In his doctoral thesis, Tom Humphries (1977) defined the term Audism as "The idea that a person is superior based on his or her ability to feel or behave like someone who feels." (Humphries, cited by Harrington 2002). Humphries explains the negative stigma that has been created based on the pathological thinking people have heard from doctors and professionals about anyone who is deaf, hard of hearing, or hard of hearing. Is it right to limit, judge, or label people based on whether or not a person can hear or whether or not they choose to speak? For my research project I decided to ask people this very question. After posting a series of questions on Facebook, a social media site, many people are unfamiliar with the term audism, confuse it with autism, are afraid to express their opinions, and don't think it's right to discriminate against deaf or speech-impaired people. hearing. The first step I took to find out what my peers knew about deaf culture was to find out if they had ever considered deafness as a culture. It took ten minutes for someone to respond to my first post. Ariela Melchor responded by saying “Yes, I went to the Fresno State Talks” (personal communication, April 9, 2014). Shortly after his comment many others responded saying they believed this was actually a deaf culture. I responded by asking why? Not a single person responded. One of the girls who replied to my post is a good friend of mine, instead of adding to my post she sent me a personal message that said the following: “I'm sorry for not replying, I just don't want to say Something is wrong. I don't want to offend anyone so I prefer to simply send you a message" (E. Rodriguez, personal communication, April 9, 2014). Now I understand why not... half of the paper... ce, personality and genetics that we all share (p. 5 ) Although we do our best not to discriminate or oppress as humans, we are unfortunately taught to categorize. We are born with the ability to quickly gather information and categorize it in a way that makes sense to us to what they say, how they behave, how they appear and in this situation the language they choose to speak. This way of categorizing often leads to superficial or harmful stereotypes, these thoughts are inevitable. By judging, assuming we have created negative stigma and formed ideas about what or who we think we know. Works Cited Ogden, P.W., (1996). The Silent Garden: Raising Your Deaf Child. Washington: Gallaudet University Press.Harrington, T., (2002). What is Audism: Introduction. Retrieved April 9, 2014, from http://libguides.gallaudet.edu/content.php?pid=114455&sid=989379