[stylist] article from Debra Kendrick

Sun Jan 24 18:26:17 UTC 2010

Great article!  There are many who vote for a candidate because of his race, 
religion, disability or lack of one.  I will label these factors (a).  What 
does any of this have to do with ability or job performance?  Label these 
factors (b).  Nothing.  In other words, a has nothing to do with b.  Many of 
the citizens of this country have decided to base their vote on differences. 
Ignorant.  If, in spite of the fact that people have been put down because 
of their race, religion or disability shines through and gotten them to a 
point that they have the ability and can perform above the opposition, they 
become someone to be celebrated.  If they choose to hide behind any of these 
factors and use them as the sole criteria for anyone to vote for them, they 
are no better than the bigots who shaped public policy for centuries. 
Judith Bron

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sherri (by way of David Andrews <dandrews at visi.com>)" 
<flmom2006 at gmail.com>
To: <david.andrews at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 12:21 AM
Subject: [stylist] article from Debra Kendrick

Article from the INDEPENDENCE TODAY
Newspaper<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

October 2009

N.Y. Governor Paterson
Blind to Tools of Success

By Deborah Kendrick

Several years ago, when I received some
mystifyingly bad treatment at the hands of other
people who shared my disability, a friend who was
both black and blind comforted me with her
insight. "Blind people can sometimes be like a
basket of crabs," she told me. "When one of them
makes it to the top, the others scramble to pull
him down." Folks I thought to be my peers, in
other words, were attacking me out of envy.

I vowed I would never do that. I would fervently
support anyone with any disability who achieved
success in any field. We should all be one happy family, right?

Then, following the 2006 elections, alarms went
off that challenged that personal pledge. The
good news was that New York state had elected a
lieutenant governor who was both black and blind.
The more troubling news was that David Paterson,
that newly elected official, by declaring that he
didn't use any of those blindness tools -
Braille, assistive technology, a white cane -
indicated to those who don't have disabilities
that he was too cool for all that nonsense. Those
of us who proudly use the tools of blindness, who
depend on them to give us a competitive edge in a
host of professional and educational
environments, tried to be tolerant. I wanted to
be first and foremost proud. A blind guy - a sort
of brother to me in the disability family - was
rising to the top, and it was cause for serious celebration.

Governor Paterson clean shaven. A new image
Of course, when Eliot Spitzer was caught with his
pants down, so to speak, and Paterson rose to the
very top of his state, sworn in as New York
governor on March 17th, 2008, the media made even
more noise about how this brilliant guy didn't
need Braille or talking computers or any of that
blind nonsense. He had a superhuman memory, we
were told, and relied heavily on staff. His staff
read important memos and documents into voicemail
messages that he listened to at all hours.

Voicemail messages? What?

He's governor of one of our most important
states, and he doesn't use a computer? Still, I
reminded myself to be tolerant. Each of us has
different techniques, different ways to
accomplish the same goal. One deaf person reads
lips. Another uses American Sign Language.
Another uses Signed English. And on it goes. The
man was governor, after all. He didn't have to do
things the way other blind people do them to earn
our support. He was one of us, and we should stand behind him.

Then Paterson started doing really dumb things.
He didn't always know the facts. He made
decisions and then, under pressure of one kind or
another, reversed them. He appointed a lieutenant
governor when nobody was sure he was even allowed
to do that and who, to add insult to injury, had
trampled with dirty boots on transportation
prospects for New Yorkers with disabilities.

He seemed to "get it" when he responded with
disdain to the "Saturday Night Live" skit that
ridiculed his blindness. And yet, he didn't
hesitate to grab a few laughs himself at the
possible expense of people with disabilities when
he appeared in a wheelchair for a charity gig.

More recently, he has vetoed one bill that would
prevent discrimination against people with
disabilities in public facilities in his state
and another that would require all polling places
to be made physically accessible.

OK, we could argue, just because he has a
disability doesn't mean he has to always agree
with us, supporting every bill that comes down
the political pike to improve the quality of life
for New Yorkers with disabilities. Shouldn't we
still support him? He's both black and blind, after all.

The proverbial "last straw" in struggling to hang
on as a cheerleader for this New York governor
came when I started seeing references in the
press linking his failures to his blindness. One
New York state senator, Diane Savino, was widely
quoted as saying, in effect, that hey, even
though the guy is brilliant, he's blind, after
all, and being blind means he can't use the same
digital tools -- such as e-mail or a Blackberry -- as his peers.

Wait a New York minute! And let me do some deep
breathing so as not to do anything undignified
like spew bad words in my own e-mail or Smartphone messages!

One headline read: "It's not his race, it's his
blindness." Let me set the record straight: "It"
-- his failure to lead -- is not because of his
race or his blindness. It's the man himself. But
blindness is something I know well and know more
than a little bit about with regard to tools and
techniques, so let me tell you now what I was suppressing all along.

His avoidance - since childhood - of tools
related to blindness, don't make him superior to
other blind people, but rather inferior. He can't
read print but refused to learn Braille. That's
denial to the point of masochism. In other words,
he's illiterate by choice! Why, I wonder, if he's
so "brilliant" did it take him 12 years to get
two advanced degrees, when lots of "ordinary"
blind people have obtained those same two degrees
in six? And even though the second of those two
degrees is a law degree, he never went into
practice as a lawyer because he couldn't pass the
bar exam. Why was that? Was it because he
couldn't read Braille or use a computer? Now, in
all fairness, I don't know the answer to that
question, but his explanation is that he didn't
receive adequate accommodations. But what would
those accommodations be, anyway, for a man who is
blind but doesn't know how to use any of the
tools that similarly educated blind people avail themselves of daily?

You could say it's not his fault. When he was a
child, New York City schools couldn't promise
that he wouldn't receive any special education,
and his parents moved to a suburb where he could
go to public school "unhindered" by special ed.
Now, maybe that was a good thing. I wasn't there.
But it sounds to me like being perceived as
sighted was more important to the family than
getting the best education possible.

And so, here we have a 21st-century governor -
the first legally blind governor to serve in any
state longer than 11 days - and he's using 1960s
or '70s tools to do his job. Staffers read
materials onto tapes and into voicemail for him.
He has no means of prompting himself with notes,
which would be effortless had he taken the time
to learn to read and write Braille.

Had he been governor in 1975, the tools he now
uses would have been adequate because sighted
people at the time were using them at the same
level of sophistication. But those tools now are inadequate.

Why doesn't Paterson use a computer with one of
the popular screen-reading programs, such as JAWS
or Window-Eyes or System Access? If he did, 99
percent of all documents generated by other
computers could then simply be e-mailed to him.
If he wanted to travel light, he could carry a
netbook (a small laptop computer) or a thumb
drive, into which staffers could pop anything he
needed to read. With practice, he could do what
blind professionals all over the world do - crank
their reading speed up to several hundred words a
minute and get through material as quickly as any
sighted politician. Add that to his amazing
memory, and he could have been a governor to make us proud.

Why does he have staffers read newspapers to him?
For free, he could sign up for the National
Federation of the Blind's NEWSLINE, a telephone
service that would enable him to read any of 220
newspapers around the country, from any phone
anywhere, at any speed he chose. He could zip
through articles at his own speed as quickly or
even quicker than his sighted peers.

Now, this "brilliant" guy is using tools that
were state of the art when Jimmy Carter was
president, has an approval rating that has
dropped at a staggering rate, and against even
the advice of President Obama, said he'll run
again in 2010. It's pitiable, really, but I'm not
feeling sorry for him. How can I when, along with
his own failure, he's pulling the overall
acceptance of and employment opportunities for
other blind people down with him?

I'm not saying I could do his job. I don't think
I could. But I am saying that lots of people who
are blind could and do it brilliantly. He wanted
so much to hide his blindness that now, in his
appalling unpopularity, it's the one thing that
outsiders are interpreting as his weakness. It
hasn't been. His weakness has been his own
arrogance and denial of reality. It's a shame.
With proper training, he might have done a good job.

But he isn't doing one, and I'm OK with having
broken my promise to myself. I know now that just
because he has a disability doesn't mean I have
to like him. And if he's going to fall headlong
into the basket, I don't want him to kick the
rest of us down to the bottom as well.

Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor
and poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth.

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