As an undergraduate student studying speech-language pathology, reading this article was very interesting and surprising to me. I was unaware that sign language also differed by race. It makes me feel uncomfortable in the sense that we have come so far along the years when it comes to racism, and to me it seems like another way of discriminating. American sign language is taught to be known as universal as in you can understand another person who knows sign language, and this article proves that it is not as an African American deaf girl could not comprehend a white persons sign language.
In an article by the Washington Post, “Sign language that African Americans use is different from that of whites” by Frances Stead Sellers, a deaf African American girl through an interpreter discusses how she feels that their form or “slang” of sign language is depicted by their culture. The articles says, “We make our signs bigger, with more body language” she adds, alluding to what the researchers refer to as Black ASL’s larger “signing space.” She then explains that sign language can fit a persons’ culture because of their background, it makes sense to their culture. Similarly, according to the article, “What’s more, Miller says, signing changes over time: The sign for “telephone,” for example, is commonly made by spreading your thumb and pinkie and holding them up to your ear and mouth. An older sign was to put one fist to your ear and the other in front of your mouth to look like an old-fashioned candlestick phone.” This makes more sense to me because things do change over time, and especially the way that we speak in present day in comparison to the past.
However, this article also adds that white people, as well as some African American people wouldn’t understand this sign language. And in this case, it makes me curious if this different sign language should be a type of sign language taught, or if its just slang used by some cultures like in speech language. It makes more sense to me if it were to be a specific context of language used by a specific group of people due to slang, but a whole other type of sign language in itself is not something that I agree with or understand."
