Shepherdized! - David Paterson

I live in New York and I didn't know the guy was blind until this whole Spitzer debacle started.

I'm hoping that if/when Spitzer resigns and Paterson takes his place that he'll help the state improve services for PWD's... But you're right; the media's portrayal of him has been less than thrilling.

Every news story I've read/seen has just said that he's "legally blind". I wonder if his vision really isn't bad enough yet to warrant the use of a cane? Or maybe he really does view it as a negative status symbol... Hmm. Time will tell.

(Reply) (Thread)

I don't know about his vision, but check this out:

February 19, 2008 -- ALBANY - In a different type of blind justice, Lt. Gov. David Paterson insists race did not play a role in his decision to replace
a white staff photographer with a black one because he doesn't see black and white - literally.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

So, we have a guy who's involved in prostitution rings, or a possible racist, using his disability to back up his decisions...

I love New York. *headdesk*

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Gah! Bug with society #183909: the idea that having no eyesight makes you exempt from any prejudice that the average person would exhibit based on a visual cue. I expect that there's no estimated fix date.

As to what makes us *look* more independent, my own personal hypothesis is that it's tied in with how much mental acrobatics the observer has to do in order to understand how things operate. For instance, about two days after I'd started working at Microsoft, their Diversity Coordinator™ decided to bring someone in from the Seattle Lighthouse to talk about blindness, and to make the people on my team aware of the diverse ways that blind people do things. Anyway, the gentleman was going on and on and on and on and on for ... oh ... about five minutes about how I wouldn't be able to see people's faces, so it was important that I get to know their voice, and so on, and so forth, and y'all all probably know the drill by now. Well, I sensed the mood of the crowd becoming "OMG how's that work", so I sort of cut him off, and explained that, really, both voice and facial recognition are really two different versions of a hash or lookup table (a structure made up of key/value pairs where the key, say, a person's name, maps to a value, say, their address/phone number/etc.), that it probably took me on average the same amount of time to construct a voice/person lookup table as it would take them to connstruct a face/person lookup table, and, no, they didn't need to tell me their name *EVERY* time they walked up to me. And lo, the light of understanding spread across the room ... with the exception of the presenter, who pointed out rather simply that "you guys *REALLY* like software, don't you?". I'm just all kinds of glad that they didn't bother with the pre-interview "blindness awareness seminar" that, I'd found out afterward, they tend to do—which, in my opinion, was a point in favor of my not identifying until the interviewers were confronted with a blind guy with a laptop and programming tools.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I realize this is not supposed to be humorous, but the idea of someone shouting at me every time I got close to the stop of a flight of stairs, is ridiculous to me. Of course, what is even more ridiculous is the idea that this odd arrangement would make me independent.

(Reply) (Thread)

I know this is an old post but I'm gonna comment on it anyway.

The link that you had is down, so I'm just going by what was said here in your LJ, so if I get something wrong, it's probably because of that.

The fact that he doesn't use a cane doesn't seem to me to have as much to do with him 'being independant' as if has with him wanting to appear independant or even to hopfully keep people from finding out he is legally blind or hoping that if it's not made obvious by the fact that he's carrying the cane that they will forget. It's stupid, but it's politics, which just explains the stupid. Appearance is always much more important than actual facts or reality for these people. They figure that the ignorant masses of sighted people will see him with a cane and thinkthat because he's blind, he can't possibly do the job. Sadly, in many cases of sighted people, that is absolutely true, but I like to think that there are more sighted people out there who aren't quite that ignorant. I hope. But FDR didn't want amnyone to know he was paralyzed from the waist down, because he thought it would hurt him politically, and I have heard the same sort of things said about people with disabilities running for any public office, many of them either choose to hide it independantly or they are adived to hide it, because of the idea that the general public will take them less seriously or will think the fact that they have a disability means that they can't do the job.

As for the firing of the photographer, I have now doubt that he knew exactly what race the photographer was, and I hope that the color blind thing was just a very poorly advised joke. Aside from the fact that I'm pretty sure that in all the time the guy worked there that the fact probably came up at some point, African Americans and white Americans tend to sound different. I'm not talking about the way they speak, their grammar and pronounciation and things like that, it's something different that I don't know quite how to describe and it's not bullet proof or always reliable, but I guess the closest I could come to describing it is the timber, or the quality of their voice. I don't know if it's something like the way their facial bones are constructed slightly different, the way Innuit, Polinesian or many Asicatic people's teeth are scoop shaped so that the quality or sound of the voice is changed by certain physical features or what, but I have noticed that people who are of different ethnic backgrounds have slight, difficult to describe differences in the sounds of their voices. It could be pitch, projection, resonance, lung capacity, larynx shape or size or any of the above caused by any combination of factors, but if you really pay attention you can hear it. Or maybe I'm just batshit.

(Reply) (Thread)

You know, aside from being full of typoes, that last comment totally did not sound like what I wanted to say, at all. But I don't know how to say it and sound exactly like I want it to. But I wasn't saying that the facial bones or the shape of the teeth was the reason for the difference in the voices of different ethnic groups, though, logically it could play a role I would guess, in the alteration of the sounds that come out of their mouths, I was just using different facial bones structure and the shape of teeth as examples of common physical differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds, to point out that while we are all people and all equally valuable, there are sometimes physical characteristics that differ between races.

I'm just gonna shut up now, this is probably one of thise times when the more I say, the more likely I am to say something totally wrong or that will be taken in a light that I didn't intend because of the way I said it. But I am talking about sound, not grammer, accents, or pronounciation; like how a tuba sounds different from a French horn, and how a silver trumpet or one with a copper bell sounds different from a brass one or from a coronet. The size of the instrument, the turns and twists of the tubes, the metal that it's contructed from all have as much to do with it's distinct sound as the person playing it does. One person could play a silver trumpet and it would sound different from if the same person played a brass trumpet, or a coronet or a tuba.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

No, it's OK--I know what you're trying to say. Like you, I hope that comment on his part was just an unfortunate joke.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Hi, I was fascinated by your description of how ethnicity may affect a person's voice quality. You made some very important points and I'm just wondering if a speech therapist or a linguist might be able to provide some sort of explanation to that? I'm Asian, and English is my second language. I have noticed that sometimes I can "tell" that a person is Asian by the quality of their voice. For example, since I am in the university setting, when I hear students talking I can usually tell if somebody is Asian, even if they speak English just like a native. And I think this usually happens when the person's parents are both Asian. My son's father is US American, and he does not have this distinctness in the voice that I have noticed with kids who are 100 percent Asian. What an interesting phenomenon. I am not vision-impaired by the way.
And just one more important question, and I don't mean to be impolite, but which term is more preferred, blind or vision-impaired? I work at a hospital and we are taught to say vision-impaired because saying a person is blind is rude. I just wanted to get some input on that.
Thanks so much.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Possibly a speech therapist or a doctor could explain it. The closest I can come is guesswork mostly, but I know that some ethnicities have differences such as greater lung capacity, their sinus cavities have a different shape which could affect resonance, the size (width, height and depth) of the mouth, larger or smaller larynxes, ect... All of these could be contributing factors. I have noticed a softer, somewhat smoother quality and often a bit higher pitch to the voices of Asians as opposed to a deeper, harder quality and pitch to some European groups. Generally speaking of course, there are always variations within any group. But it makes sense to me. If you've ever seen a documentary about how violins are made, you will see that everything from the thickness of the wood in different places, the curvature of the body, the type of wood used and even the kind and nimber of coats of varnish used affects the sound the finished instrument makes. If you imagine the open space inside the violins as the lungs, the strings as the vocal chords, the wood as the skeletal and muscular structure and the varnish as the skin, it's really sort of similar.

And I don't know which is the more acceptable term, I'm not even legally blind myself, but visually -impaired is my preferance because it more or less covers a larger group of people from the totally blind, to people with very limited vision. Or it seems to me that it does.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Some really good comments here from both of you!

Re: terminology: I personally prefer blind. I do not like to be called visually impaired because I don't like the word "impaired." But it seems, unfortunately, that this is the "hot term." Other options are "people who have low vision," etc. I try to call people what they want to be called, but I will make it a point to refer to myself as a blind person if anyone calls me visually impaired.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)