Warning: I may come off as making some slight political rants on this one. I would have never thought this was political, but here we are. My goal with this post is to educate and hopefully take the politics out of this.
I was playing on X the other day and came across the most ridiculous post I’ve seen in a long time. It was from Christopher Rufo, who is apparently a pretty big conservative activist. In his post, he is referring to an interpreter from a press conference on the wildfires in LA. This is a direct quote:
“I’m sorry, but we have to stop with the ridiculous sign language interpreter, who turn serious press conferences into a farce. There are closed captions on all broadcast channels and streaming services. No wild human gesticulators necessary.” He then doubled down as people tried to educate him on ASL. “Why the wild gesticulations?” He then said that he went back into videos from the nineties and didn’t see these “ridiculous movements”.
This is disturbing enough, but the amount of support he had shocked me. People came on and said that they agreed with him, and that interpreters were just a method of them showing how “woke” and “inclusive” you are, and a waste of money. People pointed out that ASL is not a very common first language, so the fact that we are “pandering” to people who “need to learn English” is woke nonsense that we need to get rid of.
I’m going to briefly address the term “woke” here. Woke is a slang term that means “being aware of and attentive to social and racial justice issues, originating with African-Americans.” If treating everyone we meet with love, respect and dignity is considered woke, then count me in. I do not care to be part of anything hateful, whether it be a political movement or even religion. The Jesus I know and love said the greatest commandment was to love one another. I’m willing to bet he didn’t stutter, either.
<End political rant here.>
Now that the politics is out of the way, let’s get to the nuts and bolts of this incredible misconception of ASL and Deaf culture. First, I want to go into my background, because I don’t want to make myself out to be some expert. While I am by no means anywhere near fluent in ASL, I can communicate and hold conversations, so long as the Deaf person is patient with me. (Love you for this, Paloma!) I have taken ASL classes and have a basic grasp of the grammar. If you ask me to interpret someone signing fluently, I would only get one out of every few words, although I’ll probably get a basic grasp of the conversation.
So with that said, Mr. Rufo…let’s educate you.
First, let’s talk about what ASL is and why English is hard for Deaf people. I’m speaking of ASL in general, but it’s important to note that there are as many signed languages as there are spoken ones. It is not universal. Signed languages develop exactly the same as spoken languages. This is going to seem obvious when you think about it, but spoken languages don’t come naturally to Deaf kids as it does hearing kids. They are visual, therefore, their language is visual. ASL is NOT “English on the hands”. It has its own grammar and vocabulary. Matter of fact, ASL is more similar to French in grammar than English. There is a signing system, “signed English”, that is “English on the hands.” This is not a unique language, it basically takes ASL vocabulary and uses English grammar. This is normally used to teach Deaf kids English in schools, with some mixed results.
The reason those results are mixed is not intuitive, but profound. All of the English language is based off of sound. We learn it by listening to our elders. We instinctively pick up tenses and “extra words”. (I’ll get back to this eventually.) That’s why it’s so effective to teach young children other languages. They pick them up more naturally. Those sounds later translate to words on a page, after learning the sounds of the alphabet. If you are a Deaf child, you get none of this. English is not a natural language to learn, and is very hard. Particularly English, which has a gazillion grammar rules with an equal number of exceptions. In addition, someone deaf is a very visual person. There are “extra” words in English that have no ASL equivalent. These include words such as the, be, is, am, are, of, and other non-visual words. These clarify meaning in English for us, but they have no visual meaning. It also includes some endings. For instance, the sign for “sleep” and “is sleeping” is exactly the same. ASL is a conceptual language. You have to think in pictures. The result of all of this is that Deaf people have varying levels of English skill. Many older Deaf people were never taught English, because the education system just didn’t bother with it. Many younger people are completely fluent. So while you can have closed captions, it may be of limited use. It would be like the presentation being in Spanish with Spanish closed captions, but you only have about a third grade reading level in Spanish. You will get some of it, but will be missing chunks. Or you may be very fluent and do just fine. It’s all up to the individual. In addition, the closed captioning is frequently full of errors, especially if it is a live event.
Now for the “wild gesticulations” part of that utterly ridiculous post. In spoken English, we convey a large amount of information with the tone of our voices. Not only can the Deaf not hear this, but it does not get conveyed by closed captioning. This is where the “wild gesticulations” comes in. It’s not wild. A completely unique part of ASL is that facial expressions are official grammatical markers. One of the first lessons you learn in ASL is that your face must communicate just as much as your hands, or you have left half of the meaning out of your statement. The facial expressions and more emphatic movements of the hands serve the exact same function as raising or lowering our voices to emphasize the importance of what we are saying. They also distinguish between types of sentences, such as a statement, question, or command.
With all that said, I think I’ll go back to the politics again. I would pose this question to those that denounced the interpreters as “unnecessary pandering to a small community” and “woke, inclusive nonsense.” I clicked on some of your profiles, and a huge amount of them had stuff in the tag line like “God-loving”, “Christian” and other descriptions of their faith in God. So tell me….what would Jesus do?
I think he’d bust out into some ASL, that’s what He would do. I think some of these “anti-woke” people need to reconsider their beliefs and check out that Bible gather dust on their shelves. Because the Deaf community needs the information to save their lives just as much as the Hearing community. The attitudes I saw were just nasty rantings of people that have defined “woke” as something that isn’t them, therefore it doesn’t matter in the least and needs to just get out of their sight. So when I ask you what Jesus would do, I’m not sure you’re going to like the answer in this case. It doesn’t match what you would do. But answer it honestly and learn from it. It’s not too late to grow as a human.
Unapologetically Disabled 