[nabs-l] Blindness and Identity

[Sean Whalen]

I hesitate to beat the proverbial dead horse, but I take exception to being
directly or indirectly labeled as sexist or a chauvinist.

Yes, it was perhaps not the best example to select. No, maybe I shouldn't
have jumped on board with that specific example when Mark provided several
others that work just as well. But, the fact remains that what Mark has
argued is 100% true. Nobody ever at any point claimed to know how being a
woman makes one feel or how much anybody in particular does or does not
think about the implications on their existence of being of one sex or the
other.

We were talking about identity and the way in which individuals experience
the world. Identity, in one sense, is just a description of a person which
individuates that person. In this sense, blindness, sex, skin color, and an
infinite list of other attributes are certainly part of one's identity. This
is how I think of identity. What I overlooked, and think other people refer
to when speaking of identity, is sense of self. I agree with others who have
said as much that blindness, sex, etc... play greater or lesser roles in
one's identity and that this can vary greatly from person to person. I
certainly identify myself as being blind, but it isn't a dominant part of my
identity or sense of self.

As for the way individuals experience the world, and back to the initial
point that Mark made, none of us can know how or to what degree any of our
characteristics influence how we experience the world. I'm blind, was never
sighted, and therefore have no basis for comparison to experiencing the
world in a visual versus nonvisual way. I can guess as to how being blind
differs from being sighted, but I can't say with any certainty. Similarly,
as a man, I can't say how experiencing the world as a woman differs from my
experience. I completely agree that a large majority of the differences and
supposed differences between women and men are socially constructed, but the
fact remains that there are biological differences that exist. I would think
that those differences have at least some affect on how men and women
experience the world, but, of course, I can't ever know this. That is the
point. If anybody can find anything sexist about that, please explain it to
me. Maybe there is something in this point of view that I am overlooking,
and if that is the case, I would sincerely like to understand it so I can
reexamine some of my assumptions.

I really do apologize to anybody who may have taken offense to anything I
have said, but in reading it back, I still agree with all of it.

To Arielle's point about the notion that some people seem to espouse, namely
that blind people shouldn't spend too much time socializing with other blind
people, I think she is spot on. Blind friends don't come at the expense of
sighted friends and vice versa. Social relations with blind folks and
sighted folks are not mutually exclusive. I am wary of anybody who thinks
that associating with, befriending, or dating exclusively sighted people is
a mark of success. This pretty obviously says something about how the
holders of this point of view feel about blind people. Likewise, I think it
is not good for a blind person to insist on associating exclusively with
blind people. We are all part of a larger society, and it doesn't make a lot
of sense to consign yourself to dealing with a small subset of it. I
completely understand how it can feel more comfortable and one can feel less
conspicuous in a group when being blind is the norm and not an anomaly, but
getting outside of one's comfort zone is the only way to expand it. It's
difficult to integrate into society on terms of equality with the sighted if
we are not willing to take steps toward doing so.

Sean