American Sign Language Name Sign for Vice President Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is given an American Sign Language sign name after she got elected as president Joe Biden’s vice president. 

She is an American politician and also attorney who's the 49th vice president of the United States Of America. She's the first female vp and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the 1st African American and also first Asian American vice president.

The name sign was made by a team of Black and Indian Deaf women, Smita Kothari, Ebony Gooden, Kavita Pipalia, and Candace Jones, who worked with one another for a couple of weeks. This particular women’s group worked together to come up with a list of possible sign names and then sent out a public survey to the Deaf community at large to gather their votes from February 1 to 5, 2021. 

The Importance of Name Sign

Deaf culture consists of a number of valued traditional aspects that are major to the Deaf community, and one of them is the “name sign.” A name sign is a sign that's only given to the individual, and it's often created based on the individual's attributes, persona, likes and dislikes, etc., which uniquely and distinctively identify an individual. It plays a major part in defining exactly who the person is and their personal identity. 

The tradition of Deaf people giving people outside of the Deaf community their name signs strongly resembles Native Americans giving names to honorary people who are not from their tribe. 

Name signs can be portrayed in 2 ways. One way is descriptive, meaning the name sign will depend on appearance, occupation, behavior, the similar sound of the individual's name, or other particular qualities. Another way is actually combined with descriptive, which means that the name sign starts off with the 1st letter of the person’s name, followed by a description of the person’s unique attribute. 

Watch the video here:

https://www.startasl.com/wp-content/uploads/kamalaharris.mp4