[Rehab] Social Foundations of Abuse in Blindness Rehabilitation

[Justin Salisbury]

Aloha everyone,

I have spent a lot of time reading, listening, thinking, and talking with people about what we've been discussing lately. As many of you probably know, I have a fascination with writing, especially when it comes to synthesizing what I've been hearing from others. I have composed an article very similar to the kind of article that you might find in the Braille Monitor. I love publishing articles in the Braille Monitor, but I am sending this one out on our [Rehab] email list. I sent it out two weeks ago on a private list just for cane travel instructors. From the way I've heard conversations going, I worry that, if I could get it published in a formal NFB venue, three problems might come up. First, it would require the normal delay that comes with magazine publications. Second, it might take a little bit more time for vetting because it might be interpreted as representing the NFB. Third, and by far most importantly, I think a lot of people who are upset right now would be less open to reading my thoughts if they appeared to come from anyone other than just me. That is why I am not publishing this in any other third-party publication venue, either. I know I talk a lot when we get together, but I don't hold any formal leadership positions in the NOMC community. I'm just an NOMC who likes to talk and write.

I have reached out to a small handful of folks-some of whom are probably on this list-and gathered feedback. I think this is the fifth version of this article. I take full responsibility for anything you don't like. Maybe it will be published somewhere formal one day, but my focus right now is on helping us all think about the long game.

When I hear people calling for unity, I have come to feel annoyed pretty quickly with the word because I often feel like they're saying "you all need to shut up and start thinking like me." I'm not doing that. I do want to make the observation that the blind community is very much divided over this at the moment, and I hope that we can agree that our liberation cannot be won in Louisiana, Colorado, and Minnesota alone. We must win in those places, but we cannot win 3 and lose the other 47.

In Hawaiian, there is a word "mana'o." The closest word to it in English is "perspective." Someone's mana'o is not necessarily fact, and it is not necessarily opinion. Part of an indigenous worldview shared by Hawaiians and Native Americans, in my mana'o, is the implied understanding that facts about a situation are relative to a person's worldview. I can thank someone for their mana'o without discrediting them but also without accepting every part of it.

Mahalo for considering my mana'o.

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Tuesday, April 27, 2021



Social Foundations of Abuse in Blindness Rehabilitation
By Justin Salisbury

Over the past few months, multiple media outlets, including social media, have discussed stories about problems at the Louisiana Center for the Blind and in the National Federation of the Blind, including sexual assault and misconduct, racism, and homophobia. These dysfunctions must be addressed, and we also hear that the NFB is taking steps to address them. I am a graduate of the Louisiana Center for the Blind, as well as its partner teacher training program at Louisiana Tech University, and a member of the National Federation of the Blind. My writing is informed by what the Carroll Center for the Blind, the Louisiana Center for the Blind, the National Federation of the Blind, and Louisiana Tech University have taught me about blindness rehabilitation, but these thoughts are formally my own and not statements from any organization. I trust the survivors, and I want to make sure that I do my part to bring about positive change. I am writing to discuss some of the conditions that have made these problems possible.
I am hoping that history will remember the press coverage alleging abuse at the Louisiana Center for the Blind as a good thing for blind people. For this to happen, the situation of survivors coming forward needs to be remembered as the catalyst for sweeping systemic reform that fundamentally changes the rehabilitation system. It is too early to tell how history will remember it, but I believe we are at a critical point. I understand the strategy of focusing on the world's premier training center for the blind. No offense to any other center, but we all know, if we are being candid, that every other good training center compares itself to the Louisiana Center for the Blind. It is the most famous training center. It is the measuring stick. This does not mean that LCB graduates are superior to the graduates of all other centers because we are all individuals, but LCB is the pace car. Surely, that is related to how LCB is the oldest NFB training center and the one paired with the Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness. Though I am an LCB graduate, there are graduates from all other Structured Discovery centers who I consider role models and mentors, so I understand at a deep personal level that LCB graduates should not look down on the graduates of other centers. This strategy of tackling the big dog is one that the NFB has used, too. In order to go after the exploitation of workers with disabilities by paying us wages like seven cents per hour in sheltered workshops, the NFB has gone after Goodwill Industries, as we often say, the biggest bully in the school yard. Systemic reform requires talking about the most famous institutions. Systemic change essentially requires that the most famous institution within that system change, ideally leading the change. As soon as the most famous institution changes, it creates a ripple effect for all others.
When I say, "sweeping systemic reform," I mean that we must go beyond the Louisiana Center for the Blind, and we must go beyond the training centers accredited by the National Blindness Professional Certification Board. We must carefully review all training centers for the blind so that they do not remain a breeding ground for systemic problems. In my opinion, because most of society has such low expectations for the blind, we do not hold rehabilitation agencies accountable because we did not expect them to achieve anything, anyway. If we are not holding them accountable, we are not monitoring them, so then rehabilitation agencies-public and private-operate in social isolation. By my understanding, the Louisiana Center for the Blind itself does not want this social isolation because it strives for the full integration of blind people into society. The more that full integration is achieved, the less socially isolated the training center becomes.
This next one can be a bombshell, but I will call out a pathology that I believe exists in some people. Sexual misconduct is a sin of power and control. If you are a person with a pathological desire to control other people, working with people with disabilities, including the blind, appears to be a delectable opportunity. Sometimes, these people have tried to control non-disabled people, failed, and turned to the disabled as weaker prey. When new students arrive at a training center, they frequently come with broken spirits and the feeling that their desires, hopes, and dreams are off-limits. They often come with low self-esteem and the belief that they are vulnerable. These beliefs can be self-fulfilling prophecies until the emotional adjustment occurs. A Structured Discovery program is designed to fix all these problems, which involves but is not limited to the acquisition of nonvisual skills. The student body of a Structured Discovery residential program will include students who are at varying levels of adjustment, and the senior students can be expected to push the envelope of collective advocacy for the blind. The idea that blind people are weaker prey is largely a social construct of low expectations, which the NFB is working to change.  When blind people get together-sometimes through the National Federation of the Blind-and show these people that they cannot control us, their rage can be remarkable. This can be true for disabled and non-disabled professionals. In my opinion, these people can exist in any kind of job, but I hypothesize that they will gravitate toward jobs where they can exercise great power and control, such as welfare agencies, childcare, teaching, nursing, elder care, mental health services, and law enforcement. I wish I knew how to conduct psychology research to examine what motivations lead people to work with people with disabilities. Surely, some of us have that skill, and I would love to work together on a research study if we can. Once we do that, we ought to have a way of screening people who want to work in disability service fields, including adjustment-to-blindness training. People with that pathology may not be good candidates to work in the blindness field. It will be tough to identify them because the crafty ones will know how to hide it and when to sneak up and pounce, but I think we need to develop a way of searching for that pathology.
When you are a teacher of the blind at one of these centers, you are working to help students achieve an emotional adjustment to blindness. Yes, they need to learn skills, but you really need to be focused on the emotional adjustment. This means overcoming fears, facing insecurities, shame, and any other kinds of maladaptive feelings that the student may have developed because of societal attitudes about blindness. When you are doing that, the person must be able to let you in, like going under the hood of a car, in order to help them find those weak points and address them. This requires building rapport and really getting the student to trust you. This is difficult for a reason: we as humans do not want to let someone in if they might hurt us with that power. I know about this, but I am certain that there are people who are capable of tricking me, gaining my trust, and hurting me. This is true for all humans. Someone out there is capable of doing that to each of us. We all hope it will not happen, and we all put up walls at some level, but those kinds of people do exist. This power is a valuable thing, though. I, as a teacher, take so much pride in the times that I helped a student get over an emotional hurdle. Those are still the warm fuzzy memories for me. That is why I do the job. I speculate that the cane travel instructor is the one who gets to work the most deeply on most students' emotions because most students find that cane travel is the most emotional class. If they cross the street at the wrong time, they could die. If they are ashamed to go out in front of people, that is unavoidable in cane travel. Other classes are absolutely a part of the process, but, for most students, the most emotional class is cane travel. I like being outside, but I also love teaching cane travel because of this very emotional experience.
Sometimes, the narrative about abusive relationships becomes blended with frameworks used for analyzing romantic relationships. When I was in the master's program at Louisiana Tech, I remember having conversations about what to do when there are romantic tensions between staff and student. This was true in a counseling ethics class and in blindness-specific classes. I remember being told that it absolutely will come up at some point in our careers, and we will have to know what to do about it. For me personally, this really has not been an issue yet, but I have only been teaching for about six years. Maybe it will come up six years from now-who knows. For me personally-and I do not mind sharing this publicly-I do not like feeling like I have more power than my romantic partners. If I want my partner to have equal or more power, my students are the last place I would ever want to look. I have a lot of power over my students because I am helping them work on their own psychology every day. The script is totally backward for anything romantic to come up for me. Just going from random probability, I will assume that half of my colleagues like being the dominant figure in a romantic relationship, and this is nothing to be ashamed of. I appreciate all those who have this preference and have learned to partition their emotions so that it does not get in the way of their teaching. I appreciate all those people who have controlled themselves in that way; I am sure it is tough in a way that I have not had to experience. People fall in love-it is something all humans hopefully do-but this discussion has not about falling in love. Again, the challenge that we are facing right now is not about people falling in love.
Situations of abuse are not healthy romantic relationships. People who are abusers are not the same as people who just accidentally fall in love with their student. In the Louisiana Tech counseling ethics class, I remember the professor talking about how, if you cannot control yourself with abusive desires, then this is not the profession for you. It is just as true for counseling as it is for teaching the blind, and I think there is broad consensus that we need to put more attention on these areas in the teacher preparation programs. I do not have a good answer on how we proactively address this. I wish I did, and maybe I will come up with something. I will hypothesize that there may be ways to (1) identify the abuser pathology of people in professional preparation programs, (2) conduct some interventions to correct the abuser pathology, which may be a lot of work with results hard to measure, and (3) develop ways to deal with existing professionals who we believe have that pathology. Additionally, at a systemic level, I hypothesize that we may need to develop and conduct educational programming very much like the training offered by RAINN for the NFB leaders. It is acknowledged by the NFB that this training is not the end of the interventions but rather a first step. Somehow, in my opinion, we need to do some interventions to really change culture and the way people think about sexual abuse. Part of this-again, my opinion-is changing the way that many networks in the USA deal with people who speak up. I have attended many presentations outside the blindness network about sexual harassment and assault. I consistently hear that, if anyone reports sexual harassment or assault in their workplace, they will soon be fired some way or another, and they will struggle immensely to get another job anywhere else. Somehow, word travels that this person speaks up. They will stop being invited to parties, stop being invited to serve on boards, and ultimately disappear from their network. People do not want people around who blow the whistle. The same is true with people who fight back against racism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. We must change this group avoidance behavioral pattern in our society to make it viable for survivors of sexual abuse to come forward, which is part of fixing the problem altogether.
Good training centers for the blind are active agents of social justice for the blind, so they face the challenges of respectability politics. If a training center for the blind is extremely progressive on blindness-which the Louisiana Center for the Blind is-it cannot be afforded the luxury of being progressive on anything else. As a society, we need to shift the scales so that what is currently considered progressive on blindness becomes very normal. Then, quality training centers will be given more space to become more progressive in other ways. The same could be true for any other oppressed minority group. If we shift the scales so that being accepting of people who are LGBTQIA is no longer considered a radical and left-wing way of thinking, then everybody will be allowed to do it without spending all their progressive allowance.
Adjustment-to-blindness training involves teaching blind people how to blend in within a sighted society. Any training center basically must blend in with its local community or else it will be rejected by the local community. On the concept of blending in, there is an important difference between acculturation and assimilation, which I first learned in a class at Louisiana Tech. Assimilation assumes that newcomers and any indigenous people being erased must become similar to everyone else in their new society, losing their identities. Through acculturation, people from outside the dominant culture can learn the operating rules of the new culture but still retain their original values. Teaching blind people to blend in should be more like acculturation than assimilation. In order for us to teach blind students in training how to blend in with a sighted society, we must use some set of rules and norms that we believe are true for that sighted society. One challenge is this: just like the way that blind people are not all the same everywhere, sighted people are not all the same everywhere. The rules and norms of the society around us in one city may be vastly different from the rules and norms of another city. If I tried to force people in New York City to assimilate to the cultural norms of Honolulu, that would cause a lot of problems. My concepts of good social skills and proper social norms are functions of my own lived experience, and the same is true for everyone else. This is a difficult concept to articulate, but I hope that we can make this an ongoing conversation and come up with better ways to articulate and address it. We must separate what is about blindness and what is about local community norms, and we should aim to have students learn how to acculturate into the local sighted society without removing the identity that comes from their home culture.
Ironically, the NFB is the movement that has taught the world that blind people should be treated like first-class citizens and has taught us to speak up when we are not. Blind people are doing what the NFB has taught blind people to do. Without the National Federation of the Blind, blind people would not feel as much indignation at these problems because, in my opinion, we would have been too oppressed to know so powerfully that sexual abuse is wrong. The NFB has given blind people hope and a voice, and now, we are faced with a situation where we must confront some of these societal, systemic issues that have infiltrated our movement and centers, too.
There are hundreds of training centers for the blind in the United States, and the survivors everywhere are equally important. I believe that these problems exist at all training centers for the blind, but at different levels. Whether or not sexual misconduct exists should not be measured as a discrete binary variable, like a toggle switch, on or off. I believe it should be treated like a continuous variable, like how much water I spray on my lawn. My lawn could be bone dry sand, a flooded swamp, or anywhere in between. At some level, these problems are everywhere, but how bad they are needs to be investigated, addressed, and continually monitored. This is what organizations of the blind should be doing, but it is everyone's responsibility. If any survivors are reading this, I am not, by any means, suggesting that what happened to them is not important. It is not a diversion tactic, such as "don't look at us; look at them!" It is purely to state that this is a systemic problem, and we can help blind people the most by addressing this systemic problem at a systemic level with all places involved in educating and rehabilitating the blind. There are a lot of blind people who attend the centers in their home states and do not travel to Louisiana for training. We have a duty to them to make sure that those training centers are safe, too. Let us address these problems everywhere.




Justin Mark Hideaki Salisbury
he/him/his

Phone: 808.797.8606
Email: President at Alumni.ECU.edu<mailto:President at Alumni.ECU.edu>
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"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."

Cesar Chavez