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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