[nabs-l] Blindness and Race

[Carly Mihalakis]

Hi, Arielle, and everyone,

         I was bienucleated (had both seeing organs removed) at age 
18 months and first learned about race in 2nd grade while reading 
Alex Haley's _Roots.  After that point, my interest in what race 
someone represents has its origin in my love of the natural dictates 
of people being encouraged, to be whichever racial/ethnic identity 
into which they were born.

When I heard Julie Chen describe on the _View how she got an 
opporation to make her beautiful eyes rounder, I was mortified that 
some white racist bastard succeeded in planting in Julie's head that 
her eyes looked "shifty" and that, if she ever wanted to be big in 
the field of broadcasting like Connie Chung  she would get this 
surgery. And, what would you know, she went through with it!
On another hand though, this must have pre-dated the bizarre 
construct known as political correctness, which remains a reason to 
hide one's unadultterated dislike of someone or something instead use 
bullshit words that reallly have no meaning, to artfully dance 
arround the meat of a matter and lie, it is sanctioned lying this 
political correctness. Listen to someone spout that shit. It's like 
they're using all this meaningless verbeage and not saying anything!
Okay, Carly, mellow out!
for today, Car
408-209-3239

   up   /2014, Arielle Silverman wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>Since I'm blind and also a social psychologist, I think this is a
>fascinating topic. I am curious how other congenitally blind folks
>learned about race and in what context. The stories relayed in the
>article are tragic and show us just how far we still have to go as a
>society.
>I will never forget the day in second grade when we watched a movie in
>school about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. They
>were talking about a time when a group called white people was treated
>better than a group called black people in certain parts of the
>country. I had never heard of white people or black people before. My
>parents never discussed race at home, partly because they were
>progressive and didn't think race was relevant, and partly because we
>lived in a very un-diverse neighborhood where practically everybody
>was white. I'd met a few black people by then, apparently, but didn't
>know the difference. Of course the movie never said anything about
>white and black people having different skin colors, since that was
>supposed to be obvious for sighted people. So I went through the
>lesson thinking the whole conflict and status difference between white
>and black people was completely arbitrary and very strange.
>When I got home I told my family about the movie and asked them if I
>was a white person or a black person. I still remember my mother's
>hesitation and the surprised tone in her voice when she informed me
>that I was white. I also remember asking why the black people in the
>1950's didn't just dress up like white people if they wanted to be
>treated better, to which my sister (who was ten, and sighted)
>responded with characteristic sarcasm, "Um, it would be a little hard
>for them to do that". I didn't understand why it would be hard for
>blacks to dress up like whites, but it was apparently obvious to
>everyone else in the world, so I didn't ask.
>In the days and years thereafter, I would often overhear my mom
>telling this story to her friends and asserting that my blindness gave
>me a special gift of not being able to judge people by their
>appearance. I at first thought her hesitation in answering my question
>was because I had asked a stupid question. I eventually realized it
>was a kind of pride of my naivete. For many years I truly thought that
>my blindness protected me from  being racist. I held on to that
>because it made me feel like it made up for all the other ways in
>which people thought my blindness made me inferior.
>Eventually, my view was challenged at an NFB convention, when I  told
>some of my scholarship committee mentors that I thought blind people
>must be less racist than sighted people. They argued that in their
>experience this wasn't the case, and that blind people can often
>differentiate race by listening. Today, I believe that blind people
>are just as capable of developing racist attitudes as sighted people
>are. Although being blind allowed me to stay naive longer, and
>although I can sometimes, but not always, guess the race of folks I
>meet, the main reason for my lack of racial prejudice was from my
>background rather than my blindness. My sister obviously figured out
>what race meant before I did, even though we grew up in the same
>environment. She might have figured it out visually, but she, too,
>grew up without having significant racial prejudices.
>In some ways I am glad that my first exposure to race came from a
>lesson about MLK and civil rights. I am not sure how I would have
>discovered it otherwise. Perhaps a few years later, when I became best
>friends with a girl who lived in south Phoenix and complained about
>her black classmates calling her "white bread". Although, again, I
>would have just found the comment and the situation peculiar. Anyway,
>if I had been sighted, my first introduction to race might have been
>different, but probably not worse.
>
>Arielle
>
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