Great Deaf Talent-- Regina Olson Hughes

So today I’m reading my book called Great Deaf Americans and once again I’m inspired by what so many were able to achieve. Their intelligence, creativity, bravery, and diligence were awesome. It’s so hard to pick just one person to highlight each week.

One point that struck me while reading other deaf blogs this past week however was the negativity surrounding oralism. Deaf people who use “hearing behaviors” or who speak occasionally instead of always communicating in ASL may be accused of not acting deaf by their peers—and this is NOT a compliment.. Read this blog. As someone who is late-deafened I almost always use my voice, though I’m learning ASL. I feel far removed from this oralism debate and can’t comment to the deaf perspective.

But as someone who is neither fully hearing or culturally deaf I will say this-- I do not believe all deaf people can learn to speak or lipread. It is wrong for the hearing to force such high expectations on the deaf. Over the years, the ability to speak among the deaf has wrongly been associated with intelligence level in some cases, which has hurt many highly intelligent deaf people. I want to be clear that the ability to speak and lipread is only related to one’s hearing ability and nothing more. Simply stated, some deaf people hear more than other deaf people. Some are born deaf, while others become deaf during childhood or later, after learning to speak. All of these factors taken into consideration can lead to greater advantages when learning to lipread and speak and also reading and writing abilities.

For example it is a known fact young children benefit from playing language games and being read to long before they begin reading themselves. Early language skills are the foundational building blocks of reading and writing skills. Children who are born deaf are not exposed to English language as young children. If a person becomes deaf after age five, naturally he or she will be at a greater advantage for learning to read, even though he or she did not learn to read before deafness because the language building blocks were put in place.

Then again, the deaf develop other language building blocks related to ASL. No one has ever studied this to my knowledge, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that IQ testing is skewed for the deaf simply because they think and process information differently. My guess is they are all much smarter than we know. Psychologists already understand IQ testing is not as much of a science as it is an art. We’re continually discovering new information about the brain—new ways of measuring intelligence and new types of intelligences. I suspect ASL expands intelligence in ways we have not measured yet. The deaf see our world differently and we would be wise to make the most of their gifts.

Instead we have tried to force them to be oral like square pegs into round holes. This has led to backlash among the deaf —a sort of reverse discrimination where everything “hearing” may be perceived as against deaf culture.

There was a simpler time long ago when deaf people could be oral or non-oral, and there was no rift in the deaf community. It didn’t matter. You simply did what you had to do to get ahead.

Regina Olson Hughes was one such person. She was born in 1895 and died in 1993. Always interested in drawing from the time she was a young child her parents had her tutored privately in art. At age ten she became sick with Scarlet Fever and began losing her hearing. (Another source said a doctor poured oil into her ears when she was a child.) It’s hard to know what caused her progressive hearing loss to start. She was deaf by the time she turned fourteen.

Then she went to Gallaudet for her Bachelor’s and a Masters in art. (Later, because of all her accomplishments she was given and honorary doctorate degree.) Incredibly she was able to speak four languages by lipreading: French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Most the time she lipread if it wasn’t too important to understand, but if she needed to be sure of details she had people write the words out on paper.

Eventually she took on a job for the State Department as a translator. Then later she worked for the Department of Agriculture as a scientific illustrator. She also took on another job with the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany painting plants. Today her work can be found in plant manuals, on pesticide labels, and in dictionaries, as well as museums and cards.