Beyond the Sound Barrier

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Heather Whitestone would seem the living contradiction of that entire ethos. After a bacterial infection rendered her deaf at age 18 months, her mother, Daphne Gray, decided against ASL training. "I think it's important for every child to be part of the mainstream world's society," she now says. Instead, she started Heather on an oral regimen that entailed refining her residual hearing by standing behind her, speaking words. It was difficult. Says Heather: "It took me six years to say my last name correctly." But it worked. After attending Alabama public schools and then St. Louis' Central Institute for the Deaf, which emphasizes lipreading and spoken English, she went on to study at a Birmingham arts academy and graduate from a public high school with a 3.6 grade point average -- without the use of an ASL interpreter.

In fact Whitestone has gone on record saying that she finds ASL constraining. While participating in a Miss Deaf Alabama contest, she has said, she realized that "sign language puts more limits to their dreams." She adds, "As long as they don't use English, it's not going to help them be successful." She prefers Signed Exact English (SEE), which translates English word-for-word into gestures instead of using the unique, more streamlined vocabulary and grammar of ASL.

Most deaf Americans were ecstatic at her victory. Signs Jack Gannon, a special assistant to the president of Gallaudet, "She's a new heroine for us. A star. Someone to look up to." Alok Doshi, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, was at a party when the lights in the house were flashed for attention, and someone signed the good news about Whitestone: "We all signed to each other and cheered."

Yet when apprised of Whitestone's remark about ASL being limiting, Doshi says (via computer E-mail), "I truly disagree with that." MJ Bienvenu, head of the Bicultural Center in Riverdale, Maryland, goes further. Speaking through an interpreter, she says, "That's a very damaging statement; there are many successful Deaf people." Bienvenu, a leading ideologue of cultural deafness, isn't happy Whitestone won. "It misportrays what Deaf is," she says. "She may be ((medically)) deaf, but she does not have the social identity of a Deaf person."

Perhaps more important, Whitestone may possess more luck than many deaf people can hope for. Lipreading involves inborn talent, and its most competent practitioners regard it as fatiguing and inexact. Whitestone has heroically exploited her residual hearing and her early exposure to spoken language, assets unavailable to those profoundly deaf from birth. Although SEE was invented to teach English, it may be more useful to someone who already knows it. Thus while her example should inspire the partially deaf or hard of hearing, it may be less applicable to the majority of profoundly deaf Americans.