A look of incredulity and that “you-can’t-be-serious?!” sometimes doesn’t cut thru some hearing ppl’s dense thinking or un-thinking, whichever way you see it. Some ppl will try to weasel around by putting the onus on d/Deaf ppl, so they have to be reminded there’s a law (ADA in USA, for one) that requires accommodations and makes discrimination against those with disabilities an illegal act. Unfortunately in some cases, a lawsuit has to be won in order to get compliance.

You’d be surprised at how often these things occur. According to the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Annual Report 2008-2009 reported that ” 55% of current complaints received by the Ontario Human Rights Commission relate to people with disabilities. That is as much as race and colour, sexual harassment, creed, and age combined. Over half of those disability complaints relate to accommodation.” (Malkowski.
Attitudinal Barriers Facing Persons with Disabilities, Deaf Persons and Individuals with Hearing Loss: Ableism and Audism)

.

As for how to respond to these comments, I think a simple look of incredulity and a “You can’t be serious?!!” should drive home the idea of how biased (and illegal) comments like this are.

Shel, you cited a number of comments commonly referred to as examples of audism. How about also coming up with examples of answers/ways to counter those remarks?

In the gay community, many claim the term “queer” with pride even though that term was used pejoratively by intolerant people. What is wrong with claiming Deaf, despite its negative connotations in the Hearing world?

Perhaps what we should do is focus on eliminating “deaf” metaphors rather than educating about deaf people. That could be more effective and make later public education a lot easier if there is no prior negativity.

Or we might need a new set of words. Even in poetry, we don’t say “deaf” when we mean “silent” –what if we called ourselves “people of silence” instead?