The week before last on ANTM, the Deaf contestant won best photo. His prize? A full hour in which none of the hearing contestants were allowed to speak, but instead, had to communicate in American Sign Language. Nyle of course,was all too happy to teach his competition his language.
But in the middle of it, there’s Devin, who does something hearing people usually do when confronted with a d/Deaf/HoH person.
Devin knows that the woman is Deaf. She’s actually a friend of Nyle’s from way back and is there specifically to help Nyle teach them ASL. Yet he felt the need to shout at her. This is really rude, but not all together a terrible thing to do.
Flash forward to last week’s episode, where Devin does it again.
Which, to Nyle’s credit, he takes in good stride.
By shouting back at Devin. And of course, everyone claps like it’s a party trick. Various fans have expressed glee and excitement to hear him speak. Which, maybe it’s pretty cool, but it demonstrates total lack of awareness re:Deaf speech. I have no idea what Nyle’s background in speaking is, other than that he’s a 4th generation deaf individual.
Deaf people can learn to speak, but it’s honestly superfluous because they can already communicate via Sign. It can also be really difficult depending on how deaf the indivdual is. There’s only two reasons for a Deaf person to speak: (a) because the hearing experts around them insist they learn to speak; or (b) because they genuinely want to learn how on their own. Most deaf people won’t speak even if they can because they have such a complicated relationship with speech.
For decades, deaf children were forbidden to Sign to each other and instead taught to speak because hearing experts thought they would need the ability to verbalize if they were ever going to be successful. Children caught signing in class would have their hands chained to the desk or would wear mittens on their hands that prevented them from signing. Hours that could have been spent on learning complex subjects like science or mathematics were instead spent on perfecting speech.
Given that Nyle was born into an already Deaf family, and given that he was probably raised on Sign Language, I doubt he had that experience. However, many deaf/HoH children today are mainstreamed, and part of mainstreaming is that they go to speech class to work on weeding out their deaf accent. I spent grades k-8 working on that, and I still have mine.
The point here, is that Nyle went above and beyond. He not only keeps trying to teach everyone to sign, but he also verbalized the phrase “happy birthday” to please Devin (who so clearly loves being loud). Yet, later on, this happens…
On the surface for any hearing person, this seems pretty harmless. A little inconsiderate, maybe. Except, Nyle’s phone is his way of communicating with the hearing people around him. None of the contestants know ASL fluently, so he types out what he wants to say to them on his phone, and they respond. Having grown up in a Deaf family, he is using his second language to communicate with others. Nyle eventually gets up, leaves the party, and gives this confessional.
There’s also an earlier scene from an interview that helps explain his experience living in a household full of hearing people.
Nyle tries really hard to communicate with his cast mates, and few of them seem to attempt to do the same for him. I would give the cast the benefit of the doubt here, except I know all too well how hard it is to get hearing people to communicate with me in ASL. Even I am guilty of falling back on English because it’s my first language. I have no doubt that the cast is just too used to the world around them being designed for hearing people to put much effort into learning American Sign Language. And in fact, once the contestants realize that Nyle left and find out why, they speak to each other in a way that doesn’t include Nyle, even though he’s right there.
Courtney is literally sitting on Nyle’s lap, but she’s using English and talking about Nyle as if he isn’t in the room. Nyle can’t even be included in the conversation about the fact that he was excluded. Talk about irony. One contestant does sign “SORRY” at Nyle, but it’s too little, too late.
In the end, I’ll leave you with this tidbit from Nyle that broke my heart.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gummygunk
kianamaiart
amandla
yousharknotpass
pixelskylines
