There’s a piece in today’s New York Times on blindness that’s been bugging me—maybe I don’t have the vernacular right—its lodged in my gestalt where a life of research is troubled—maybe that’s better.
The OpEd by Rosemary Mahoney and entitled Why Do We Fear the Blind? is both well meaning and terribly weak, and though its not meretricious, it works on the margins of analysis. Mahoney’s premise is that “the sighted” don’t understand “the blind” and moreover sighted people fear blindness. Accordingly her thesis is insufficient to the topic—which is something much larger than the mise en scene of scary blind people walking down streets and frightening sighted pedestrians as blindness can’t be separated from larger issues, (what’s called in disability studies “normativity” or the social construction of normalcy). All physical differences trouble the public nerve, a fact that matters because in Mahoney’s article blindness stands alone and is reified or metaphorically forced to represent a thousand discomforts. Because Mahoney doesn’t understand this she makes a secondary mistake, imagining there “is” something especially significant about “the blind” that she needs to explain because, after all, she works at a school for the blind.
I’ve traveled to 47 states and 7 foreign countries with my three guide dogs. In general terms I don’t encounter people who say, “How do you think, how do you understand life?” I know dozens of blind men and women who can share stories of full inclusion—I can’t resist—of unblinking acceptance. I’ve had cab drivers from Egypt and Somalia talk excitedly about their own blind family members who are in school; I’ve had civic leaders and business people talk about blindness as a workplace advantage. Mahoney’s essay will, I fear, leave the uninitiated reader of the Times convinced that blind people are in need of rescue.
Far better to say that all people with disabilities both in the United States and abroad suffer from misconceptions that can set them back. Better to say that because blindness is a low incidence disability its possible to know very little about the subject. Better to tell stories of students and blind friends who have opened doors of success. You would think, looking at the Times layout (which features a vaguely sinister blind man with sunglasses apparently balanced in cosmic rays of indeterminacy) that the “blind” are shrill with nature’s unfair cry.
I was disappointed. Or as my friend Bill Peace would say, “I wasn’t impressed.”
Planet of the Blind 
Steve,
Thought provoking as usual. On this one however I in part disagree. Regarding the article itself, agreed, weak, not well developed.
Sadly however, on many points I find her to be correct. Over the 50 plus years I have been blind and wandering the earth, I have encountered no shortage of the kind of mythological stereotypes described, both Christian and otherwise. While the entire world does not subscribe to these, I find them to be at the root of the behavior of many. People who merely hold misconceptions are usually open to the correction of such misinformation via discussion and sound information to replace assumptions. Those holding such views as described in this article are often highly resistent because the problem is deep seated.
I also believe your lumping of all disability groups is over simplified. It is not that we blind folks are special and the only recipeint of such foolishness as described in this article, it is that each group tends to be painted with its own unique version. I do not think it is just “the blind” who are feared, I think it is many people viewed as different onto which many members of society project their deepest fears.
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