[Nfbf-l] Why Do We Fear The Blind - This is an excellent article taken from the New York Times.

[Alan Dicey]

Why Do We Fear The Blind
This is an excellent article taken from the New York Times.
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.
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