Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community » (1st Edition)

Harlan Lane is recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and of the World Federation of the Deaf International Social Merit Award. He is the author of When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, and Journey into the Deaf World. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

A look at the gulf that separates the deaf minority from the hearing world, this book sheds light on the mistreatment of the deaf community by a hearing establishment that resists understanding and awareness. Critically acclaimed as a breakthrough when it was first published in 1992, this new edition includes information on the science and ethics of childhood cochlear implants. An indictment of the ways in which experts in the scientific, medical, and educational establishment purport to serve the deaf, this book describes how they, in fact, do them great harm.

Publishers Weekly

``Audism'' is the term that Northeastern University psychology professor Lane, who is not deaf, uses in this forceful indictment of what he calls ``the hearing establishment,'' which he portrays as a colonial power overseeing the needs of deaf subjects. Hearing ``experts'' (at least the ones who can hear) demean deaf people, who, he writes, view themselves as an ethnic group, and who tend to marry among themselves. A deaf mother recalls her response upon learning that her newborn was deaf: ``I wasn't disappointed. I thought, it will be all right. We are both deaf so we will know what to do.'' Lane derides the financial motivation of those who urge upon deaf patients cochlear implants, a procedure with mixed results based on a painful, complicated bone-drilling process. Those who are deaf, he observes, are not handicapped; they have heightened visual powers. His book is an eye-opener. (May)