Aaliyah Bryant

The title of chapter 174 in the book For Hearing People Only was named “Why is

employment for deaf people limited?” However, this chapter explained that it isn’t or it shouldn’t

be due to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Because of the ADA, Deaf people can

choose whatever field they can excel in. However, Deaf people have been doing seeming

impossible fields for centuries. Despite all these achievements, there is still so much to be done

before Deaf people are considered to be equal. They still have barriers to deal with such as

hearing people taking jobs from them and worst of all, people’s attitudes. However, they deserve

the right to fail and succeed like everyone else.

A lot of topics that were explained in this chapter were something I’ve already learned.

However, the newest thing I learned was what influenced Deaf people’s choice of career. The

answer to that question is that in the old days, they would do whatever their families did. I

learned that Black and/or female had to be forced to take alternate paths because they were

limited in their choices of profession. I also learned that a lot of Deaf people wanted to

mainstream in education but that chance was taken away from them when hearing people forced

them out of schools. I also learned about the accommodations that Deaf people had to take when

they entered mainstream universities long before professional interpreters.

How I can apply everything I learned is by simply educating myself. I already knew that

Black and/or female people were limited in choices of their professions but I wondered how that

affected the Deaf people that were Black and/or female. All my life, I’ve only seen hearing

people teaching ASL. So when I heard that my ASL professor was Deaf, I had no idea how that

was going to work out. After 3 semesters, I realized that it was better this way because of how

authentic it was.