Sunny submitted:
Hi, so I’m a hearing person with the desire to learn ASL. I’ve been learning it slowly through lessons on Lifeprint’s website. I told a friend this a while back, and she got really irritated with me. Her mom is d/Deaf (do I capitalize that? sorry), so I was wondering if it’s offensive for me to be learning it at all when I don’t have any deaf people consistently in my life. It’s helped me with customers at work (they all seemed very pleased that I was trying), and she’s the only person I know that’s gotten bothered by it. Still, I don’t want to offend a community by accident.
Is it appropriative for me to be learning ASL? If not, do you have an idea on why my friend was so bothered? Also, what all can I do as a hearing person to be supportive of the Deaf community?
First of all, I think it’s awesome that you not only want to learn ASL, but you’re taking steps to actually learn it. This is fantastic, especially since Lifeprint is a really accurate and useful tool to learn with!
For the deaf versus Deaf capitalization, it depends on if your friends mom is part of the Deaf community. If so, she would be Deaf. If her mom doesn’t participate in the local Deaf community, then she’d most likely be deaf. does that make sense?
I don’t know why your friend got irritated with you, as most people are very excited that others are learning ASL. It widens one’s social circles and makes it that much easier for those whose primary communication is ASL. Just like most other languages, learning ASL isn’t frowned upon, and is not appropriative of the culture. The only way that learning a new language is bad is if you only learn it to say bad words and dirty phrases- that is the only way I can think of to be offensive in learning ASL.
Like I said, I haven’t got a clue why your friend is bothered by learning ASL. Does she know ASL herself? If not, she could have been made uncomfortable by someone learning something that she isn’t willing to learn for her family. You may want to ask her about it if it is really bothering you.
When it comes to what you can do as hearing person to be supportive of the Deaf community... Keep learning ASL. Stand up for accessibility and if you see a video without captions and are able to, caption it. See if you can get your workplace to have small sessions on deaf communication if there are deaf customers there. Go to Deaf events (the ones that welcome hearing people. Most do but check just in case). Hang out with more deafies, and just listen to people in your local Deaf community when they talk about deaf stuff. Sometimes just being there helps.
Does anyone else have any advice?
