Greetings Economists, On Nov 4, 2006, at 1:40 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
and deaf students at Gallaudet, apparently the only US campus that saw a huge upheaval (missing from anti-war campus protests) in recent times.
The Disabled Rights movement born in the early seventies was based on the principles of uniting all Disabled People at once. Large segments of the Deaf Community have rejected the label of 'Disabled', and the fierce fight at Gallaudet has it's roots in the nineteenth century effort by persons like Alexander Graham Bell to force the Deaf Community into the main stream by lip reading and efforts to make signing like English. to force like they did the Native American children, the Deaf child to abandon all the previous generations of Deaf People fought to gain a common way to communicate. Remember the phrase "Deaf And Dumb"? The Dumb part is still there in terms of the fierce fight to make Deaf people "HEAR". What this brings up is a deep issue in uniting the working class as a universal movement to share with a broad Disabled People or more broadly the whole working class. Language work, sharing a language is often seen as how dominant languages like English really possess a huge advantage in terms of what is carried in the cultural and intellectual content of shared language. Sign language and deafness confer an insight upon Deaf people. What they invent for themselves often works better to represent their interests as a community despite the isolation of deaf from hearing. The technical solutions are a wedge once again to push down sign language amongst the deaf. I am referring to cochlear implants. Spontaneously across the world small deaf communities invent a new language from very sparse roots because in various places they are smushed together to learn their lessons. They don't hear language, they adapt their minds to each other as children and this sharing process soon becomes a new form of signing. But the sharing of minds is the Left wing clue to what is to be done. This language making process offers new avenues to explore in terms of building a left. Not I say in Identity Politics, but in a way to unite the working class to a deeper level than ever. thanks, Doyle
