Black American Sign Language: Best And Worst Of American Education

American Sign Language (ASL), and consequently Black American Sign Language (BASL), is uniquely American in that it represents the best and worst of American Education. The best part is that ASL, and its education, gave deaf Americans the opportunity to communicate with others. In contrast, BASL exhibits how racism infiltrates the education system and sign language itself. Thus, BASL originated due to institutional racism in education by way of differing language policies. To begin with, the two differing language policies in question are oralism compared to manualism. Oralism is a way of teaching deaf students that emphasizes verbal communication in the way of lip reading and speaking, signing is forbidden (Lucas 2022). This policy was implemented for deaf students to

However, black deaf students never suffered the consequences of oralism due to racist ideology. This ideology refused to extend oralism, which was equated with humanity, to non-White students because they did not want to take part in public life or democracy. Consequently, this divide created the dialect difference between ASL and BASL because black signers retained more traditional manualist methods (Waller 2021). Subsequently, although the presentation of oral education to black signers backfired, the attempt demonstrates an institutional system of racism to not care about non-White students' education. Despite the prevalence of oralism, many black students were taught using traditional and formal manual methods. Manualism, in contrast to oralism, promotes the use of signing as the primary language of instruction and communication. This split between White and Black students created many distinct differences in language. For example, most Black signers are likely to sign using both hands, which is the citation/standard form found in ASL dictionaries and classes (Lucas