Essay about Discrimination Against the Deaf Culture
The deaf community does not see their hearing impairment as a disability but as a culture which
includes a history of discrimination, racial prejudice, and segregation. According to an online
transcript, Through Deaf Eyes (Weta and Florentine films/Hott productions Inc., 2007) there are thirty
five million Americans that are hard of hearing. Out of the thirty five million an estimated 300,000
people are completely deaf. There are ninety percent of deaf people who have hearing parents
(Halpern, C., 1996). Also, most deaf parents have hearing children. With this being the
exemplification, deaf people communicate on a more intimate and significant level with hearing
people all their lives. Deaf people can be found in every ethnic group, ... Show more content on
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According to an online journal by Carla A. Halpern, in 1817, a Connecticut clergyman named Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet, opened the first permanent school for the deaf in Hartford (Halpern, C., 1996).
This deaf school was for American children which only had seven students and a head teacher by the
name of Laurent Clerc. Clec was from the Paris Institution for the Deaf and had been deaf since
infancy. He bought to the United States a nonverbal form of communication known as French sign
language (Halpern, C., 1996). The technique that Clerc taught was by the use of his hands, which he
communicated with French sign language, blended with a bit of signs used by students in the United
States. To Gallaudet the language was a inspiration which he called it, Highly poetical (Weta and
Florentine films/Hott productions Inc., 2007), but to Clerc and many of the deaf people, the using of
sign was natural and useful. This was a result of a created acculturated nonverbal language known as
American Sign Language (ASL). As new schools for the deaf spread west and south, American sign
language also evolved as well in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky,
Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois. By the year of 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed a law constituting the first
college in the world for deaf students called Gallaudet University and all these schools used sign as a
curriculum (Weta and Florentine
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