Well, I certainly can't speak about your experience, but I suspect that if the
majority of sighted men encountered a blind woman, it wouldn't occur to them
that she was a potential sexual partner so if they looked back at their
experience over many years, they'd most likely say, "Well, the opportunity to
date a blind girl just never came up."
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 8:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: For White America, It's 'Happy Days' Again
As I have said before, before I became blind I very rarely encountered a blind
person and most of the few encounters I did have did not really involve
interaction and I never even gave much thought at all to blind people or
blindness. So perhaps I am deluding myself and the delusion is easy to
accomplish because I never encountered the opportunity of having to make the
decision or perhaps I am just different from other sighted men, but I really do
not think I would have rejected the possibility of a romantic relationship with
a blind woman as a sighted man on the sole basis of her blindness. But, like I
said, the opportunity to prove that just never came up when I was sighted and
seeking out the opportunity never crossed my mind.
On 4/28/2017 6:18 PM, Miriam Vieni 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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