[nabs-l] Ignorance vs. Prejudice

[Melissa Green]

Arielle,
You make some very good points.

Melissa Green
Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our
possibilities become limitless
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arielle Silverman" <arielle71 at gmail.com>
To: <nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2009 11:01 PM
Subject: [nabs-l] Ignorance vs. Prejudice


Hi all,

Recently we’ve been talking about airline discrimination, which has
historically served as a good representation of the kind of
second-class treatment that we often get in everyday interactions with
members of the public. I think Jedi made some good points in
describing the tendency of some sighted people to judge us as
incompetent based on the role of sight in their own lives and their
assumption that losing their sight would leave them incapacitated. It
is true that we are a tiny minority (even within the disabled
community) and that a lot of sighted people simply don’t know how we
perform everyday tasks. In some cases this ignorance leads to
discriminatory treatment (“The blind person can’t sit in the exit
row”) or stereotypes (“Blind people are slow”).

What I’ve always found fascinating, though, is that lack of
knowledge—ignorance—doesn’t always translate into discrimination. In
fact many sighted people are simply curious, and if we tell or show
them how we use the computer, read or travel, they quickly accept our
alternative techniques and treat us just the same as everyone else.
But this doesn’t happen all  the time. And then, on the flip side,
there are those who know all the facts about blindness and still
“don’t get it”. This includes, for  instance, the mobility instructor
who’s taught O&M for thirty years but who still insists that you
should walk three blocks out of your way rather than cross a busy
intersection. Many of us find that our own parents make more of a big
deal out of our blindness than do people we’ve just met, even if our
parents have met competent blind people or been to blindness
workshops, know Braille, etc. So there definitely is a difference
between ignorance and prejudice. The combination of both is bad, but
you can easily have one without the other. And it’s prejudice, not
ignorance, that actually causes us trouble.

Unfortunately, while we can easily remedy ignorance with simple
education, alleviating prejudice isn’t that simple. It seems like much
of the persistence of people’s prejudices comes from their emotional
or “gut” reactions to blindness. The experienced teacher of blind
students may know all the facts about Braille, including the fact that
children who learn Braille while young can read just as fast as
sighted children. And yet, on some gut level the teacher feels an
aversion to Braille, seeing it as a stigma or a symbol of weakness. So
no matter how well this teacher is trained, if she gets a kid in her
caseload who has partial sight, it’s going to be  a struggle for the
teacher to actively teach the child Braille. The parent who finds his
child’s blindness frightening, likewise, is going to have a hard time
letting the child play outside or do chores, no matter how  much he
reads about what is best for blind children, unless he figures out how
to let go of  his fear. I think so much of the success of our training
centers comes from their ability to not only teach us practical
skills, but also help us  overcome our own fears and negative feelings
about blindness.

And yet, as Monica has demonstrated, there  are those sighted people
who display a lack of prejudice and who automatically include us and
treat us normally without any prior knowledge about blindness or
education on our parts. We all know sighted people like this, even
though we often tend to spend most of our mental energy grumbling
about the sighted people who treat us strangely. My boyfriend never
met a single blind person before me, and yet in some ways seems to
instinctively “get it” more than my mother, for example, who besides
raising me for twenty-four years, also read many of the leading  books
about raising a blind child. (Never mind that many of the messages
espoused in those books are rooted in prejudices of their own).

So  what do you guys think makes the difference between those members
of the sighted public who show prejudice and those who don’t? Is it
something about their personalities or experiences? And if simple
educating isn’t enough to address people’s deep-seated emotional
reactions, what can we do about it? Do we have any control over
whether the sighted guy on the street grabs us or treats us with
respect? It’s easy enough for us to tell who will be responsive to
education about blindness and who won’t. But for those who aren’t
responsive, how do we deal with them civilly while still protecting
our rights and our freedom? And how do we deal with educators like O&M
instructors, who have power over what we learn or what accommodations
we get but whose judgments are affected by their misconceptions about
blindness?

I look forward to a lively discussion on this topic, as it’s central
to how we act as an organization and how we can really change what it
means to be blind for ourselves and for others.

Arielle

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