The green-eyed brunette had scored high in the swimsuit competition. She had received repeated ovations during her talent program, a ballet set to the religious pop anthem Via Dolorosa. But it was during the beauty contest's final, brief Q&A that Miss Alabama, 21, performed her most moving feat. She answered a question. Her voice was a bit fluty and her consonants soft, but the college junior clearly understood Regis Philbin's query about self- realization; and her reply, a paean to belief in oneself, was obviously deeply felt. Minutes later, when Heather Whitestone, who is deaf in one ear and has only 5% hearing in the other, won the 74th annual Miss America Pageant, she didn't realize it until her runner-up pointed to her. Then she burst into happy tears -- joined, undoubtedly, by thousands of viewers around the country.
If there was ever a Miss America worth cheering -- or crying -- for, she would appear to be the one. But deaf viewers, although thrilled for one of their own, noticed that beyond the well-known gesture for "I love you," Whitestone made no use of American Sign Language, the primary idiom of over half the country's profoundly deaf citizens, whose number may reach 2 million. In fact, comments by the new queen on ASL and deaf pedagogy may make her controversial, in a community where linguistics and education are issues more fraught than those of religion, money or sex. Should the deaf emulate her triumphant plunge into the mainstream? Can they?
The story of the deaf in America is intimately bound up with ASL and its travails. Traditionally, schooling for the deaf featured attempts, usually unsuccessful, to get them to learn and speak languages they couldn't hear. In the early 1800s, however, American instructors, acknowledging deaf practice, began teaching a language composed entirely of gestures. ASL became the backbone of almost all formal schooling for the deaf. In 1880, however, educators reverted to a philosophy called oralism. Unlike ASL, oralism was committed to English: written, lip-read and spoken.
! Oralism was only sporadically successful, and schools that subscribed to it or to related techniques found that students still learned ASL on the sly. "Try as they might, they were unable to stamp out sign language," says Northeastern University linguist Harlan Lane, author of The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community. Yet "signing" would wait another century for its renaissance: in the 1960s, when linguists certified it as just as autonomous, flexible and rich as English, it became the core of an identity movement that still flourishes today. More than half a million ASL speakers -- a group sometimes plagued by passivity and disengagement -- reconceived themselves as members of a vibrant linguistic minority. Their most visible political statement was the 1988 protest by students at Washington's Gallaudet University that pressured the institution into hiring a deaf president. Culturally, activists began distinguishing between "deaf" (to describe the disability) and "Deaf" (to represent the language group).