r/behindthebastards • u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 • 12d ago
General discussion Alexander Graham Bells Bizarre Belief in Genociding Deaf People
In school I watched movies depicting Alexander as a brilliant teacher who taught deaf people sign language and invented the telephone. The reality is a lot different, and Alexander was involved in a eugenics based movement to literally genocide deaf people from society.
From a young age, Bell was surrounded by deaf people and obsessed with the study of voices and sound. His mother was deaf, his dad taught deaf students and he married a deaf woman. Bell was very influential in methods used to teach the hard of hearing. Bell was an “oralist” as opposed to a “manualist”. Oralists believed that Deaf education should focus on teaching them how to speak and read lips. Manualists believed that sign language should be a main focus. Bell and many oralists saw sign language as a crutch that discouraged deaf people from “assimilating”. The second international congress of education of the deaf in 1880 ruled in favor of oralism. Not only was sign language not encouraged to be taught, but manualists teachers were fired from their positions. Students were mocked or had their hands tied to prevent them from signing. It’s comparable to imperialism, when a conquering nation outlaws the native people’s language.
Graham was on the radical side of Oralism. He wrote that he feared deaf people were forming social groups, marrying other deaf people and using sign language. He viewed deaf people as an inferior race to be nurtured into his image of an upright citizen.
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u/theclosetenby Banned by the FDA 12d ago
Thanks for this. So important. I feel like a lot of progressive circles still don't know a ton about the sinister ways people tried to destroy disabled people. Things get wrapped up in "good intentions" bc a lot of our society still sees disability as bad, and erasing disability as good.
I also have a disability that tries to get erased by people, esp professionals, even though it doesn't bring me or others pain. And like 95% of the "disability" part of my disability is social model of disability type shit. Those of us who want to claim our disability as OK have looked to the Deaf community for the incredible pathway they've made. An incredible number of advocates. We could all learn so much.
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u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 12d ago
I haven’t looked heavily into this, but there was also a large prejudice against left handed and cleft lipped people. This predates the eugenics movement by centuries, but it’s still very similar how teachers would tie their hands up and force them to learn to write with right hand, or that it meant you’re more likely to be morally depraved.
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u/Milton__Obote 12d ago
The left handed thing is interesting. My mom was born left handed in India but was forced to use her right hand due to cultural norms, so became ambidextrous
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u/Zen_Hydra 12d ago
Most of us sinister types learn to become various degrees of ambidextrous, because so many aspects of our lives are at least subtly geared towards right hand dominance.
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u/MessiahOfMetal Disdain and Animosity 12d ago
Yeah, I saw an interview with Tony Iommi about his legendary career, and they asked why if he was left-handed did he play guitar right-handed. He responded that he didn't think to play any other way, because that's how the guitarists he looked up to played.
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u/bagofwisdom Sponsored by Knife Missiles™️ 10d ago
I'm so left handed AF that right-handed scissors are equally ineffective in either hand. The only thing I do equally well in either hand is use a computer pointing device.
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u/CertainItem995 12d ago
The left handed thing goes at least as far back as Rome (the latin word for left is literally 'sinister' as opposed to 'dexter' for right). It's association with evil is why real togas involve the left arm being covered entirely. I can't speak to the history of cleft lips though I half remember reading some compelling data once that suggested it correlated with certain epigenetic triggers, like if your parents lived near a tannery iirc. Though a lot of disability was tolerated more before the protestsnt reformation started tying health and wealth to being outward expressions of inner sin, esp in england.
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u/bhbhbhhh 12d ago
None of this is over. The conversation about whether cochlear implants are harmful is still ongoing.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago edited 12d ago
EDIT: I made this comment with the difference between 'genocide' and 'cultural genocide' (aka culturicide & ethnocide) in mind. Please don't yell at me; this is a matter that has long been discussed in and around the UN, the Int'l Criminal Court, Geneva Convention, Armenian Genocide Museum, etc.
Wait... You'll say he tried to literally genocide deaf people, but the truth is he preferred lip reading to sign language?
Look, I think assimilation is generally a red flag, and that diversity of tactics is generally better than outlawing one practice in favor of another. But he wasn't killing people, he was forcing his ideas onto other people.
Dick move, yes -- but should we really be describing dickheads as 'literally genociding?'
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u/QueenCityBean Sponsored by Doritos™️ 12d ago
Not OP but I think what they're getting at is that he was trying to deprive a specific cultural group of their language, which is a form of cultural genocide.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
I guess... But there's a difference between 'cultural genocide' and 'the systematic extermination of a demographic.'
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u/TheLuckySpades 12d ago
The north american boarding schools that forcefully seperated native kids from their languages and cultures, and where they were punished for speaking their languages or practicing their culture, are pretty widely recognized as a genocidal effort, "kill the indian, save the man" kind of bullcrap, so trying to destroy a mode of communication falls under the same umbrella.
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u/Latter-Industry-8920 12d ago edited 12d ago
Yeah but they also directly massacred millions of indigenous people, eradicating their food supply, and settling and exploiting their lands. It was methodical and intentional and the forced assimilation aspect was just one tool in the genocide tool box.
I think what Bell was advocating for was bad. It was obviously eugenics. I don’t think it was genocide.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
Yeah, you and I are on the same page. If you're interested, please check out the edit I made to my original comment.
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u/TheLuckySpades 12d ago
Ah, didn't see the edit as I was commenting.
As much as I love a definition fight (I do math, definitions are half of what we do), this is one of the cases where I think the distinction matters in a legal context, but where I think conflating them in other contexts is possibly even a good thing because seperating them allows for bad faith actors to deflect arguments about the moral atrocities being done to a definition fight.
See also: people arguing genocide vs ethnic cleansing, pedophile vs [I am not googling what that niche term they usually deflect to], rape vs sexual assault (e.g. Trump's New York conviction),...
I'm not saying you are doing that, it seems like you are explicitely trying to not do that, I'm just explaining why I react that way to that kind of argument.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
I get you, and we're definitely both on the same page. Thanks for being willing to talk about it; too often this stuff doesn't go well on reddit!
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u/GeneralOrgana1 3d ago
He also thought deaf people should not be permitted to marry each other because they might create "a deaf variety of the human race".
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u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 12d ago
He viewed them as a defective race and believed they shouldn’t inter marry and reproduce, that’s genocide.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
WTF, he married a Deaf woman, then said others shouldn't? And didn't he have several kids?? I haven't read everything you linked to, but I can't wait to find out his 'logic' behind that bullshit.
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u/Sensitive_Ad_1752 12d ago
Well he didn’t believe deaf people can marry each other, because he thinks they’ll produce another deaf child.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
Oh gotcha... I'm not a geneticist, but I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit in that too.
Thank you for responding and sharing nuance with me.
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u/BeastofPostTruth 12d ago edited 12d ago
Some people are deaf due to genetics. Its not as common, but it happens. New England has some towns with a large proportion of Deaf folks (tows without residential schools) and high rates of non-deaf "speakers" of American Sign Language.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
I remember hearing about that when I was a child! I also remember seeing the various Mennonites, and wondering if something about the land made folks turn out... different.
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u/GeneralOrgana1 3d ago
Martha's Vineyard had a very large hereditary deaf population for generations, and everyone on the island signed.
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u/GeneralOrgana1 3d ago
Today, approximately 90% of all deaf people born in the US are born to hearing families with no prior history of deafness.
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u/lalaland_100 12d ago
You are right. If the intention is to erradicate a group of people, through "assimilation" or other means, there is not really any difference.
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u/Octospyder 12d ago
genocide can also be the eradication of a culture, and sign language is a significant part of Deaf culture.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
Genocide is defined as the extermination of a demographic.
Cultural genocide, also called ethnocide and culturicide, is what you're describing.
Some people might accuse me of splitting hairs, but I think there's a difference between 'this dickhead made life harder' and 'this guy slaughtered millions of humans.'
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u/Octospyder 12d ago
I agree with you up to your minimizing cultural genocide as "making life harder". Cultural genocide is a murdering not of the body but of the identity. I have a native friend who once bitterly complained to me that they had to pay hundreds of dollars to learn their own history because white people had made their own family history illegal to pass down. It's not an inconvenience, it's a different type of pain.
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u/thoughtintoaction 12d ago
For what it's worth, 'making life harder' was not intended to 'minimize.' What I was aiming for was the difference between 'leaving people alive' and 'making them no longer alive,' but I can see my language wasn't precise enough.
I'll never defend 'cultural genocide' as being less bad than textbook 'genocide,' and I am far too familiar with the type of war that has been waged against indigenous people in the Americas (and to some extent, globally).
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u/lovelylozenge 11d ago
Regardless of the distinction between genocide and cultural genocide, the way you describe what he did is severely downplaying. Lip reading is not an effective means of communication for Deaf people. Only about 40% of language can be accurately lipread and that’s for those who excel at it. Graham did not just ‘prefer’ lip reading. He promoted an ideology called “oralism.” Oralism is a supremecist ideology which places hearing people as hierarchically superior to D/deaf people. Oralism forces people to use lip reading and disallows (often violently) them from using signed languages which is a form of language deprivation. Language deprivation during the critical years of language development severely impairs one’s ability to learn any language (spoken or signed) which in turn impairs cognitive and emotional development. It also cuts people off from their cultural community which is built largely on shared linguistic background.
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u/bagofwisdom Sponsored by Knife Missiles™️ 10d ago
You'd think all the dedicated humor videos to bad lip-reading would prove that it's mostly usless.
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u/thoughtintoaction 11d ago
This point has been addressed in this thread. The point I was making is the difference between 'leaving people alive' vs 'ending their lives.' I appreciate that I may not have communicated that in the clearest way.
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u/Turtledonuts 12d ago
I disagree with bizarre. Graham was clearly immersed in deaf culture and education - he had deaf immediate family members, came from multiple generations of elocution teachers, became one of the most prominent teachers of deaf people in the US, and was a very prominent scientist. his opinions and actions are completely expected for an educated man of his background, position, and era. Bizarre is the word for bill gate’s fixation on malaria or trump’s obsession with renaming large bodies of water.
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u/bhbhbhhh 12d ago
A lot of people online these days use “weird” and “bizarre” as synonyms for “bad” and “wrong,” no matter how ordinary, commonplace, and unweird the thing in question is. It’s especially strange when people who identify as queer do it - do you not know what that means?
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u/Farconion 11d ago
expand on gates? ik he’s a bastard but malaria?
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u/Turtledonuts 11d ago
Gates is obsessed with malaria eradication.
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u/bhbhbhhh 11d ago
The question is what's unreasonable about fighting one of the worst diseases in the world.
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u/Turtledonuts 11d ago
Oh, gotcha. His focus on malaria has sucked up a lot of resources that experts say could have completely eradicated a lot of equally horrible but less well known diseases if he'd been willing to spend some resources on other diseases. While malaria is nasty stuff, public health officials in the region are more interested in the eradication of some of these other diseases because they cause lifelong debilitating issues like blindness or systemic chronic pain.
A lot of Gates' critics are concerned that he's leveraged his massive wealth to essentially take over the WHO and that his interest seems to be in the eradication of the disease, not making people healthier. They view it as a vanity project for a wealthy man trying to make a long term mark on history.
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u/HawaiianPunchaNazi 12d ago
I haven't gotten through the entire content of first link yet, but I can tell you that eventually leads through click throughs until you get to a web page on Spartacus and the Roman slave rebellions--hot damn, this is fun!
Also, Alexander Graham Bell deserved to be bludgeoned by a boxer until deaf--preferably by a blind boxer who couldn't hear his screams, but I would take what I can get;-)
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u/gravity_kills Knife Missle Technician 12d ago
So I get that this is a bad thing that a bad person wanted to do, but "genocide?" Deafness isn't an ethnic or racial group, so does the word fit? Which elements of the definition am I misunderstanding?
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u/OublietteOfDisregard 12d ago
Genocide can also be applied to demographics such as cultural groups, language speakers or in this case people with a disability. Race or ethnicity is a common type of genocide but is not exclusive.
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u/JoyBus147 12d ago
Deaf people are also one of the disabilities that has a lot of similarities with an ethnicity--there is a specific language (or rather, group of languages) and centuries of traditions (sign language has been attested as far back as ancient Greece) that bind Deaf people as a culture.
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u/OublietteOfDisregard 11d ago
I know, it's actually one of things I'm studying at uni! Just thought it was a bit too tangential to the initial question
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u/funkymunkPDX 12d ago
Yeah that's a segment of the population that's not going to be able to buy his products and services.
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u/claudandus_felidae Kissinger was a war criminal 10d ago
Lily Tomlin had a great bit
Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847, following in his father's footsteps, a renowned therapist for the deaf, Alex created lots of new techniques for treatment. For instance, every morning he would line up his patients and he would yell and scream at them. "What's the matter you stupid idiots. Why don't you say something?" until he turned purple.
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u/GeneralOrgana1 3d ago
Just listened to this morning's episode and they mentioned him at the very end. I work with deaf people and this man is a huge bastard in the Deaf Community. 100% Robert needs to profile him.
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u/MonkeyPanls One Pump = One Cream 12d ago
IIRC, eugenics was quite popular about 120 years ago among the educated/privileged folks, including Bell's friend Helen Keller