Back in the days when I was a card carrying member of the NFB, my
focus was still on the concept that "education" would resolve all our
prejudices. This was a carry over from my college days, despite the
fact that many of my classmates were budding elitists, developing
"intellectual" justification for the prejudices they carried with them
into college. Which is exactly what I was doing, from my own
upbringing. But one of Man's great abilities, as well as one of Man's
great disabilities, is the ability to compartmentalize. Anyway, I
bought Kenneth Jernigan's preaching about this army of highly skilled,
independent blind people going forth and spreading the Word, and
educating the entire nation of our equal status.
I closed my eyes...funny statement...to the obvious fact that the NFB
was an elitist organization from its inception, proclaiming that the
Blind knew who they were and they would never go back. "The blind
leading the blind". But just like the statement, "of the people, by
the people and for the people", no NFB member asked, "which blind
people are leading the blind"? The fact is that the organization was
built upon a familiar model. We had our all-knowing leader and his
hand picked lieutenants and a select Board of Directors, who all met
and agreed upon the policies of the organization, and then went forth
and told the membership what to believe. I used to play the
presidential tapes at chapter meetings. Kenneth Jernigan explained to
us the important events of the month, calling upon us for certain
actions and for more fund raising. Jernigan and his Cabinet
determined who our enemies were...and they were numerous. We were
told that we were surrounded on all sides by self serving agencies
bent on controlling our minds.
To some extent this position of the NFB leadership could be justified.
And to some degree the rank and file blind members needed to learn
self respect, and to demand equal treatment. But as the "Movement"
grew, the All Wise Leadership tightened control, rather than teaching
the rank and file members to take charge of their lives. Very much
like what happened in Labor Unions, where a handful of officers begin
to tell members how to think, and members began to let the officials
run the show. Such behavior looks efficient in the beginning of a
Movement, but it is self defeating, in the long run.
Anyway, despite its original lofty positions, the NFB has morphed into
a national agency for the blind, with headquarters in Baltimore,
Maryland. In my personal opinion, rather than educating the sighted
world, the NFB has become "educated" in the ways of fitting in. The
Movement has long since turned into a self serving program. Sure, it
has done some good, developing some technology and supporting some
discrimination cases, but the NFB is a long way from living up to its
original radical belief that it could "educate" its way to equality.
But we blind are no different than our sighted neighbors. Despite the
fact that it has been 150 years since Honest Abe freed the Slaves,
America is just about as full of Racists and White Supremacists as
ever. Despite all the well intentioned legislation, attitudes are
passed down the line from parent to child. Latinos, Asians, Jews,
Gays, all face the same deeply ingrained contempt by the European
White Men. And even that largest of all minorities...the one that
actually has more numbers than the White Male Majority, Women, has
never been able to overcome deep set prejudice. Of course women have
come a long way since the days of the skirts that swept the floor, and
the Black former Slaves have seen some of their children and grand
children move into a more comfortable life, even into the White House
and seats upon the Supreme Court. But under the surface there still
exists rage and hatred that does not exist toward other White Men.
Perhaps one fine day we blind will wake up to the realization that our
salvation can only come about when we turn our efforts toward
improving ourselves by teaching future generations how to think for
themselves, and how to take charge of their lives. And there I go
again, putting my Faith in education!
Carl Jarvis
On 4/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, actually I do make judgments of sighted people in relation to blind
standards, or, you could say, my standards. Sighted people don't pay
attention to cues in the environment, at least, not at a conscious level. I
remember when I was in high school and my two friends and I were on the
school newspaper, and we were traveling on the subway to an unfamiliar
station for some project or other. I paid attention to that subway station,
and I knew how to get us back to the right track, for the right train. They
could see signs perfectly well, but they were confused, standing there
saying, which way? But I had partial vision, couldn't see the signs, but had
paid attention. And we pay attention to spoken language. We know how to
listen to directions, how to hear what people are feeling, but not saying.
We even read more efficiently because we don't skim over material so quickly
that we lose important information in the process. That being said,
blindness is a severe disability. People are supposed to be able to see. A
fully sighted person who is less intelligent than a really smart blind
person, is able to function in situations in which a blind person cannot.
This has to do with the fact that human beings are built in such a way that
a huge amount of information comes to them through sight. So yes, blind
people can be brainwashed into feeling incompetent in situations in which
they are quite capable. But the real world is made by and for people without
disabilities. And we are able to function in it, only to the extent that we
are taught to compensate for our incapacities and because of the ways in
which it has been made accessible to us. Without the special training and
without the special considerations, we'd be pretty helpless. And that is why
sighted people say, as they watch us do things that they thought were
impossible, that we are wonderful. They know that if at that moment, their
sight was gone, they could not do what we can do and they cannot imagine how
we can. For as long as I can remember, blind people have been talking about
educating the sighted world. Perhaps blind people should pay more attention
to their own tendency to deny the impact of their blindness on their lives
and to comprehend the reasons for the reactions of sighted people, rather
than constantly trying to change them. It should be obvious that the attempt
hasn't worked.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2017 9:54 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
Lots of food for thought in this stream.
I do agree with Miriam that blind couples have a tougher time than do either
sighted couples or mixed blind and sighted. I say tougher because our world
is set up to accommodate sighted people. A blind couple might be
independent, but need sighted assistance for certain basic tasks. Things
such as how to get spots out of clothes when you can't see them yourself.
Or stains on rugs or counters. Streaks on freshly washed windows. Grocery
shopping.
Even though sighted people also need assistance, it is in ways that many
sighted people need help. But because the sighted person uses sight to
accomplish a task which a blind person needs help doing, the sighted person
feels superior. Yet, that same blind person may be highly skilled at tasks
at which the sighted person is unskilled. Of course the sighted person
usually retreats to the old traditional statement, "How marvelous. You do
so amazingly well."
Both the blind person and the sighted person might be equally independent,
but the blind person is measured by how they function as a sighted person,
even though they are not. The blind person does not judge the sighted
person by blind standards, because as I said, the world is set up for sight.
We blind people are certainly able to set conditions to allow ourselves to
live independently, especially if we have plenty of money. Money is the
great equalizer. But even so, a rich sighted person, who employs help to do
all their daily activities is seen as Independent, while a rich blind person
employing the same help is seen as Dependent. So, even though I have felt
most of my life as a blind man, that I am able to function independently, I
understand that this is not the way sighted folks see me. It comes down to
the fact that perception separates us. And in that sense, no matter what my
perception is, I will always be measured by the sighted persons perception.
And no matter how we try to "educate" the world, it is, after all, the world
as created by sight. Therefore, how I see myself is the most important
opinion that matters. I strongly encourage support groups of blind people.
We need to build upon our collective belief that we can live complete lives.
Since, like our Mass Corporate Media, hammering the beliefs of the Ruling
Class down our throats, the sighted beliefs are pounded into our heads,
teaching us that we are unable to be as independent and as successful as are
sighted people.
For certain my life as a husband and father are different now that I am
blind. But I and my wife make trade-offs so that we share equally as
partners.
Just as in any endeavor, we need to assess our abilities, our strengths and
weaknesses. Knowing ourselves and learning to accept ourselves is what
independence is all about, to me.
Roger's comments brought to mind the years before TV. I had very clear
mental pictures of the people on the radio, disk jockeys, announcers and the
variety of actors. I don't think I ever came close to accurately picturing
people from just their voices. When I could see, the most beautiful part of
the girls I fell for was their eyes.
I really believed that I could tell what sort of a person they were by
looking into their eyes. After I became blind, I felt cheated. But I soon
learned to judge beauty by voice. I fell for several women on the basis of
their sound. Even when friends would describe some of them as plain, or
homely, or fat, or scruffy, if I was drawn to their voice, then none of that
mattered. So after divorcing my first wife, I fell in love with the gentle,
sweet voice of the woman who assisted me in the Braille and Taping Service.
We dated, married and had two children. After 8 years, she had an affair
with a man where she
worked, and after some stormy months she ran off with her girl
friend.
Once again I learned life's lessons the hard way. Pretty eyes or soft
voices are not a good way to determine who will make a good mate. And it is
as foolish to seek approval from the guys at the local bar, or at the gymn.
I think that our society leans far too heavily on sight, when it comes to
deciding who we will associate with. Looks tend to begin sagging with
stress and age. Once known as "the silver fox", my "silver hair" has turned
a whispy white, and my tight stomach seems to have developed some blubber,
and even the firm jaw line has developed a wobble under the chin. Anyway,
it's a good thing that Cathy loves the "inner Carl". Because the wrapper is
not holding up so well.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I remember that when blind young people, especially guys, became
interested in people of the opposite sex, they would ask people with
sight to describe them. I gather that they felt like they needed
sighted validation for their attraction. I think that's pretty sad. It
shows how dependent blind people are on the opinions and standrds of
sighted people. Those standards are visually relevant. I don't see why
they should be relevant to the blind unless it's a matter of pride and
wanting respect and adulation from the sighted world. I also remember,
from when I was young, although people on this list have argued with
me, that the tendency is for sighted women to go with blind guys, but
for very few sighted guys to be sexually interested in blind women.
Often the sighted guys who became involved with blind women, had a
personality of physical disability.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2017 4:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days'
Again
Here is something else you might wonder about in your choice of a wife.
Being one of those strange people who read textbooks for recreational
purposes I came across an experiment of interest in a psychology
textbook.
They allowed subjects to just sit down and talk a few minutes to a
number of members of the opposite sex one after another and then asked
the subjects to rate their conversation partners for attractiveness.
Then they did the same thing again with a different set of members of
the opposite sex, but with the subject blindfolded. It turns out
that their assessments of the attractiveness of their conversation
partners were radically different when they were blindfolded. They
rated as attractive people whom they would have rated as unattractive
without their blindfolds. It makes me wonder about myself. Whenever I
meet someone new I always form a mental image of them. I don't have a
conscious basis for my mental images, but I think it may be based on
perceived similarities with others whom I met in my sighted days with
similar voices or personalities.
Undoubtedly my mental images are all wrong. I noticed that when I was
first becoming blind. I was hospitalized for eye surgery and I would
ask the nurses to describe themselves to me. Then the bandages would
come off and I could see that they gave me accurate descriptions, even
good enough to have picked them out in a crowd, but they still looked
nothing like I had them pictured.
Also I know that it is very common for sighted people to hear a radio
personality and hen see the person in a picture or in person and be
shocked that he or she looked nothing like one expected. All of this
leaves me wondering. There are so many women I have met after losing
my eyesight who strike me as highly attractive. I just wonder if I
would recoil in revulsion if I could see them. I think that might be
the case because I think I identified such a case once. There was a
certain female bartender who did strike me as attractive. Then I got
into a conversation with a man in that bar and the small talk turned
to a bit of guy talk and he said that he did not consider the
bartender to be attractive at all and then he described her. It had
not been all that long at the time since I had lost my eyesight and I
recognized the description as matching that of a bartender I had seen
around before I became blind. Indeed, I did not consider her to be in
the least attractive. So, Carl, I think that it is a pretty good bet
that both of us have entirely different standards for female beauty than
we did when we were sighted.
On 4/28/2017 12:52 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Interesting how so many of us blind men, and some blind women wind up
marrying sighted partners. Of course we might conclude that this is
so because there are so many sighted candidates as opposed to blind
ones, but I think that this is only part of the answer. After my
divorce from my first wife, whom I'd married as a sighted man, I
dated several women, some sighted and some blind. I came close to
becoming serious with two blind women, one who has remained a close
friend for nearly 50 years, and the other who was far to smart to get
serious over me. But then along came a young woman, a sighted woman,
who worked as my secretary in the Braille and Taping Service, and I
gravitated toward her, and subsequently married her. Looking back,
there were compelling reasons that I did not even think about at the
time. While I have blind friends who are married to other blind
partners, and they lead successful lives, nonetheless, the lack of
sight does create challenges that are not part of a sighted/sighted,
or a sighted/blind partnership. At the time, choosing between two
women, I would have said it was strictly a matter of love. But
looking back, did I fool myself? Probably. After all, sighted for
nearly 30 years, carrying the unspoken stereotypes about blindness,
still uncertain if I could carry my own weight, live independently,
be attractive to sighted women. Lots of social and cultural issues
that lurked just below the surface, ignored by me at the time.
The example you gave about the man, blind from birth, building his
mental image of Black people through the often unspoken inferences of
people around him, with no understanding of how deep prejudice toward
Black people is, he most likely felt he had a true mental picture,
without his being prejudiced.
No one ever sat me down and said, "Blindness will make you inferior",
but that is what I knew, down in my heart. No one told me that Gay
men were not real men, but that is what my view had been as a young
man. But I did receive enough conversation at home to help me avoid
being racially prejudiced. In fact, what finally helped me
understand prejudice, was the constant drilling by my parents that
each person is unique, and we accept or reject them based upon the
sort of values, the sort of person that they are. This finally got
through to me regarding my youthful prejudice toward Gays. While
many of my school chums judged people through stereotypes, I saw each
person as just one more human being, and accepted them, or rejected
them on an individual basis.
Sure, in all of that I had my prejudices, learned through living in
the neighborhood I grew up in. And I am still a work in progress,
learning new stuff about what jerks my chain or rings my bell. In
fact, I would like to be in the process of altering my belief on some
matter, the moment I leave this life behind.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I may have mentioned this before. When I was in college, in my
senior year, I took an honors seminar in the Social Sciences, and I
think it was for the final, I had to organize a sociological study,
perform it, and write up the results. At the time, I had a part-time
job in the Lighthouse recreation program, teaching guitar and
autoharp to people of various ages. I decided to study the racial
attitudes of the teenagers with whom I worked. I composed a set of
questions which I asked them in order to elicit their racial
attitudes. There was one boy, just a few years younger than I, who'd
been totally blind since birth. What stands out clearly in my memory
was that He described what he believed, black people looked like.
His description included every stereotype you've ever heard. He'd
learned what black people look like from the culture which
surrounded him. He had no visual knowledge which might correct his
beliefs. Interestingly, he became a social worker, ended up working
for our county hospital, eventually became president of the Nassau
County Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. He
married a sighted woman, and was also President of our local chapter of
NFB.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl
Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 9:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days'
Again
"It ain't easy being Green", or Black or Brown or Female or Gay.
One solution would be to provide every person with sleep shades, and
force the to be worn at all times. But then, I know some very
prejudiced totally blind people...
Carl Jarvis
On 4/13/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage
non-federal law enforcement agencies," Jeff Sessions wrote in a
memo last week. (photo: Michael B. Thomas/Getty)
For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
13 April 17
Jeff Sessions rolls the clock back on civil rights enforcement
Two recent news stories crossed like ships in the night, without
much public discussion of how they were related.
Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all
agreements between the Justice Department and local police
departments around the country. Sessions wrote that "it is not the
responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law
enforcement agencies," and said the DOJ might "pull back" on
federal oversight responsibilities under Donald Trump.
The news came after the revelation by the New York Daily News that
Daniel Pantaleo - the officer who used a chokehold in the killing
of Eric Garner - had repeatedly been disciplined by the Civilian
Complaint Review Board
(CCRB) prior to the Garner case. New York City had fought like a
tiger to keep this information out of the public eye, and when it
finally was released, it was only through an anonymous leak.
The story about Pantaleo shows why the Sessions story is so
unsettling.
People laughed when Donald Trump had to get Scott Baio to serve as
an opening-day speaker at the Republican National Convention. But
the Happy Days symbolism officially takes a darker turn with this
Sessions news. What Sessions is suggesting means literally going
back to a Fifties-era conception of the Justice Department's role
in preventing local police abuse.
If Sessions has his way, he will holster the most powerful weapon
the government has in addressing tragedies like the Garner incident:
federal civil rights laws.
The key statute is 18 USC 242, which gives the federal government
the right to intervene if a person has been harmed by a
"deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or
protected by the Constitution."
An example of when this law comes into play would be a police
murder in which the officer is acquitted in a sham trial by an
unabashedly corrupt local government. The federal government is
supposed to then use its powers to step in and file charges for
civil rights violations, correcting the local wrong.
It took decades of hard-fought legal battles to get the government
to actually use this tool.
Back in 1959, during the days that Donald Trump once recalled
fondly to Michele Bachmann as the time when "even my Jews would say
Merry Christmas,"
a deputy attorney general named William Rogers wrote a memo very
similar in tone to the one Sessions just wrote. He declared that
the federal government should not intervene in local controversies
and file civil rights charges absent "compelling circumstances."
In practice, the Rogers memo meant that, provided there had been
some kind of local due process, no matter how flawed, the feds
wouldn't step in and take a second whack at an offender in a race
killing or a police brutality case.
This prohibition against "dual prosecutions" was the law of the
land for nearly 20 years. It didn't change until after an egregious
incident involving an unarmed African-American man named Carnell Russ.
In 1971, Russ was shot in the head by a policeman named Charles Lee
Ratliff at point-blank range in Star City, Arkansas, after being
pulled over for speeding.
Ratliff was acquitted in a joke of a trial in which an all-white
jury in Star City took less than 15 minutes to deliberate. Years
later, the NAACP sued the federal government - specifically the
attorney general under Gerald Ford, Edward Levi - for failing to
use its civil rights authority to investigate the obvious problems
in the Russ case.
The case went before a Nixon-appointed judge named Barrington
Parker, who would later become famous as the judge in the trial of
would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley. Parker was African-American.
He ruled in the NAACP's favor. Although the federal government
appealed, a deal was later struck between the NAACP and Jimmy
Carter's attorney general, Griffin Bell, whereupon the federal
government would look at "each and every allegation of a violation
of the civil rights laws ...
on its own merits."
The 1977 Bell memo gave birth to the modern civil rights
investigation.
That
means it took until the late Seventies, over 110 years after the
Civil War, for the government to finally accept its responsibility
to police local police. That the federal government still needs to
use those powers is self-evident. Just look at the Garner case and
countless others like it, where local governments routinely fail to
investigate and/or secure indictments against brutal cops.
After the Garner case, three out of four Americans believed there
should be charges for Pantaleo. There were protests around the
country, and the onslaught of high-profile brutality cases that
followed - from Michael Brown in Ferguson to Tamir Rice in
Cleveland to Walter Scott in North Charleston to Freddie Gray in
Baltimore to Sandra Bland to Dajerria Becton, the 15 year-old girl
in a bathing suit thrown to the ground by police in McKinney, Texas
- led some people to hope that there would finally be some kind of
national discussion on the issue that would result in positive
changes.
With the Sessions news of last week, things have officially gone
the other way. The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts
to the Justice Department budget, including the outright
elimination of funding for the Legal Services Corporation and
Violence Against Women grants, as well as slashing up to a third of
the Civil Rights Division's budget.
Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local
police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably
expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely.
Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from
the people who elected
Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police
beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry
that there's too much federal oversight of police, and too much
advocacy for people who come in contact with police.
The facile conclusion to all of this is that white America wants to
go back to the Fifties. But it's worse, and weirder, than that.
Seventy years ago, affluent white people could huddle in the
suburbs, watch Leave It to Beaver, and pretend that cops weren't
beating the crap out of people in East St. Louis or Watts or
wherever the nearest black neighborhood was. But these days, the
whole country regularly gawks at brutal cases of police violence on
the Internet. Nobody can pretend it's not going on, but millions of
people clearly don't want to do anything about it - just the
opposite, in fact. They want more.
Is this a twisted country, or what?
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