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

Carly Mihalakis carlymih at comcast.net
Thu Dec 20 07:23:32 UTC 2012


Listen, I don't know much about this "person 
first," nonsense but I would guess that this 
whole concept of addressing the person first was, 
like talking about a Black, or gay person, 
thought up by folk who aren't themselves,  Black, 
or gay, no? This idea of nonmembers labeling us 
horrifies me. A step toward self determination, 
in my view, is to figure out what makes how we ought to  be identified.
Car 2012, you wrote:
>Ashley,
>   For myself, I mostly agree that person-first language is cumbersome
>and doesn't really address the real problems disabled people (or
>"people with disabilities", if anyone cares) still face in our
>society.  However, the fact that the "sighted world" insists on
>person-first language indicates, to me, that people are at least
>trying to think of us as people who happen to have disabilities rather
>than disabled people.  I've often heard Federationists say something
>to the effect of "I'm not a blind person!!!  I just happen to be
>blind, and there's a real difference!"  I think that statements like
>that from disabled people (which are totally understandable) have, at
>least in part, inspired the professional world to adopt person-first
>language.  I don't think it's the right answer to descrimination and
>marginalization, but at least the powers that be in the academic world
>recognize, on paper if nothing else, that people often define us in
>terms of our disabilities and not who we really are.  Surely, that
>recognition is at least a small step in the right direction?
>   Just my thoughts,
>Kirt
>
>On 12/19/12, Ashley Bramlett <bookwormahb at earthlink.net> wrote:
> > Arielle,
> > Well said. I prefer just blind people as well.
> > Its interesting to me that we usually put the adjectives before the person
> > to describe them.
> > We do not say person with black hair but we say black haired person.
> > We will not say person who is tall but  tall person. Yet with a disability
> > we have to say person first. It seems odd to me.
> > Just say deaf person, blind person, etc. It sounds less cumbersome  to me.
> >
> > Ashley
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Arielle Silverman
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 10:07 PM
> > To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> > Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Are we blind people or people who are blind?
> >
> > Hi all,
> > The question of whether we describe ourselves in terms of blindness or
> > in terms of other traits we have is an interesting one as well, but I
> > think that's a different question from what the article I posted is
> > asking about. The article is asking what we should call ourselves (or
> > what others should call us) in discussions where blindness is the
> > focus. Should we refer to ourselves as "people who are blind" or
> > "people with blindness" or is the term "blind people" more
> > appropriate?
> > I find this issue to be personally relevant because I am applying for
> > a job with a blindness research group, and I noticed that everywhere
> > in their online materials, publications etc. they refer to their
> > research participants as "people who are blind", "youth with visual
> > impairments" etc. I don't think this necessarily reflects on their
> > philosophy, but is probably just the language that they are accustomed
> > to using and that is required by journals and other outlets. I also
> > co-authored a paper a few years ago and one journal to which we sent
> > the paper insisted that we use the term "people with blindness"
> > throughout the entire manuscript, which I found extremely cumbersome
> > and awkward. Anyway, in applying for this job it has been strange for
> > me to either use the term "people who are blind" or to say "blind
> > people" and risk causing offense. As a member of the blind community I
> > feel on some level that everyone in this community are members of an
> > extended family, and so it's weird to refer to all you guys as "people
> > who are blind" and distance them from blindness, which I consider a
> > positive identity that I share with all of you. This is also why I
> > like to call someone with partial sight "blind" rather than "visually
> > impaired" because calling them "blind" is welcoming them into my
> > blindness family and community. Those of you who are NFB members, ACB
> > members or part of any blindness organization probably understand the
> > collective pride and joy that can rise up when we are in a convention
> > assembly and call ourselves "the blind". Looking at it that way, I
> > feel like it's almost insulting to refer to members of my blindness
> > family as just "people who are blind" rather than fully including them
> > with the label "blind people". So I understand what the article is
> > talking about. At the same time, I wonder if there are folks out there
> > who truly prefer to be called people who are blind instead, and if
> > they feel this is putting their humanity before their blindness.
> > Arielle
> >
> > On 12/11/12, Kirt <kirt.crazydude at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Brandon,
> >> Thank you for writing my email for me. :-)
> >>
> >> Sent from my iPhone
> >>
> >> On Dec 11, 2012, at 5:11 PM, "Brandon Keith Biggs"
> >> <brandonkeithbiggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hello,
> >>> I used to call myself: "A blind actor" but recently I've stopped and
> >>> what
> >>> I've noticed is that often times people forget you are blind to some
> >>> extent when you don't even say you are blind. I was talking to a guy on
> >>> my
> >>> dance teem and he said he had no idea I was blind until I was talking to
> >>> my teacher after a conference and mentioned something about following a
> >>> leader as a blind person.
> >>>
> >>> I personally think it matters in a context. If people are talking about
> >>> my
> >>> acting ability, I don't want to be known as a "blind actor" in reference
> >>> to my acting ability, that would just be negative. There are aspects
> >>> where
> >>> saying blind actor or actor who is blind would be appropriate at the end
> >>> of an article or possibly at the end of a bio, but that is only because
> >>> people like the challenge of trying to figure out who the blind guy is
> >>> :).
> >>> I ask them after a show and they tell me what they saw that tipped them
> >>> off. This helps me in becoming more natural and makes a little game of
> >>> something that is of no major import for that point of time, but could
> >>> mean me getting or losing a job later on.
> >>>
> >>> If I was in an article about genetic research, I would like it to be
> >>> known
> >>> that I'm blind first, because that is what is being tested for. They
> >>> don't
> >>> really care about me as a person, they just want to know I'm blind.
> >>>
> >>> If I'm talking to a director or agent about my singing, they don't need
> >>> to
> >>> know I'm blind, they want to know my voice type and my best rolls.
> >>>
> >>> I'm a blind person who happens to be blind and I'm OK with both :). I
> >>> don't even notice the difference.
> >>> Thanks,
> >>>
> >>> Brandon Keith Biggs
> >>> -----Original Message----- From: Arielle Silverman
> >>> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2012 3:40 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
> >>> ________________End of message________________
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