Ableism
The first step towards eradicating ableism is the development of inclusive vocabulary. For instance, the word deaf is sometimes capitalized to “distinguish the culture from the audiological condition” (Baynton 48). Deaf refers to individuals who identify culturally as Deaf. However, people in the d/Deaf, hard-ofhearing, and hearing-speaking communities, as well as disability scholars no longer make as strong a distinction between prelingual and postlingual deafness, because some communities overlap (Brueggemann 14–15, 163–64 n1). Samuel Yates writes, for instance, that “where Deaf communities flourish, d/Deaf and hearing persons live alongside each other with Deaf persons modeling different ways of being in the world” (79).