Dumping Mental Garbage
A linguist strongly attacks earlier conceptions of the role of language in culture, especially its use as a tool of oppression by colonialists, as follows:
According to 19th-century racists, languages and people alike were ranged along a scale of being from the primitive Bushman with his clicks, grunts, and shortage of artifacts, to the modern Western European with his high pale brow and plethora of gadgets. That was when everyone, racist or anti-racist, did believe that Western Man was superior; the only argument was about how nasty this superiority permitted him to be toward "lesser" breeds. Now that we are rapidly disabusing ourselves of this kind of mental garbage, it becomes possible to uncouple language from "level of cultural attainment" and look at it developmentally without any pejorative implications.(9)
Our focus will be on communication by deaf people, especially those who live in the United States and Canada, though we will consider sign languages that exist in almost every country throughout the world. Today, most people have seen someone signing--on a bus, in a store, at public meetings, on television. Since Jimmy Carter's successful bid for the U. S. presidency in 1976, many politicians have employed interpreters to sign their public addresses for the benefit of deaf people in the audience. In the popular movie Children of a Lesser God, the heroine is deaf and signs her part. Sign language appears frequently on television. A whole generation of children has grown up watching Linda Bove sign on Sesame Street, and millions of television viewers have seen Reasonable Doubt, a series in which a deaf attorney uses ASL in the courtroom.
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