Mocking: How it is Harmful

Let’s talk about mocking. 

As defined by Oxford Languages: Making fun of someone or something in a cruel way.

Making fun of other people for getting laughs, is something that I’ve always felt maybe a bit sensitive to. 

I want to share with you what I generally find funny. I’ve never found Saturday Night Live funny at all. I’m probably one of those people that don’t find too many things funny, but when I think it’s funny, I will let you know. The other thing is how I express what I think is funny. I’m totally that person that laughs on the inside. I do laugh aloud, but if I’m watching tv and there’s a funny scene. I’m most likely the person who is chuckling on the inside. Every now and then, you’ll catch me in a laugh out loud moment. 

Let’s get back to the topic at hand, “mocking.” Social media has been a platform to bring people together. It’s also made it a lot easier for people to bully or mock others anonymously without retribution. 

Growing up, I’ve always been super self conscious about my ASL skills because I never felt like I was as good as my older sister. I was made fun of as a kid. Other deaf kids often made fun of my appearance, particularly my nose and changed my sign name to be similar to an elephant. Kids can be cruel. 

What ultimately made me transition from an all deaf school to a mainstream public school in 6th grade, was when I was mocked at by other deaf kids that said they felt like I was too “hearing” and I wasn’t “deaf enough.” They bullied me for a few weeks before I left the deaf school permanently. 

This exact experience has made me feel as if I’m an imposter time and time again. As I have gotten older, people would meet me after meeting my older sister, who is an ASL teacher.  And they would question whether or not we grew up in the same household because our signing style is very different. That line of questioning often made me feel like an imposter.  Can I really identify myself as deaf if I’m not very fluent in ASL? It comes up all the time for me! I struggle with feeling like I’m truly representing the deaf community because of what I see happening on social media. 

There are a few different things I’ve been seeing. 

Here’s what is happening: there are hearing people teaching sign language. There is a strong  belief within the deaf community that only deaf people should teach sign language. So what happens is that there are people within the deaf community that make fun of the people teaching sign language. It’s a LITTLE bit funny, but like come on. 

The other thing happening is that these same people also make fun of other deaf people. 

Now, there’s one person in particular that I know is deaf, but she’s not known in the deaf community. She was teaching some signs, and to be fair, there were some signs that made me go, what? I’ve never seen that sign before. Because of that, there were deaf people in the community that started mocking her. This isn’t ok. It really isn’t. 

In order to pinpoint why the mocking of another deaf person bothered me so much, I needed to really dive into my journey to identifying as a deaf person.

I’ve only come to feel like I truly identify as a deaf individual in the last 4 years….more recently as a deafblind individual. It has taken me years, err….decades,  to get to this point. 

As I slowly immersed myself back in the deaf community after being a part of the hearing world for all of my middle school and high school years. I was incredibly nervous to even be part of the deaf community when I went to Rochester Institute of Technology for college. 

I still didn’t feel like I belonged because even though most of my friends were deaf, the majority of them actually did not grow up knowing sign language, rather they relied on the spoken word. (BTW this blew my mind that they all successfully navigated through high school without an interpreter). I never would’ve made it. 

They picked up sign language as we all navigated college together. We supported each other. A couple years ago, I had asked some of them whether they identified as deaf. They said no they didn’t identify as deaf. Their answer, unfortunately, didn’t surprise me. It made me feel sad. Each of them had different reasons as to why they didn’t identify as “deaf,” and their answers had me realizing that there’s still a lot of stigma within the deaf community.

Even though the deaf community that I was a part of when I first went to Maryland School for the Deaf was pretty diverse, it is a lot more diverse today. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, there were no repercussions when people made fun of deaf people for the way they sign and speak. This was the sign of the times. 

I’m really not cool with other people making fun of others for how they sign. It makes me feel supremely self-conscious. And I think it also fails to recognize that there are different signs across the country and naturally different sign languages in the world. I know that American Sign Language has truly adapted over the years. Even now I’m like wait, what’s that new sign? We adapt as we evolve. We adapt based on who is around us. I know that I tend to do some code switching depending on who I’m with. 

It’s not ok to mock other people for the way they communicate. It’s not ok to mock deaf people for how they sign. It’s not ok to mock deaf people for how they speak. It’s just not ok.