Imagine you’re an adult professional minding your business, and someone acts impressed that you have a college degree.
Or someone speaks about you as if you aren’t in the room.
Or people assume bad news should be filtered through someone else because communicating directly with you would be too difficult.
If that all sounds weird, you’re right. It is.
But most Deaf people experience situations like these regularly. It’s called audism.
Audism is often defined as a hearing bias against Deaf people, but the concept goes deeper than that. Coined by Deaf scholar Tom Humphries in his 1975 doctoral dissertation, audism describes the belief one’s ability to hear and behave like a hearing person is inherently superior.
Humphries argued that the experiences that Deaf people faced were not isolated discriminatory incidents, but part of a larger belief system that viewed hearing and behaving like a hearing person as the ideal.
If, after reading that, you think, “Well that’s terrible, I would never think or act that way,” you’d be surprised how normalized it can be. And it’s why it’s important to share this, especially with our allies, in order to create change in the wider world.
What Does Audism Look Like?
Audism can appear in the more outright forms of discrimination and exclusion, but also in subtle assumptions about communication, intelligence, language, success, and what it means to live a “normal” or better life.
Assuming Deaf People Are Less Capable
These assumptions usually come from people that don’t know all that much about you and have more of a peripheral relationship. The comments or actions usually come out of left field, too, so personally, I find it hard to prepare for them.
Examples:
- Being praised for ordinary tasks. Driving, cooking, making a phone call, owning a home are all things Deaf people do regularly, so acting like it’s something they are impressed by is more than a little insulting. Someone once told me they were proud of me for hosting a yard sale.
- Being treated like a child. Deaf adults were once children that looked forward to being adults, so once we got there, we like the same privileges. Like, a 47-year-old probably would like to see that wine list. I had a new hairdresser lead me by the hand across the salon rather than point to where she wanted me to go. She quickly became my former hairdresser.
- Asking to speak with the Deaf person’s hearing spouse, parent, or child instead. When our family was checking out of our hotel on vacation in the Dominican Republic, the guy at the desk was speaking fast and looking down. I asked if he could look at me, speak slower, etc. He said, “Why don’t I talk to him then?” pointing to my Deaf-and-even-worse-at-lipreading-than-me husband who was checking flight times on his phone. I stepped aside and said, “Go ahead.” Have fun, kids.
- Lower expectations in school, work, or writing tasks. “You mean you wrote this?!” isn’t quite the compliment some think it is. There is a fine line between praise and acting too surprised, see.
Don’t get me wrong, praise isn’t bad, but when the praise is rooted in surprise that a Deaf person accomplished something ordinary, it’s a little embarrassing—not for me.
Speaking For or About Deaf People Instead of Referring Directly
There’s a tendency for hearing people who work closely with Deaf people to be put in the “spokesman” position. That is, a hearing person with the “inside scoop” who can give other hearing people information about Deaf people without having to approach Deaf people directly.
The problem with this is it assumes hearing perspectives are safer, more credible, or more appropriate than Deaf perspectives.
Examples:
- Hearing people explaining Deaf experiences to other hearing people.
- Hearing professionals making decisions for Deaf people.
I once had a hearing teacher tell me they felt it was important to have hearing ASL teachers for beginning ASL classes because Deaf teachers often scared students away.
Right, we wouldn’t want future interpreters to be scared of Deaf people… wait, what?
Even well-intentioned efforts can reflect audism. In a 1970s Tiger Beat feature, the Osmonds taught readers “sign language for the deaf” because two family members were deaf. While the article helped introduce sign language to a wider audience, it also reflected a pattern that’s common even today: hearing people becoming the public face and authority on Deaf experiences while Deaf voices remain largely absent from the conversation.
Treating Deaf Communication as Inferior
This one is less obvious to hearing people as audism, yet it still hits us Deaf the same. It happens among those who have known us all our lives, new people, anyone really.
You may be familiar with and happily use any of our usual communication methods with us: ASL, text messaging, email, VRS, FaceTime, Zoom… until you don’t. When it’s not convenient, you’re rushed, or something out of the ordinary needs to be communicated, suddenly our way of communicating takes a backseat to hearing preferences and comfort levels.
Many hearing people think they’re being considerate. However, it shows the underlying assumption is:
“This communication method is not good enough for serious conversations.”
That reveals a belief that spoken communication is superior.
Examples:
- Refusing to text important information
- Saying you’d rather talk on the phone because text is “impersonal.”
- Saying “I’ll tell you later.”
- Assuming VRS is inadequate
- Acting as though communication is only valid when spoken directly to a hearing person
I understand some of these reasons may be a result of generational discomfort with new technology. But if you have a Deaf person in your life, try to understand what breakthroughs these have been for us in communication, how long we have relied on them, and how meaningful it is to have these tools widely accepted today.
Audism Isn’t Usually Intentional
All told, most people who engage in audism have good intentions and don’t realize how harmful this may be.
Likewise, most people have never examined their assumptions.
What Is Internalized Audism?
Audism is especially powerful when Deaf people begin believing the negative messages society teaches them.
Children internalize what is presented to them by adults who care for them. Often these adults are hearing and may project audism, whether they realize it or not. Whether they are family members or people who end up working with Deaf children because they feel called to it, “help” can feel like a projection of what they would want as hearing people, not what a Deaf person would feel empowered by.
“I’ll Be Hearing When I Grow Up”
One of my Deaf friends told me she believed she would be hearing when she was an adult. Perhaps her parents had hope that by that time medicine would advance to the point that no one would be deaf any longer.
My grandfather felt similarly.
Experiencing his own hearing loss associated with aging, he talked with me about what he missed hearing and what I was also missing out on. He expressed hope that a future cure would allow me to fully hear someday.
The message was that my deafness was a problem waiting to be solved.
Hiding Deafness
That message is a form of internalized audism and it especially happens with deaf people who are more isolated from other deaf people. When a Deaf or hard of hearing person only sees the disadvantages deafness poses among hearing people and believes that their deafness is a flaw, they tend to hide it. Even if deafness is apparent, we can still try to minimize the social impact. Internalized audism shows up in ways most hearing people never know about:
- Pretending to understand when you don’t
- Avoiding accommodations like ASL interpreters or captions
- Hiding hearing aids/cochlear implants
- Avoiding signing in public
- Not telling someone that you’re deaf
- Telling someone signing they “don’t have to sign” with you
Who could blame us? When society consistently sends the message that hearing more is something to aspire to, it’s natural to conclude that ‘hearing is better’.
So many Deaf people learn to minimize or hide parts of themselves in order to fit in.
Why Audism Awareness is Important
The danger of audism is not in being politically incorrect or hurting someone’s feelings.
It can contribute to delayed language access, lower expectations in education, exclusion from conversations, pressure to prioritize speech over language access, loss of job opportunities and struggles with identity and self-worth.
Audism names the bias which affects Deaf people in every aspect of our lives. Other than stacking our own decks educationally and being the savviest and the luckiest of strategizers, the only way out from under audism is to make others aware of it.
The thing is, people often don’t know they have this bias. And they could be anyone, from total strangers to people closest to us.
How To Avoid Audism
Most people will recognize the most obvious, discriminatory types of audism, but fewer will see the more subtle forms.
If you’re trying to understand how to avoid audism, ask yourself these questions about the Deaf person or people:
Would I hang out with them socially?
Go to them for advice about my own life?
Respect them as professionals?
Would I be speaking to a hearing counterpart this way?
If not, why not? These are good starting points to examine your own perception.
Avoiding audism really comes down to what you believe and how you act on those beliefs.
And if you:
Believe Deaf people are experts on their own lives,
Include Deaf people in decisions that affect Deaf people,
Respect sign language as a complete and legitimate language,
Provide communication access from the start rather than waiting to be asked,
Avoid assuming deafness is something that wants/needs to be fixed,
… you’re in good shape.
Audism Is About Power
Audism is the belief that hearing ways of communicating, learning, and existing are inherently better than Deaf ways.
For many Deaf people, audism is not a single event. It is a lifetime of small messages about who gets to speak, who gets believed, and whose experiences matter the most.
Recognizing audism in ourselves can be a challenge, but it’s the first step toward creating a more accessible and equitable world.
Next: Deaf Family on Shark Tank: What Hearing Audiences Missed