and their job is to record the events that are happening to a group of people and to record their experiences as individual and as a group. They also study the data to form appropriate theories that describe the different characteristics of a group of people.

Do I understand correctly that the scholars in the study of Deafhood accept all kinds of experiences that deaf people had? Here is one extreme example:

A deaf person was born to hearing parents, received cochlear implant when he was one year old, acquired the spoken English language, never used signed languages, attended hearing schools, married to a deaf woman who also had cochlear implant, had one deaf child who also received cochlear implant when he was one year old, used only the spoken English language with the child, got involved in social activities with the hearing people, and was very happy to be part of the majority hearing culture all through his life.

Is his experience part of Deafhood? If not, why is his experience not accepted for Deafhood?

I understand better what you meant by a group of people sharing the similar negative experience that led them to form as a community to make a positive change in the life of deaf people. But, I am not sure if all negative experiences are supposed to be part of Deafhood. I will share a negative experience that I had.

When I was 15 years old, I entered a deaf school as a resident student for the first time. My experience at the residence during the first year was not pleasant. I was being bullied, was made fun of, and picked on by a group of deaf students, some of them are Deaf-of-Deaf. (To balance this out, I also met some new friends at the residence.) Is this kind of experience part of Deafhood?

Shel’s perspective on Deafhood as the Deaf experience seems to include all kinds of experiences. Is that correct? I really don’t know. Do the strong proponents of Deafhood accept all kinds of experiences regardless of whether they are positive or negative? How about the scholars in study of Deafhood? If it is not correct that Deafhood accepts all kinds of experiences, are there any criteria that are used to exclude some experiences from being part of Deafhood?

Deafhood within the context of philosophy:

I notice that a lot of discussions were on the philosophy of Deafhood. Some said that Deafhood is this way and not other way. Other said that Deafhood is that other way and not this way. Some insist, sometimes in forceful way, that Deafhood applies to all deaf people regardless of whether they think otherwise. Others thought that Deafhood did not apply to everyone. Some said different things about Deafhood.

I am fine with all of these different views on Deafhood. Yet, I still have a problem with some people who insist that their philosophy of Deafhood applies to all deaf people including myself. Can they even recognize that Deafhood is not the only one way that applies to all deaf people? Can they even have enough tolerance and respect for some deaf people who do not think that Deafhood applies to them? Can they acknowledge that there are some deaf people who have diverse views on the lives of deaf people?

I am not oblivious to the fact that some philosophers think that their philosophies are right and that the other philosophies are wrong. I observe that few strong proponents of Deafhood are like them. They think that they are right about Deafhood and those who disagree with them are wrong. I have encountered such kind of people. I will not force them to accept my positions even though I don’t agree with them and I let them be what they want to be. But, I hope that they should at least recognize that if they are insistent that they are right, they are partially responsible for not allowing others to participate in forming the definition of Deafhood. In other words, Deafhood could be used as an exclusionary tool. This can lead to problems. In this case, it will be very difficult for deaf people to participate in forming the concept of Deafhood.

It is not hard to acknowledge others’ different opinions on Deafhood but it seems that it eludes few strong proponents of Deafhood.

Deafhood within the context of organizational activities:

I observe that some organizations such as Deaf Bilingual Coalition and California Association of the Deaf use Deafhood as part of its agenda, policy or activity. I have no problem with the organizations using Deafhood. It is the business of the organizations to use or not to use Deafhood for whatever purposes. However, their use of Deafhood is slightly different from the use of Deafhood in philosophy and sociology. They may have specific reasons for using Deafhood. It could be that they use Deafhood to advance their goals. Sometimes, the goals are beneficial. Sometimes, the goals serve only the organizations. In this context, it is extremely difficult to allow the deaf people who have different opinions on Deafhood to be part of these organizations.

It is not surprising that the very serious tensions that we saw in the deaf blogsphere occurred when Deafhood is used to advance an organization’s interests and these interests are not aligned with the dissenters’ interests. There are ways to handle this kind of situation but I will not go into this.

I want to mention one last point before I close. It is about deleting comments that some commenters experienced at DeafVideo.tv. This is unfortunate. It is not limited to one side of the issues surrounding Deafhood. I have seen both sides eliminating the comments or not allowing some comments. I am very worried about what Shel did to the comment made by Ann_C. I hope that Shel will post the entirety of the comment in her next blog entry.

When one removes a comment or blocks a person from making comment, what he really does is that he takes away the space of communication from the commenter. This rarely helps anyone. Every time that a commenter feels that his or her space of communication is taken away, he does not feel that he has the respect or tolerance for his view. To me, giving anyone a space in the sphere of communication is like giving respect to the person and this can lead to greater tolerance for the person’s view. To take away the space from the person is to diminish the respect and tolerance that the person deserves. This is my personal view and I can understand how others may feel differently. In this case, I really don’t condone anyone trying to remove your comments.

I again apologize for the length of this comment.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
josephpietrojeungriolo@gmail.com

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain.

This is to let you know I received your comment, but I would like to address your points, in another blog if you don’t mind.

I would like to continue to focus on the positive discourse re: Deafhood the Deaf Experience I see occurring here. Thank you for your patience.

Shel

As for my mistake re: Deafchip’s family background… I actually know him and chatted with him in the past. He simply reminded me of a fact that I forgot. GASP! I’m living proof that school teachers ARE human!

I’m surprised at you for naming some deaf people on your blog without knowing the history of the deafness in their families. This is irresponsible of you to do that without askig them for their permission in advance. A school teacher like you should know better than that, Ms. Potma.

My own view is that it is the SHARING of our negative experiences that STARTS the positive part of the experience… That Deafhood acknowledges the individual audiometrically deaf person’s own experience, but also acknowledges that once we get together (usually because we feel the experience as shared) that the community thus formed CAN become a very positive force.

You are right, however, that this has not actually occurred. To MY view, this is due to a possibly-deliberate muddying of the definition, especially by Mr. Sewell, who seems to believe that Deafhood means that the community encouraged by Deafhood is necessarily an exclusive one (“not deaf enough” need not apply).

When I politely challenged him on that point (saying that Paddy Ladd himself grew up oral, and was mainstreamed for his own education… Does that mean Paddy Ladd is excluded from his own Deafhood idea?), Mr. Sewell removed my comment claiming that that I had used bad language, and found an excuse to subsequently ban me.

From what I’ve seen and read, I am pretty sure that by now, my experience with attempting to politely counter Mr. Sewell’s arguments is far from unique.

Perhaps we can begin again here? It is SO very refreshing to discuss the topic with somebody who tries hard to answer what I meant!

So to summarize, I agree with you that a deaf person’t Deafhood experience is not automatically positive, but believe that this correlates strongly to avoiding the community that is formed by our very-similar individual Deafhood journeys.

That is, understanding Deafhood allows me to use the similarity of the d/Deaf situation to the situation of other subaltern groups to understand this very d/Deaf against D/deaf problem.

Not that this understanding is unique to Deafhood (Ladd credits Harlan Lane for a lot of the ideas that became Deafhood, but also cultural theorist/activist, Stuart Hall, among others), but that our situation vis-a-vis other subaltern groups shows us advocacy and activism strategies we might (or might not) find to be similarly useful.

Hence to me, the DBC’s activism, in part, DOES stem from Deafhood, but the DBC is really pretty tame, because it is just trying to use strategies others have found successful, and changes as it finds things that do and don’t work.

The big bad DBC image largely, in my opinion, a creation of Mr. Sewell’s persistent drumbeat to his followers that anything Ella supports (DBC, AFA, Deafhood, Deafhood Foundation, CAD) must be fought against, simply because he dislikes Ella…

What would Deafhood look like if evaluated without this bias? I DO think it would be more positively perceived, which is why I feel I can understand the film’s stressing the positive posibilities of being able to work together as a counter-narrative to Mr. Sewell’s persistent negativity on the subject, all the while insisting that he “doesn’t need to understand Deafhood.”

In my opinion, you cannot discuss anything objectively if you neither know about the subject, nor like th epeople who support it, AND do not work hard to overcome this bias.

Clearly, you DO do your homework and I DO feel that the points you make are valid.

Is there any way we can work together to get the distortions against Deafhood corrected, so that we can explore what might be useful about the perspective, and go on to developing strategies and techniques that work somewhat like those in ethnic, cultural, disability, gender studies, but that FIT our situation better because we have tuned them to our commonly-shared deaf needs, as well as our individual preferences about how much we should try to assimilate (vs. how much stress “passing” is) into the still-overwhelmingly dominant society.

Hope this is clearer! It is SO GOOD to have you in our discussion!