Beyond the Sound Barrier

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

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).

Heather Whitestone would seem the living contradiction of that entire ethos. After a bacterial infection rendered her deaf at age 18 months, her mother, Daphne Gray, decided against ASL training. "I think it's important for every child to be part of the mainstream world's society," she now says. Instead, she started Heather on an oral regimen that entailed refining her residual hearing by standing behind her, speaking words. It was difficult. Says Heather: "It took me six years to say my last name correctly." But it worked. After attending Alabama public schools and then St. Louis' Central Institute for the Deaf, which emphasizes lipreading and spoken English, she went on to study at a Birmingham arts academy and graduate from a public high school with a 3.6 grade point average -- without the use of an ASL interpreter.

In fact Whitestone has gone on record saying that she finds ASL constraining. While participating in a Miss Deaf Alabama contest, she has said, she realized that "sign language puts more limits to their dreams." She adds, "As long as they don't use English, it's not going to help them be successful." She prefers Signed Exact English (SEE), which translates English word-for-word into gestures instead of using the unique, more streamlined vocabulary and grammar of ASL.

Most deaf Americans were ecstatic at her victory. Signs Jack Gannon, a special assistant to the president of Gallaudet, "She's a new heroine for us. A star. Someone to look up to." Alok Doshi, a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology's National Technical Institute for the Deaf, was at a party when the lights in the house were flashed for attention, and someone signed the good news about Whitestone: "We all signed to each other and cheered."

Yet when apprised of Whitestone's remark about ASL being limiting, Doshi says (via computer E-mail), "I truly disagree with that." MJ Bienvenu, head of the Bicultural Center in Riverdale, Maryland, goes further. Speaking through an interpreter, she says, "That's a very damaging statement; there are many successful Deaf people." Bienvenu, a leading ideologue of cultural deafness, isn't happy Whitestone won. "It misportrays what Deaf is," she says. "She may be ((medically)) deaf, but she does not have the social identity of a Deaf person."

Perhaps more important, Whitestone may possess more luck than many deaf people can hope for. Lipreading involves inborn talent, and its most competent practitioners regard it as fatiguing and inexact. Whitestone has heroically exploited her residual hearing and her early exposure to spoken language, assets unavailable to those profoundly deaf from birth. Although SEE was invented to teach English, it may be more useful to someone who already knows it. Thus while her example should inspire the partially deaf or hard of hearing, it may be less applicable to the majority of profoundly deaf Americans.

Only a minority of institutions practice pure oralism anymore; but a babel of challenges to ASL remain. Mainstreaming, the widespread and generally salutary policy of removing students with disabilities from special schools and seeding them through regular classes, may be counterproductive for the deaf. They cannot be expected simply to "pick up" English from their new classmates; and yet removing them from an all-deaf environment may prevent them from picking up ASL. Northeastern's Lane talks grimly of their "drowning in the mainstream." Total communication, which asked teachers to sign ASL and speak English simultaneously, although once popular, seems in decline. Cued speech, essentially lipreading enhanced with explanatory gestures, has a small group of enthusiastic backers. Even Bienvenu champions "bilingual- bicultural" education (Bi-Bi), which uses signing as a foundation toward "English as a second language."

In Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, between TV appearances and clothes-shopping expeditions, Whitestone receives a guest. Dressed in a T shirt and a polka-dot vest and pants, she is an enthusiastic and fluent conversation partner. She readily acknowledges not being part of Deaf culture -- "I don't know it very well. I have seen it" -- and tends to refer even to small d deaf as "them."

Indeed, linguistic politics interest her far less than her own, very mainstream motivational program, called STARS because it has five points ("positive attitude," "a dream," "hard work," "knowing your problems but not letting them master you" and "a support team"). The system has already been introduced in a Birmingham-area school. In fact, the acounting major is currently considering a career change: "Maybe I'll be a math teacher or a counselor, so that I could see young people every day."

Does she want to apply her philosophy to deaf young people or hearing young people? It is Whitestone's strength, but also, perhaps, her weakness, that she feels the same approach should apply equally well to both.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Hannah Bloch/New York and David Rynecki/Birmingham