[nabs-l] Are we blind people or people who are blind?

[Carly Mihalakis]

Good evening, Ashley,

I agree! In fact, this "person first" mentality 
does nothing whatsoever to increase chances of 
sighted acceptance of us whatsoever. It makes us 
seem ever alien, than we are already. I find it 
immensely clattery and unnatural. Besides, as 
someone said, our blindness is often what defines 
us, like it or not. It's way more than an 
inconvenience. Furthermore, it makes us special 
since not everybody is BLIND. Does this make sense?
Anyway Ashley, I agree with you!
Car  /19/2012, you wrote:
>Hi,
>good topic.
>
>I think this is creating only a politically correct society where people are
>afraid to say the words associated with a disability such as blind, deaf,
>paraplecgic, etc.
>
>I don't mind people at all saying blind person, or visually impaired person,
>etc.
>In fact often saying person first makes our language more cluttered and
>disorganized. I cannot imagine having to keep writing person who stutters
>rather than stutterer; I'd prefer the direct way; besides what is more
>important is changing attitudes; and I don't think we've come to accept a
>disabled person for who they are yet.
>
>Ashley
>-----Original Message----- From: Arielle Silverman
>Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 6:40 PM
>To: nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>Subject: [nabs-l] Are we blind people or people who are blind?
>
>I saw the below article on another list and thought it was very
>interesting. What do you guys think?
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From: LILITH Finkler <lilithfinkler at hotmail.com>
>Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:41:42 -0300
>Subject: New Article: "Person-first language: Noble intent but to what
>effect?"
>To: DISABILITY-RESEARCH at jiscmail.ac.uk
>
>
>Dear Colleagues. Please see article below from the current issue of
>the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The journal is publishing a
>series on "person first language".
>Lilith===========================================================================================
>CMAJ December 11, 2012 vol. 184 no. 18 First published November 5,
>2012, doi: 10.1503/cmaj.109-4319© 2012 Canadian Medical Association or
>its licensorsAll editorial matter in CMAJ represents the opinions of
>the authors and not necessarily those of the Canadian Medical
>Association.NewsPerson-first language: Noble intent but to what
>effect?Roger Collier-Author AffiliationsCMAJKenneth St. Louis grew up
>with a moderate stutter that he eventually got under control in
>college. His struggle with stuttering led to an interest in
>speech-language pathology, which he now teaches at West Virginia
>University in Morgan-town. St. Louis is an expert in fluency
>disorders, including cluttering, a condition characterized by rapid
>speech with an erratic rhythm. Once, after a journal sent him the
>edited version of a paper he had submitted on cluttering, St. Louis
>noticed something curious.“They changed ‘clutterer’ to ‘person who
>clutters’ all the way through,” says St. Louis.The changes to St.
>Louis’ prose stem from the person-first (or people-first) language
>movement, which began some 20 years ago to promote the concept that a
>person shouldn’t be defined by a diagnosis. By literally putting
>“person” first in language, what was once a label becomes a mere
>characteristic. No longer are there “disabled people.” Instead, there
>are “people with disabilities.”
>No reasonable person would challenge the intent behind person-first
>language. Who, after all, would prefer to be known as a condition
>rather than as a person? But is this massive effort to change the
>language of disability and disease having any effect? Is it actually
>changing attitudes, reducing stigma or improving lives? Skeptics point
>to the nonexistent body of evidence. Advocates claim it starts with
>language and that results will follow.Words are indeed powerful, and
>they can perpetuate hurtful stereotypes and reinforce negative
>attitudes, suggests Kathie Snow, a disability rights advocate who runs
>the “Disability is Natural” website (www.disabilityisnatural.com).
>“People with developmental disabilities have, throughout history, been
>marginalized and devalued because of labels,” she says. “Labels have
>always caused people to be devalued. It has caused people to be put to
>death, to be sterilized against their will.”If a person-first language
>advocate had commissioned this sign, it would read: “CHILD WITH AUTISM
>AREA.”Image courtesy of © 2012 ThinkstockSuggesting that a diagnosis
>is a person’s most important characteristic reinforces the
>all-too-common opinion that people with disabilities have limited
>potential and society should expect little from them, Snow has written
>(www.disabilityisnatural.com/images/PDF/pfl09.pdf). She suggests that
>the disability rights movement is changing language to be more
>respectful rather than merely politically correct, in a similar vein
>to past efforts by civil rights and women’s movements.“If people with
>disabilities are to be included in all aspects of society, and if
>they’re to be respected and valued as our fellow citizens, we must
>stop using language that marginalizes and sets them apart,” wrote
>Snow. “History tells us that the first way to devalue a person is
>through language.”
>The global movement to promote person-first language has been
>extremely successful. It is now standard in government documents
>around the world, as well as in scientific journals and many other
>publications. Widespread adoption of this grammatical structure is the
>reason that, present sentence excepted, this article will not refer to
>a stutterer, a cancer patient, a diabetic, a blind man, a deaf woman
>or an autistic person. It might, however, refer to a person who
>stutters, a person with cancer, a person with diabetes, a man who is
>visually impaired, a woman who is hearing impaired or a person with
>autism.
>But some people, including members of several disability groups,
>aren’t big fans of person-first language. They claim it is merely
>political correctness run amok, verbosity intended to spare hurt
>feelings yet accomplishing little more than turning one word into two
>or more words. Even worse, some suggest, tucking the names of diseases
>and disabilities in the shadows may have the opposite effect of what
>is intended. It could stigmatize words that were never considered
>derogatory or pejorative in the first place.
>St. Louis’ introduction to person-first language made him wonder if it
>actually had an effect on opinions about words used to label people
>with various conditions, including speech, language and hearing
>disorders (J Fluency Discord 1999;24:1­24). He found that the
>person-first version of a label was regarded as “significantly more
>positive” in only 2% of comparisons. “For example,” wrote St. Louis,
>“with the exception of widely known terms that have stigmatized
>individuals (e.g., ‘Moron’), terms identifying serious mental illness
>(‘psychosis’) or dreaded diseases (‘leprosy’), person-first
>nomenclature made little difference in minimizing negative
>reactions.”There is no evidence that person-first terminology enhances
>sensitivity or reduces insensitivity, notes St. Louis, and yet health
>professionals and scholarly publishers are now among its strongest
>advocates. Good luck getting your work published in a scientific
>journal if you don’t conform. In the field of speech-language
>pathology, terms such as “person who stutters” or “child who stutters”
>have even become acronyms (PWS and CWS). To St. Louis, the notion that
>calling someone a PWS is more sensitive than calling them a stutterer
>is nothing short of ludicrous.
>“It’s not really about sensitivity,” says St. Louis. “It’s about: This
>is just the way it’s done.”Furthermore, suggests St. Louis, the
>sentiment expressed in communication is far more important than the
>linguistic circumlocutions present in the language. “If you are going
>to be a jerk,” he says, “you can be just as much of a jerk using
>person-first language as using the direct label.”Members of some
>disability groups have become so fed up with pressure to adopt
>person-first language that they have begun pushing back. The National
>Federation for the Blind in the United States has long opposed what it
>perceives as “an unholy crusade” to force everyone to use person-first
>language
>(www.nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm09/bm0903/bm090309.htm).The
>federation’s main publication, the Braille Monitor, has unequivocally
>defended its right “to cling to its conviction that vigorous prose is
>a virtue and that blind people can stand to read one of the adjectives
>that describe them before they arrive at the noun”
>(www.nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm09/bm0903/bm090308.htm).
>“Blind people we are, and we are content to be described as such.”
>Many people with diabetes are also surprised to learn that the word
>“diabetic” is now considered taboo. Who turned it into a moniker non
>grata? Not people with diabetes, apparently. Type “diabetic” and
>“tattoo” into Google Images and you’ll find thousands of people with
>the condition who have the word permanently inked on their skin. One
>of those people is Tanyss Christie, a mother of two from Chilliwack,
>British Columbia, who has “diabetic” tattooed on her inner left wrist
>in a style similar to a MedicAlert bracelet. Would she be upset if
>someone called her a diabetic?“No, I wouldn’t be offended,” Christie
>writes in an email. “Diabetes is me and who I am and I don’t need to
>hide that; I am a diabetic and have been for 29 years. I say it strong
>because I survived such a hard disease and hope to [for] many more
>years.”
>The topic of person-first language seems to stir particularly heated
>debate among people affected by autism. In general, parents of
>children with autism appear to prefer person-first language. Some even
>suggest that saying “autistic child” is not much better than referring
>to someone with cancer as a “cancerous person.” Many adults with
>autism, however, believe that autism is central to their identity and
>prefer to use terms such as “autistic person.” This has been called
>identify-first language.Person-first language implies that autism can
>be separated from the person, which simply isn’t true, according to
>Jim Sinclair, an adult with autism who cofounded the Autism Network
>International. In a widely circulated essay, Sinclair wrote that
>autism is such an essential feature of his being that to describe
>himself as a person with autism would be akin to calling a parent a
>“person with offspring” or calling a man a person “with maleness”
>(www.cafemom.com/journals/read/436505). Attempting to separate autism
>from personhood also “suggests that autism is something bad — so bad
>that it isn’t even consistent with being a person.”
>Then there are those who take a more moderate position, varying their
>language according to their audience so that focus remains on their
>message rather than how it’s delivered. This is the approach taken by
>Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, a writer who chronicles her “journeys with
>autism” on her blog (www.journeyswithautism.com).“I will use
>person-first (i.e. person with autism) and identity-first (i.e
>autistic person) language interchangeably, partly for the sake of
>variety, and partly to resist the ideologues on both sides. I will
>also vary my language to suit my audience. For example, if I’m talking
>with people who prefer identity-first language, I will use it. If I am
>talking to people who prefer person-first language, I will use it. If
>I am talking to a mixed group, I will likely mix my terminology,”
>Cohen-Rottenberg writes in an email. “I find that people’s feelings
>can run so high regarding language that, even if I find person-first
>language very problematic, I’ll use it with people who favor it so
>that we don’t end up getting derailed into language discussions and
>away from the issue at hand.”Editor’s note: First of a multipart
>series.Part II: Person-first language: What it means to be a
>“person”(www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.109-4322).Part III:
>Person-first language: Laudable cause, horrible
>prose(www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.109-4338).Facebook Google+
>LinkedIn Reddit StumbleUpon TwitterWhat's this?Responses to this
>articleMaria Z GittaDo we really need to ask 'to what effect'?CMAJ
>published online November 7, 2012Full Text
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