[Ctabs] Federationist in Connecticut: Winter/Spring 2021 Issue

[llee at nfbct.org]

The Federationist In Connecticut

 

Winter/Spring, 2021

 

Executive Editor: Brianna Rigsbee

 

 



 

National Federation of the Blind of Connecticut

111 Sheldon Road, Unit 420, Manchester, CT 06045

860.289.1971

www.nfbct.org



 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

FROM THE EDITOR, By Brianna Rigsbee

 

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER <> , By Isabel Rosario

 

MIXED RACE AND HIGH PARTIAL: CHOOSE A GROUP <> , By Justin Mark Hideaki
Salisbury

 

BEING DISABLED and WEARING MY BROWN SKIN <> , By Veronica Alston

 

SETTLER COLONIZATION AND THE BLIND INDIAN <> , By Justin Mark Hideaki
Salisbury

 

CHAPTER AND DIVISION UPDATES <> 

 




 

FROM THE EDITOR

 

Greetings, Federationists, and welcome to a new installment of The
Federationist in Connecticut. As most of you know, my name is Brianna. I am
your new Executive Editor. I have been an active member of the Federation
since joining in 2017. I have served on the Connecticut Association of Blind
Students Board as both the Secretary and then Vice President. I identify as
a blind, African American woman. Within the few years of being involved in
the NFB, I've taken a huge liking to this publication. I love what it
represents-camaraderie, and the willingness to come together to share
experiences and stories. I love that it causes us to think and reflect on
what our fellow members have to say in their pieces. Recently, there have
been a few very timely and important issues brought to the forefront of the
Federation: sexual assault and intersectionality. Both issues,
unfortunately, causing most members to question their place within the
Federation for various reasons, creating less of the camaraderie and
togetherness that I, and others, have come to love about the organization.
This divide has shifted the way we feel about one another, and has
undoubtedly stilted our motivation to continue advocating alongside our
fellow members who have become some of our best friends. This affiliate
prides itself on being a family. Therefore, by keeping this publication
going strong, I hope that we can bring just a little of that togetherness
back.

 

In this issue of the Federationist, I thought it would be a great idea to
talk about intersectionality, and how as people, our various identities
(whatever they may be) define us. Some of our members have contributed by
sharing with us their stories of strength and determination within their
communities as disabled and colored people. They have shared their lived
experiences as a disabled woman of color, how being blind has shaped their
thinking when it comes to judging other people based on voices, and how they
allow their different identities to define them as people. In each of these
stories, we get the chance to learn a lot about the people we call "family".
I think that by reading their stories, you will find it admirable of them to
want to share with us. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the latest issue of the
Federationist.

 

If you would like to submit an article to The Federationist in Connecticut,
please send it to me at  <mailto:editor.fedct at gmail.com>
editor.fedct at gmail.com. This publication cannot exist without your
contribution. I encourage you all to reach out to me. Whether you need help
writing, help with your technology, or just want to float an idea by me,
please do not hesitate to contact me. We can do this together.

 

Thank you, and happy reading!

 

 

 

Judging A Book By Its Cover,

By Isabel Rosario

 

Often times when we meet someone, we immediately judge them based off of how
they look or sound. However, it is impossible to truly grasp who someone is
without knowing their background or what intersectionalities lie beneath the
surface. I myself identify as a Blind Hispanic American woman. While my
family is Hispanic and my mother was born in Puerto Rico, I did not grow up
in a traditional Hispanic home. My whole life we practiced American foods
and traditions. I speak some Spanish and can hold conversations but I am not
fluent. There have been times where I have visited Puerto Rico and wished
that I could fully grasp the language where my family is from. Not knowing
the language in its entirety has definitely impacted how others in the
Hispanic community view me. There have been times when I am out and a
Spanish speaker approaches me because I look Hispanic; however, if they're
asking me for specific directions, I struggle to help them fully and I can
feel their frustration when they realize that I am not fluent. My family
does celebrate the traditional Puerto Rican holidays, and when we have those
celebrations, it helps me feel more connected to my roots.

 

Blindness is merely a characteristic that does not hold me back from living
my life. However, because I am blind, I have been reminded that I cannot
judge someone solely on how they sound. I had an experience in which I was
hanging out with some friends at my university. My friend John mentioned
that we were waiting for his friend Jeniffer. While we were waiting, someone
approached us and engaged in our conversation. Based off of how the person
sounded, I assumed that the person was a male.  In my head I wondered where
Jeniffer was because we had been waiting for a while. I was extremely
thankful that I did not speak my question aloud because I discovered that
the person I thought was a male was Jeniffer. She identifies as a
transgender woman. This interaction taught me that I cannot base who someone
is by how they sound. If I would have voiced my question aloud, I would have
inadvertently offended Jennifer. Although it would not have been done
maliciously, it was still wrong because I assumed who the person was without
understanding what intersectionalities they identify with. There is always
more to a person that meets the eyes or ears, and it's important to discover
what that is before making a judgment.

 

 

 

Mixed-Race and High-Partial: Choose a Group

By Justin Mark Hideaki Salisbury

 

In the broader blind community, many of us are familiar with the idea that
society often wants to sort us into groups based on the extremes. Society
often wants to consider us totally blind with no light perception, or fully
sighted, ready to fly a fighter plane. Logically, we all know that there are
people at every level of that spectrum, but society struggles to recognize
that we exist. We are often asked to choose whether we are totally blind or
not blind at all. In my case, it is proper to call myself blind even though
I do have a substantial amount of residual vision. Some people would call me
a "high-partial." As Dr. Jernigan taught us, "an individual may properly be
said to be 'blind' or a 'blind person' when he has to devise so many
alternative techniques-that is, if he is to function efficiently-that his
pattern of daily living is substantially altered." If you watch me going
through my daily life, I do a lot of things differently-by using alternative
techniques-than I would if I were still sighted, so I am blind.

 

For those of us who belong to multiple racial groups, we often find that
society wants to split us into pieces in order to sort us into one group or
another. Part of privilege is not needing to think about one's minority
group memberships. If you are a mixed-race person, people are often
misclassifying your race and treating you accordingly. Maybe they think you
belong to only one racial group. Maybe they perceive you to be something
that you are not. If you are half black and half white, but completely not
Latino, some people might think you're Puerto Rican even when you're not.
People have so many false ideas about how to classify someone else's race,
and it can create so many problems.

 

Sometimes, a mixed-race identity can be an advantage. In my case, I have
that the benefit of being exposed to different cultures within my family. I
suppose I occasionally get invited to gatherings related to a certain
cultural identity that might not come my way if not for that part of my
identity. As we move forward in diversity and inclusion work in many parts
of our society, I believe that mixed-race people hold a lot of the keys to
the answers needed by the rest of society. We grow up learning how to blend
different cultures. We know how things work on one side of our family and
how those themes vary versus the other side of our family. Unfortunately, as
I have talked to many other mixed-race people about this, we are almost
always excluded from diversity and inclusion work. If we are invited, we are
supposed to act as translators to help the monoracial people communicate
with each other, but we are not supposed to share our perspective. When we
do share our perspective, the people around us often panic and try to push
our commentary aside because they don't know which monoracial group we
represent. The problem is that they come to diversity and inclusion work
assuming that everyone must represent only one racial group. This assumption
is not only wrong; it undermines diversity and inclusion work.

 

If we are mixed-race people in a blindness-related setting, we do sometimes
face discrimination based on our mixed-race identity. I have been denied
vocational rehabilitation (VR) services by a VR counselor who insisted that
"American Indians aren't eligible for VR." Then, when I went to complain
about it, I was told that this could not have happened because I was also
white. The problem was not resolved, but the mixed-race identity was
leveraged to cloud the issue and deny me the VR services I needed.
Furthermore, I was accused of being racist against the Asian-American VR
counselor as a white person for complaining about Asian-American racism
toward American Indians. Mixed-race people face this problem all the time.
Racism between minorities is very real, and the mixed-race people take shots
from all sides.

 

I have also found myself in settings where being white-passing made
monoracial white people feel comfortable speaking in racist ways in front of
me. When we are blind, sometimes people feel comfortable speaking as we are
not there, like our blindness makes us unaware of what is going on, or maybe
so powerless that we cannot do anything about what they are saying. I
remember riding in a shuttle in Oklahoma with a white driver who went on a
rant full of racism against American Indians. I don't look like the Indians
of Oklahoma because I'm not one of them, but I had to endure his racist
rant. I have been in the room when the other people of color have left, and
the feeling in the room changed. I have been asked to participate in a
racial purge, purging people who looked like my family members. Sometimes,
people welcome me into a group or relationship thinking I'm white and
subsequently expel me when they realize I am mixed. Mixed-race people find
ourselves in these situations more often than monoracial people may realize.

 

Some people think it is best for a white-passing person to just assume a
monoracial white identity and blend in that way if they can. This is like
telling a high-partial to pretend to be sighted; don't do it! For me, it
causes me problems when people assume I'm white. For example, marriages
between men and women in most American Indian, Black American, and Puerto
Rican families are matriarchal. Marriages between men and women in most
White American families are patriarchal. If people assume that I am white,
they often assume that I will come from a patriarchal family and find that
structure most intuitive. The fact is that I do not, and a patriarchal
structure is still unnatural to me. The way people perceive my race affects
the assumptions they make about my culturing, which affects how they treat
me.

 

As a mixed-race person, I have often wondered what my group is. Maybe it's
other mixed-race people, but then someone who is a different mix than I am
might come from different traditions. As a blind person, I know who my
people are. The Federation teaches us that all blind people belong together.
If you're blind enough to seek out the Federation, you belong in the
Federation. I suspect that mixed-race blind people would be easiest to
recruit to the Federation because we want that community that knows that we
completely belong in it. I have had my share of clashes with monoracial
blind people who become angry when I do not fit into the boxes that they
have available for me, but I stick around because the Federation is the only
organization I know that understands blindness and offers inclusion in the
blind community. I also suspect that monoracial white blind people feel this
about the Federation, too, as they do not belong to a racial minority group.
I will let monoracial white blind people tell their story, and I hope they
let me tell mine. One key ingredient in raising expectations for the blind
is making sure that the Federation is completely welcoming to mixed-race
people.

 

 

 

BEING DISABLED and WEARING MY BROWN SKIN

By Veronica Alston

 

We all at times take things for granted. For example, the ability to see,
hear, speak, and walk are second nature and allows individuals to function
normally on a daily basis. What about individuals who contend with life's
challenges and circumstances beyond their control? What about individuals
with physical and intellectual challenges? Is it fair to say that just
because a person who is disabled, has the wrong skin color, or both should
be deemed incompetent? Every human being, regardless of their disability,
ethnicity, or race, has the right to live their lives to the fullest
potential without the fear of being bullied or discriminated against. We all
encounter hardships in our lives. It takes courage and strength to overcome
obstacles and barriers surrounding employment, public transportation, and
accessibility to public places.

 

Those who have never walked in the shoes of someone who has been
discriminated against due to a disability or race will never understand the
fight for continuously working toward securing equality, independence,
acceptance, and respect for all.

 

My name is Veronica Alston. I would like to share a little of my life story.
I was born into circumstances beyond my control. My mom gave birth three
months prior to her expected due date delivering me at only two pounds. The
doctors suggested that my parents start planning my funeral service. They
also said that if I did live, I wouldn't have any vision by the time I was
four years old. I stayed in the hospital for the first five months of my
life and had to undergo two eye surgeries before going home for the first
time.

 

I received my primary and secondary education in the New Haven Public School
System, then went on to college with plans to receive a Bachelor's Degree in
Special Education. I figured that would be a good career since I could
relate to needing special accommodations in the classroom. I was in my
sophomore year at Southern Connecticut State University when I developed
Glaucoma at the age of 19. I had to take a break from school in order to
adjust from having usable vision to total blindness.

 

Before I lost my sight, I had enough vision that would allow me to see

colors, ride a bike, take the bus and had the ability to complete normal

daily tasks with minimal assistance. Socially and physically, I was fine

but at times felt ostracized.

Having to adjust to total loss of vision was one of the most difficult and

darkest times of my life. I cried for weeks, listened to people tell me

that everything would be ok, giving me advice on how I should do this

and how I should do that. Some felt sorry for me, some didn't. Some

tried to get over on me, some genuinely cared.  

 

It was 11 years after losing my sight when I returned back to school

deciding to change my major from special education to social work.

During that period I had to figure out on my own how to put back the

pieces to the puzzle, finally realizing that life goes on whether I picked

them up or not. I don't have the solution or all the answers to living

with a disability. I haven't walked in anyone else's shoes but my own. I

will share what works for me and what I had to learn in order to

function in life. It doesn't matter if people can't accept me for who I 

am. I learned to love myself from the inside out. I don't look for

validation because I know my worth. I don't let my disability or the

color of my skin define me. The biggest challenge is getting people to

understand that yes, I am AN African American WOMAN with A VISUAL

IMPAIRMENT, but that doesn't make me incompetent. Here are some

of my accomplishments since graduating from Southern Connecticut in

May 2001. There were bumps, scrapes and bruises along the way, but I

brushed myself off and kept it moving. I worked for a nonprofit

organization for 14 years, had two children, bought a home, currently

married and doing outreach with community organizations to help

make a difference in the lives of others.

 

Thank you for taking the time out to read my story. I hope it can inspire,

motivate and encourage someone who is looking for light at the end of

the tunnel.

 

 

 

Settler Colonialism and the Blind Indian

By Justin Mark Hideaki Salisbury

 

First off, I want to pick a word for indigenous North American identity. For
almost everyone I know who share this identity, we are open to multiple
different words for it. The way you treat people is a lot more important
than the word you use. I often just say "Indian", and I have learned to do
so from other Indian people. I like the term Indian because it has fewer
syllables, so you can say it faster. In Indian communities, it is normal for
us to talk about ideas like oppression and settler colonialism. I am going
to bring up some themes here which may be new to our readers.

 

To discuss Indian identity, it will help to explain settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism is a mentality and a process of trying to replace the
original population of a place with a new society of settlers. It involves
replacing the customs and culture of the original people with those of the
colonizing culture, which are believed to be innately superior. There is
often some kind of support from the imperial homelands of the colonizing
culture. Once settler colonialism becomes established somewhere, members of
the dominant group just assume that it is a fact of life. Settler
colonialism has been a practice of British, German, French, Spanish,
Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Chinese, and Japanese settlers, just to
name a few. American popular culture tries to teach us that a craving for
conquest is a natural human desire, just like hunger or thirst, but this is
not the case for indigenous people. To most indigenous people, it is
unnatural to think about conquest. We just want to live.

 

Blind people and Indians both encounter others from outside our groups who
try to invalidate our identities. For both groups, there is a misperception
that we are given some kind of advantage because of our minority group
membership, and people outside our group don't want us to have it. A lot of
people think that all Indians get a check, but we don't. Our reservations
continue to be very much impoverished, but it was worse before we realized
that we could open some casinos on our tribal lands. Then, settler people
became green with envy and started opening up their own casinos because they
didn't want us Indians getting that money. Those casinos have offered jobs
in the tribal communities. I have been denied vocational rehabilitation (VR)
services and told to seek VR from my tribe, since my tribe surely has money
for VR. That VR counselor made so many false assumptions but was fixated on
driving a wedge between Indians and the resources we have. We also face
accusations of ethnic fraud from those settlers who feel like our existence
gives them less claim to the land that their ancestors stole from ours. If
they can argue that we do not exist anymore, then there is nobody left to
take the land back from them. Since I am both blind and Indian, I am accused
of fraud for both reasons.

 

Almost all Indians today are mixed with something else. Settler colonialism
urges us to identify with that something else. If we are blind but have
partial vision, we may use that partial vision to draw conclusions about
another person's race, but this can lead us astray. I once dated a white
woman who, using her partial vision, had concluded that I was white. Her
sighted family seemed to concur, but they were from a community that was
almost universally white. When she learned that I was not fully white, this
created a major problem. She had been raised to believe that white people
should only date other white people, and she had taken pride in the fact
that she had only ever dated white men. Things went downhill in our
relationship from there, and it eventually ended. Part of me felt a lot of
pain over her commitment to segregation, but I also felt bad for her that
she had been fallen into the trap of depending on her residual vision. If
she had used the nonvisual technique of asking me about my racial identity
early on, we could have spared ourselves the trouble.

 

I want to bring up another problem we face-one that often invokes a strong
backlash from the neoliberals who get into the business of diversity
programming in the first place. American Indians have not only taken abuse
from people of European ancestry. Other ethnic minorities give us grief,
too. The first slaves in the Americas were not African; they were Indian. We
worked as slaves right next to the Africans, but very few history books
report it. We were forced to interbreed with the Africans so that the
masters could refer to us as black, and the settlers could argue that we no
longer existed. After the slaves were freed in the 1860s, many of the
freedmen were offered employment as Buffalo Soldiers, whose primary job was
to clear the west of the Indians. The history books often depict massacres
of unarmed women and children as battles in which the militias and soldiers
fought valiantly and eventually overcame us. Unfortunately, centuries later,
we still face the Buffalo Soldier effect from the black community, where the
black community has been taught that their liberation requires serving as
agents of settler colonialism, a conflict designed by the settlers. In other
words: if you want to be first-class citizens, you need to help us crush the
Indians. My Indian grandmother has the hair of a black woman because she is
partly that, too, and I see myself in both communities. Another group of
settlers whose settler colonialism gets almost no attention from the
neoliberals is the Asian Americans. Pointing out their settler colonialism
does not require hating them, just as pointing out the settler colonialism
of European Americans does not require hating them. Asian settler
colonialism is just as real, but we get no protection from it from the
so-called social justice activists. How do these intergroup tensions affect
us as blind people? For starters, anytime we need anything related to our
blindness, it comes up.

 

Indian mascots perpetuate a stereotype that we are stoic and warlike people.
The history books often describe all Indian men as warriors, and almost all
the stories about us focus on some kind of violence. Violence was used as a
means of stealing our land and controlling our people. That stereotype of us
all being warriors helps the settler people justify their claims that they
won the land fair and square and helps them justify their entitlement to the
fruits of our oppression. Unfortunately, in the blind community, we have
some sports teams with Indian mascots. As the Federation works on diversity
and inclusion, I hope that we will reach out to blind sports teams like the
Austin Blackhawks and Aztec Warriors and ask them to change their names.
When Indians object to the Indian mascots, we are often portrayed by the
settler media as offended or angry, thus reinforcing the warlike stereotype
that the mascots embody. Our emotional juice is too valuable to spend it on
getting offended every time someone puts up a racist depiction of Indians,
so I encourage other Indians to scrub those words from our vocabularies. We
cannot afford to feed the trolls with the word "offended." The warlike
stereotypes affect us when we apply for jobs. I am a teacher of the blind, a
profession where a person labeled warlike is not particularly desired. I
speak out against the mascots because I want salvation from the stereotype.
Since we have mascots in the blind community, I hope we can do our part.
Decolonization and the liberation of the blind do not only complement each
other; they demand each other.

 

 

 

Chapter/division updates:

Central CT Chapter -Deb Reed, President

 

Our January 16 meeting included the Hartford Chapter. Our guest speaker was
Ollie Cantos, a former NFB leader, disability advocate, Attorney and federal
employee for the Department of Education in the civil rights area. We
enjoyed his presentation with guidance for how to find blind children to
participate in our BELL program as well as the parents of blind children
division, which we are hoping to start this year in Connecticut.

 

 

 

Currently, all National Federation of the Blind of Connecticut chapters are
meeting virtually. For meeting information, please contact our chapter
presidents:

At-Large Chapter: Jim Cronin at 860-593-7063

Central Connecticut Chapter: Deb Reed at 860-973-3679

Greater Hartford Chapter: Gary Allen at 860-607-6774

Shoreline Chapter: Shonda Rosetta at 860-951-6107

Southern Connecticut Chapter: Marchele Davis at 203-314-5298

Greater Waterbury Chapter: Josefina Martinez at 203-578-6471

 

 

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