Blackface and yellowface are no longer acceptable. They are tenets of racism America largely pretends we have never engaged in. We now have a new form of racism like this on television: audism in the form of Switched at Birth. Katie Leclerc, AKA Daphne, for those of you D/deaf people who don't know (I didn't until my friends told me how disgusting and cruel it was, and embarrassing), adopts a "deaf accent" for her role on Switched at Birth.

Katie Leclerc is not deaf. She has a hearing loss that fluctuates, but she does not identify as deaf. She does not identify as Deaf. She does not identify as hard of hearing. Katie/Daphne has an abominable grasp of American Sign Language as a "Deaf" character. There is nothing about Daphne that brings about the verisimilitude of a young Deaf woman.

She does, however, make oodles of money portraying a Deaf character in the last remaining culturally acceptable form of racism. It's acceptable to mock and mangle American Sign Language and hire someone who is not Deaf, but it is not acceptable to hire white actors and tape their body parts into shapes you want, paint them varying shades, and call them Asian, Black, American Indian, or any other race or ethnicity. The world needs to stop appeasing white, hearing people. The world needs to respect d/Deaf people wholly, and one way to do that is scrap Switched at Birth and create a similar show, hiring an actual Deaf actor with a Deaf voice who's willing to engage in speech therapy for the sake of being on television, or whose dialogue is subtitled entirely.

Katie Leclerc, for you uninitiated hearing folks, is not a competent signer. She flicks her tongue in a way many D/deaf people find derogatory and embarrassing--far too often. She cannot sign well. Daphne, her character, is the least Deaf person in the entire universe. No Deaf person would attempt to hijack our language. Katie Leclerc DOES NOT CARE ABOUT DEAF PEOPLE, DEAF CULTURE, THE DEAF COMMUNITY OR PORTRAYING DAPHNE ACCURATELY AS A DEAF PERSON. 

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN DEAF AND HEARING PEOPLE IS ONLY POSSIBLE THROUGH RESPECT, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING...NOT THROUGH DECEIT AND MAKING A MOCKERY OF A LANGUAGE BELOVED TO US ALL.