I realize that you have to take blindness articles with several grains of sault. So I'm not actually reflecting on Paterson, but on the media's portrayal of Paterson. Here's a quote from an older article:
Paterson's disability was not a major factor in the election either. In fact, not everyone is aware he has been legally blind since birth. He almost always
has someone with him, and he doesn't use a cane or seeing-eye dog.
If that's true, it's too bad. But I'm always perplexed by these articles that talk about how "independent" someone is because they don't use a mobility aid. I remember reading an article about one woman who said her doctor suggested a cane, but she wanted to be more independent. Her solution? Make sure a coworker was around to yell to her when she was approaching the top of the stairs.
So, if we want to *look* inependent (as opposed to *being* independent), maybe we're going about it all wrong. Maybe it's like a status symbol if we can have all of these people around to guide us so we don't have to rely on one of those canes or dogs.
I see the same thing in articles about braille--someone is "independent" because they spend hours and hours memorizing stuff rather than reading braille.
Is our cultural fear of blindness so great that it shapes our perceptions of what constitutes independence?
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.
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.
I love New York. *headdesk*
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.
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.
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.
Voice "anatomy"
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.
Re: Voice "anatomy"
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.
Re: Voice "anatomy"
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.