A Culture of Oppression: Education, Deafness, and Blackness in America

A Culture of Oppression: Education, Deafness, and Blackness in America

The word ‘culture’ is so malleable, flexible, all
encompassing (at least from a cosmopolitan point of view) that I feel any
person wishing to deny a certain group the right to constitute themselves a
specific culture to entirely out of line. If any group of people can find
something in common with one another that allows them to feel safe, accepted,
and allows them to relate, I believe they should be able to label it their
culture. Subcultures, or cultures that do not necessarily find themselves in
the same social hierarchy as mainstream cultures, are still cultures regardless
of who accepts them. Two examples of groups whose culture status would normally
be questioned are that of Deaf culture, and Black American culture. Both
compose cultural groups because of the systematic oppression they face in their
daily lives. One of the biggest obstacles, on which this paper will mainly
focus, is the struggle for equal educational opportunities. The struggle
against such oppression brings the communities together into a culture of
solidarity.

Deafness is such a trait that brings people together that would normally be excluded from mainstream society, or the hearing culture that remains status quo.
Historically, deaf people have come together to create their own clubs,
businesses, schools, theatre, language, and other institutions that were meant
to foster a sense of pride and dignity. They have not mourned the fact that
they are without the ability to hear sound, but celebrated the other skills
they have developed in its place. Many deaf people reject the term ‘disabled,’
as they believe it is a limiting title that inherently suggests something is
wrong with them. Before the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975,
many Deaf children were told just that.

Deaf children were sent to public schools and placed in
hearing classrooms where no special accommodations were guaranteed to help them
overcome their hearing impairment. They were expected to learn in the same way
as hearing children, which caused problems. Many would graduate from secondary
school with the average of a third or fourth grade reading level (TESOL
Quarterly 244). After the act of 1975 was passed, it was mandatory for all
public school districts to provide education to any deaf and disabled child,
and provide voice interpreters for the students (Padden and Humphries, 116).
This expansion of disability rights spanned over the next two decades and moved
into the workplace along with public and commercial places. Though steps have
been taken, Deaf people still do not live an entirely equal world. They cannot
move very high on the social ladder in areas where predominately hearing people
rule, due to language and communication barriers. Deaf “culture,” where signing
is the preferred mode of communication is threatened as more speech education
and cochlear implants are being pushed on Deaf children. Deaf schools of higher
education are few and far between compared to predominately hearing schools.
The list goes on. As a social minority, Deaf people must fight to retain their
way of life and communicating while the outside hearing world is relentlessly
trying to force them to assimilate.

Black people in the United States face similar
oppression as Deaf people, but the things they are denied are quite different.
Race has been a factor that has contributed to widespread poverty and
socioeconomic inequality for many Blacks in America. Kwame Ture and Charles
Hamilton lament such atrocities in their book Black Power: The Politics of
Liberation. They term such laws, policies, and de facto social practices
keeping Black people from reaching parity with whites as “institutional
racism.” Institutional racism bars Black people from most housing, forcing them
to live in segregated neighborhoods and with this comes segregated schooling,
which leads to poor education, which leads to ill paying jobs—a vicious social
cycle (156). Like Padden and Humphries, Ture and Hamilton believe that the key
to ending such a circle of poverty is quality education.

Quality education means that merely racially integrating
schools is not enough, but that the resources allocated to each school and
spent on each student should be equal. Like Deaf children, many Black children
are passed through the education system year after year without truly mastering
the subjects taught in each grade. The result is a high population of Black
students with underdeveloped skills in math, reading comprehension, science,
and language. For example, white fourth graders are three to four times as
likely as their black and Latino classmates to be reading at the proficient
level (Growing Up American 135). Another consequence of a poor education is an
increase in Juvenile delinquency. If the importance of education is not pushed
for children, they will find themselves out of school, out of work, and most
likely onto the streets. In a world where Black juveniles are five times as
likely as white youths to be incarcerated, or where black juveniles are about
four times as likely to be arrested as their white counterparts, it is hard to
ignore the root causes of these social problems. Black people do not celebrate
the fact that more young black males are in prison rather than in college as
part of their culture, but it is an issue that brings them together. It is a
social consequence of their systematic oppression, which also applies to jobs,
housing, and mobility.

Both groups, the Deaf and the Black people of the United States,
share the common grievance of being a minority. Being a minority comes with the
added baggage of undergoing some kind of structural oppression, whether it be
lack of funding for education, lack of mobility (social and economic), or even
lack of respect from the dominant culture. While facing such great obstacles,
both groups find ways to come together and preserve their way of life. For Deaf
people, this may include sending their children to all deaf schools where
signing is taught over speech. It may also include choosing to live in an all
deaf community, to attend a deaf church, or to work at a business owned by Deaf
people. For Black Americans, it may mean pushing children to succeed
academically, to join Black churches, or do some other community organizing to
keep their friends and family becoming another negative statistic. They key to
community uplift could be through forming labor unions, protesting living and
education conditions.

There is no one solution to any culture’s ills, but in order
for any oppressed group of people to maintain their culture, they must be able
to both celebrate the good parts of their situation and recognize the bad
parts. Sometimes attempting to fix the bad parts takes a little more energy.
Culture is not just what clothes a group of people decide to wear, the dances
they decide to dance, the foods they decide to eat, or the language they decide
to speak. It is an unfortunate truth, but sometimes it is the bad and the
negative aspects of a culture, such as their systematic discrimination that
truly have the power to bring people together. The culture of struggle, the
culture of trying to better the lives of all in one’s cultural group is an
important social aspect that we must not forget to honor.

Works Cited

Edelman, Marian Wright and James M. Jones. “Separate and
Unequal: America's

Children, Race, and Poverty.” Growing Up American. The
Future of Children, Vol.
14, No. 2, Children of Immigrant Families. (Summer, 2004),
pp. 134-137.

Padden, Carol and Tom Humphries. Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005.

Swisher, M. Virginia.
“The Language-Learning Situation of Deaf Students.”
TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 2. (Jun., 1989), pp. 239-257.

Ture, Kwame, and Charles Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics
of Liberation. New
York: Vintage Books, 1967.