[Oabs] FW: Article from New York Times Sunday Review Desk 2014 01 05

[Kaiti Shelton]

Hi all, 

Agreed 150 percent!  I think it is horrible that people are under the
impression that to have eyes is to have a brain in your head, when that is
not the case.  I know some very smart blind people, as do all of you, and
some very dumb sighted ones.  Sight has nothing to do with intelligence,
other than forcing those who do not see to get their information in
different ways.  

Here are the thoughts I came up with when I was thinking about this article.
I was wondering which of these cases, the stereotypes we have in the U.S. or
those in developing countries, is worse?  Most blind people in our country
are not in jeopardy of being stoned, or kept from school, but society is
tricky.  Even parents sometimes fluctuate between telling their blind child
that they can do anything and restricting them because they're blind and
might get hurt or may not be as successful as the sighted kids.  We can be a
part of society, but society at large still hasn't reached a point where it
will recognize us as full people or take the time to understand blindness as
a physical trait rather than something which sets us beneath them.  The way
I phrased it, it sounds like I think society is demeaning and cynicle about
blindness, but I really just think they don't know, and the saddest cases
are the people who don't know what they don't know like the lady at the
party.  She was so convinced that blind people do not comprehend speech
coming from a sighted person that she wouldn't even let the author explain
her point.  

Of course, I do not mean to belittle the violence and overt discomfort to
blindness that people in developing countries experience from their angry
villagers and family members.  This is a huge problem and one that does
deserve much more attention.  Braille Without Borders is a great program,
and I wish there were more like it around the world so that more children
could have access to the education, technology, blindness training, and
braille that they desperately need.  The stereotypes held about blindness in
other countries may seem laughable to us, but they have existed in these
places for thousands of years and never been debunked.  And the interesting
thing is that with immigration they actually exist in America too.  Last
August my mom and I were followed down Brown Street in Dayton by a man who
insisted that I needed healing.  He stopped us to ask at the UDF, which is
on the first corner, and was still behind us when we walked into Five Guys a
few blocks away.  This not just two separate issues; these are both the same
issue that I think needs a lot of attention.  

Kaiti Shelton
University of Dayton---2016
Music Therapy Major, Psychology Minor, Clarinet
Ohio Association of Blind Students, President 
Advocates for Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP), Vice President
NFB Community Service Group, Service Project Committee Chair
Sigma Alpha Iota-Delta Sigma, Usher Coordinator

-----Original Message-----
From: Oabs [mailto:oabs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Aleeha Dudley
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2014 10:49 AM
To: Ohio Association of Blind Students list
Subject: Re: [Oabs] FW: Article from New York Times Sunday Review Desk 2014
01 05

Hello
Initially, I am horrified by the perceptions of these people. It has always
saddened me that people think that just because our eyes don't ork that we
have some sort of mental delay. I believe that a lot of education is
necessary, especially in developing nations. We have a long road ahead of
us, and I don't think that e can ever completely break these misconceptions,
but e can go a long way toward doing so. We are so blessed in this country
to have the lives that we do. I believe we should still be focusing on our
own issues, but we also need to realize the environment that others have to
live in. We should focus some of our energy on helping others in these
countries so that this horrifying occurrance can be somewhat eliminated. 
Aleeha 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 5, 2014, at 11:04 PM, "Kaiti Shelton" <kaiti.shelton at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 
> How about over the list?  This sounds like a good topic to start 
> conversation off.  We can do a meeting about this too, but I'm kind of 
> interested in what the immediate reactions to this article are.
> 
> I love how this was published on the 4th too, which was a pretty funny 
> coincidence.  I'll weigh in myself later, but I want to see what you 
> all think first.
> 
> Kaiti Shelton
> University of Dayton---2016
> Music Therapy Major, Psychology Minor, Clarinet Ohio Association of 
> Blind Students, President Advocates for Sexual Assault Prevention 
> (ASAP), Vice President NFB Community Service Group, Service Project 
> Committee Chair Sigma Alpha Iota-Delta Sigma, Usher Coordinator
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oabs [mailto:oabs-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Deborah 
> Kendrick
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 8:50 PM
> To: Ohio Association of Blind Students list
> Subject: [Oabs] FW: Article from New York Times Sunday Review Desk 
> 2014 01
> 05
> 
> Here's the article Kaiti was trying to share.  I recommend it to all 
> of us - even though it is a bit long.  The author makes some important
points.
> 
> In fact, I'd love to hear reactions from all of you at some point - 
> perhaps a discussion topic for a future meeting?
> 
> Deborah
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From: NFB-NEWSLINE Online [mailto:nfbnewsline at nfb.org]
> Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2014 8:23 PM
> To: Deborah Kendrick
> Subject: Article from New York Times Sunday Review Desk 2014 01 05
> 
> 
> 
> OPINION. Why Do We Fear the Blind?. By ROSEMARY MAHONEY. The author of 
> the forthcoming book 'For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches 
> From the World of the Blind. BRISTOL, R.I. -- A FEW years ago, when I 
> mentioned to a woman I met at a party that I was teaching in a school 
> for the blind, she seemed confused. 'Can I just ask you one question? 
> she said. 'How do you talk to your students? I explained that the students
were blind, not deaf.
> Raising the palms of her hands at me, as if to stem further 
> misunderstanding, she said: 'Yes, I know they're not deaf. But what I 
> really mean is, how do you actually talk to them? I knew, because I 
> had been asked this question before by reasonably intelligent people, 
> that the woman didn't know exactly what she meant. All she knew was 
> that in her mind there existed a substantial intellectual barrier 
> between the blind and the sighted. The blind could hear, yes. But 
> could they properly understand? Throughout history and across cultures 
> the blind have been traduced by a host of mythologies such as this. 
> They have variously been perceived as pitiable idiots incapable of 
> learning, as artful masters of deception or as mystics possessed of 
> supernatural powers. One of the most persistent misconceptions about 
> blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a 
> past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and 
> makes him not just dangerous but evil. A majority of my blind students 
> at the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum,
India, a branch of Braille Without Borders, came from the developing world:
> Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and India. 
> One of my students, the 27-year-old Sahr, lost most of his eyesight to 
> measles when he was a child. (Like many children in rural West Africa, 
> Sahr had not been
> vaccinated.) The residents of Sahr's village were certain that his 
> blindness
> -- surely the result of witchcraft or immoral actions on his family's 
> part
> -- would adversely affect the entire village. They surrounded his 
> house and shouted threats and abuse. They confiscated a considerable 
> portion of his parents' land. Eventually, the elders decreed that 
> Sahr's father must take the child out to the bush, 'where the demons
live,' and abandon him there.
> The parents refused and fled the village with their son. Many of my 
> students had similar experiences. Marco's parents, devout Colombian 
> Catholics, begged a priest to say a Mass so that their blind infant 
> son would die before his existence brought shame and hardship on their 
> household. The villagers in Kyile's remote Tibetan village insisted 
> that she, her two blind brothers and their blind father should all 
> just commit suicide because they were nothing but a burden to the 
> sighted members of the family. When, as a child in Sierra Leone, James 
> began to see objects upside down because of an ocular disease, the 
> villagers were certain that he was possessed by demons. In these 
> places, schools for blind children were deemed a preposterous waste of
resources and effort. Teachers in regular schools refused to educate them.
> Sighted children ridiculed them, tricked them, spat at them and threw 
> stones at them. And when they reached working age, no one would hire 
> them. During a visit to the Braille Without Borders training center in 
> Tibet, I met blind children who had been beaten, told they were 
> idiots, locked in rooms for years on end and abandoned by their 
> parents. These stories, which would have been commonplace in the Dark
Ages, took place in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
> They are taking place now. Nine out of 10 blind children in the 
> developing world still have no access to education, many for no other 
> reason than that they are blind. The United States has one of the 
> lowest rates of visual impairment in the world, and yet blindness is 
> still among the most feared physical afflictions. Even in this 
> country, the blind are perceived as a people apart. Aversion toward 
> the blind exists for the same reason that most prejudices exist: lack 
> of knowledge. Ignorance is a powerful generator of fear. And fear 
> slides easily into aggression and contempt. Anyone who has not spent 
> more than five minutes with a blind person might be forgiven for 
> believing -- like the woman I met at the party -- that there is an 
> unbridgeable gap between us and them. For most of us, sight is the 
> primary way we interpret the world. How can we even begin to conceive 
> of a meaningful connection with a person who cannot see? Before I 
> began living and working among blind people, I, too, wondered this. 
> Whenever I saw a blind person on the street I would stare, transfixed, 
> hoping, out of a vague and visceral discomfort, that I wouldn't have 
> to engage with him. In his
> 1930 book 'The World of the Blind,' Pierre Villey, a blind French 
> professor of literature, summarized the lurid carnival of prejudices 
> and superstitions about the blind that were passed down the centuries. 
> 'The sighted person judges the blind not for what they are but by the fear
blindness inspires.
> ... The revolt of his sensibility in the face of 'the most atrocious 
> of maladies' fills a sighted person with prejudice and gives rise to a 
> thousand legends. The blind author Georgina Kleege, a lecturer at the 
> University of California at Berkeley, more tersely wrote, 'The blind 
> are either supernatural or subhuman, alien or animal. WE take our 
> eyesight so much for granted, cling to it so slavishly and are so 
> overwhelmed by its superficial data, that even the most brilliant 
> sighted person can take a stupidly long time to recognize the obvious: 
> There is usually a perfectly healthy, active and normal human mind 
> behind that pair of unseeing eyes. Christopher Hitchens called 
> blindness 'one of the oldest and most tragic disorders known to man. 
> How horribly excluded and bereft we would feel to lose the world and the
way of life that sight brings us. Blindness can happen to any one of us.
> Myself, I used to be certain I'd rather die than be blind; I could not 
> imagine how I would have the strength to go on in the face of such a loss.
> And yet people do. In 1749, the French philosopher Denis Diderot 
> published an essay, 'Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who 
> See,' in which he described a visit he and a friend made to the house 
> of a blind man, the son of a professor of philosophy at the University 
> of Paris. The blind man was married, had a son, had many 
> acquaintances, was versed in chemistry and botany, could read and 
> write with an alphabet of raised type and made his living distilling 
> liqueurs. Diderot wrote with wonder of the man's 'good solid sense,' 
> of his tidiness, of his 'surprising memory for sounds' and voices, of 
> his ability to tell the weight of any object and the capacity of any 
> vessel just by holding them in his hands, of his ability to dismantle 
> and reassemble small machines, of his musical acuity and of his 
> extreme sensitivity to atmospheric change. The blind man, perhaps 
> weary of being interrogated by Diderot and his friend as if he were a 
> circus animal, eventually asked them a question of his own. 'I 
> perceive, gentlemen, that you are not blind. You are astonished at 
> what I do, and why not as much at my speaking? More than any of his 
> sensory skills, it was the blind man's self-esteem that surprised 
> Diderot most. 'This blind man,' he wrote, 'values himself as much as, and
perhaps more than, we who see. I've learned from my blind friends and
colleagues that blindness doesn't have to remain tragic.
> For those who can adapt to it, blindness becomes a path to an 
> alternative and equally rich way of living. One of the many 
> misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater hearing, 
> sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not 
> strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts 
> they always had but had heretofore largely ignored. A few years ago, I 
> allowed myself to be blindfolded and led through the streets of Lhasa 
> by two blind Tibetan teenage girls, students at Braille Without 
> Borders. The girls had not grown up in the city, and yet they 
> traversed it with ease, without stumbling or getting lost. They had a 
> specific destination in mind, and each time they announced, 'Now we 
> turn left' or 'Now we turn right,' I was compelled to ask them how 
> they knew this. Their answers startled me, chiefly because the clues 
> they were following -- the sound of many televisions in an electronics 
> shop, the smell of leather in a shoe shop, the feel of cobblestones 
> suddenly underfoot -- though out in the open for anyone to perceive, 
> were virtually hidden from me. For the first time in my life, I 
> realized how little notice I paid to sounds, to smells, indeed to the 
> entire world that lay beyond my ability to see. The French writer 
> Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight at the age of 8, understood that 
> those of us who have sight are, in some ways, deprived by it. 'In 
> return for all the benefits that sight brings we are forced to give up 
> others whose existence we don't even suspect. I do not intend to 
> suggest there is something wonderful about blindness. There is only 
> something wonderful about human resilience, adaptability and daring. 
> The blind are no more or less otherworldly, stupid, evil, gloomy, 
> pitiable or deceitful than the rest of us. It is only our ignorance 
> that has cloaked them in these ridiculous garments. When Helen Keller 
> wrote, 'It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach 
> an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara,' she was 
> speaking, obviously, of the uplifting and equalizing value of 
> knowledge.. DRAWING (DRAWING BY SKIP STERLING). This article is 
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