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,â€Å"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. â€Å"Deaf people can be found in every ethnic group,†¦show more content†¦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 d eaf 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, â€Å"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, Ten nessee, 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 FlorentineShow MoreRelatedChildren With Disabilities Act ( Ada )1222 Words   |  5 PagesBefore 1990 the United States did not systematically have tools or laws in place for Deaf individuals. In 1991, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) – a civil rights law was implemented across the U.S [with four sections] that prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities including deaf and hearing impaired people. The purpose of the ADA is to make sure that people with disabilities have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. 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