by Christopher J. Kuczynski
From the Associate Editor: Chris Kuczynski is one of the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind of Pennsylvania. He was a 1985 NFB scholarship winner, and he is now an attorney with a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. This article is reprinted from the September, 1991, issue of the Blind Activist, the publication of the National Federation of the Blind of Pennsylvania. Here it is:
Blind people are merely a cross-section of society, which is comprised of people with various interests, talents, and desires. Recognizing this, the National Federation of the Blind has formed several divisions, each of which deals with issues having particular significance for its members, while continuing to deal with the betterment of life for blind people generally. One distinction that we do not make, however, is that between totally blind and partially sighted individuals.
I was not surprised, when I attended my first Federation function, to learn that not all of the organization's members were totally blind. But it took me a while to understand that there are no significant differences between people with no sight and those with some, at least in the way society ultimately treats us.
A Federationist once told me that no matter how much sight I pretended to have, society would treat me as a blind person, and I had better be prepared for that reality. I was not prepared for it, having been raised, as many partials are, in that land between blindness and sight--blind enough to require certain adjustments in daily life, maybe even to obtain certain benefits; but sighted enough that, if I worked really hard at it, people who met me briefly would not even know I was blind. I don't know what benefit I hoped to derive from this denial of blindness. I suppose it was the same one that some rehabilitation counselors believe will accrue to the partially sighted job applicant whom they advise not to tell an interviewer about blindness. "Once you get your foot in the door," the reasoning goes, "you can prove your ability, and your blindness won't matter." I know of no instance in which feigning sight that one did not have has ever benefited a blind person in the work place or anywhere else. Ultimately the blindness will be discovered by those from whom it is being hidden. The person who is bluffing sight will either have to learn alternative techniques to increase efficiency on the job and in other aspects of life or perform at a lower level of competency. In either case, society will recognize the person as blind--not partially sighted or visually impaired.
If the problems of the totally blind and partially sighted are essentially the same (namely, the desire to be treated as equals in a largely sighted society and the need for proper training and good attitudes that will help to make this equality a reality), then the Federation is correct in making no distinction between its members on the basis of how much sight they possess. It also follows logically that all Federationists should combat discrimination in the same way: by recognizing themselves as blind, by identifying themselves to the public as blind, by getting whatever training is necessary to function effectively in society, and by doing those things which will lead to society's acceptance of them as blind people, having rights no different from those of the sighted. Old habits die hard. It has taken me a long time to destroy the barriers that society had constructed between partially sighted, visually impaired, or legally blind people on the one hand, and totally blind people on the other. Most other partials share experiences similar to my own. Let me illustrate this fact by considering the widespread reluctance to carry a cane.
A woman I know is familiar with our movement and considers herself blind. In response to my question about why she did not carry a cane, she replied that she knew she was blind and was not ashamed of it. However, she knew that other people had negative images about blindness. Seeing a cane, those who met her for the first time would not want to get to know her as a person. They would immediately judge her as inferior. She felt that the subject of blindness could be brought up later.
I then asked her which of two ways of fighting discrimination she thought would lead to a better result: 1) Trying to gain acceptance into society as someone who appears sighted in spite of blindness or 2) Demonstrating, in all that one does, that there is nothing wrong with the characteristic of blindness, that it is possible to possess it and to work alongside sighted people, and that blind people are entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship, regardless of whether they appear to be like everybody else. I think she agreed with me in principle that the second alternative really was better, but in her personal life, the added ease of travel was simply not worth the discrimination that went along with the white cane.
It would be an oversimplification to say that this woman was ashamed of her blindness. I think she craved the same things that everyone (blind or sighted) does: the companionship and approval of others and the right to be given an opportunity to participate fully in society. She simply viewed the public as uneducable and maybe as even less receptive to the rights of the blind than it actually is. I pointed out that she was deceiving herself and that she derived little if any benefit from trying to hide her blindness in exchange for possibly diminished freedom to travel. Further, she was impeding the interests of the blind as a class, because her reluctance to use alternative techniques sent a message that blindness was regarded by blind people as being as much of a stigma as society considers it to be.
My own early thoughts about the white cane were that I did not want and did not need to use one. After all, I was a partially sighted person--legally blind, perhaps, but with enough travel vision to move about without the assistance and the corresponding stigma of a white cane. One of the first things I learned about the Federation was that many of its members who had better sight than I used white canes. For them (and now for me) it was both a tool and a symbol of independence and a source of pride.
My acceptance of the cane did not occur immediately after having attended my first NFB convention. It actually began before the convention but was not complete until years later. In some way I knew I was blind as early as age five or six. I learned at that time that I really needed Braille to become literate. At age eight I began taking mobility and orientation lessons. I knew that traveling for me would be different from traveling for other people, since "I didn't see too well," but I knew just as surely that I did not need a cane. I didn't carry one at all until my last year in high school when someone suggested it would be helpful for me to learn to use it "just so that, if I ever needed to ask for help, people would know that I didn't see too well."
I learned to use the cane, but not in the same way or for the same reasons that totally blind people did. I didn't believe that the cane might really help me to be a more effective traveler, but at least some of the stigma was being stripped away. Nevertheless, I made sure that I carried a folding cane, used it only in unfamiliar places, and promptly placed it in my back pack or the closest hiding place when I was in familiar areas. In fact, during the rest of my senior year in high school, I did not use the cane at all since, I reasoned, I knew the route to school and the school building very well.
Like many other reluctant cane users, I thought that a change of scenery (an environment in which no one had known me without the cane) would cause me to start using it on a permanent basis. However, when I got to college, I used it just long enough to find out where all my classes were.
My law school experience was similar, though by my third year I was taking the cane (thank God for the NFB telescoping variety) to job interviews. At this point, I really had no choice, since I had realized that there was no way for me to travel effectively in unfamiliar surroundings without a cane. My travel during high school and most of college was narrowly circumscribed to include only those places with which I was familiar and those to which sighted companions would take me.
Even when I started my job, I did not use the cane regularly. Finally and all of a sudden, I just decided to start using it and to forget making distinctions between those times when I needed it and those when I did not. The truth is that I really need the cane all the time if I want to travel as comfortably as sighted people. The decision was not as difficult as I had imagined. For a few days people who knew me asked whether there had been some change in my vision. After only a few days the questioning stopped, and I have not discerned any difference in the way people with whom I have worked or friends of mine now treat me. From the process of learning to accept the white cane as a method of effective travel (and the corresponding process of accepting my own blindness), I learned at least three important things. First and most obvious, I am simply a better traveler with a cane than without one, and I marvel at the fact that the public's acceptance of me once meant so much that I was willing to risk my safety by traveling without it.
Second, people really did treat me as a blind person whether I used the cane or not. I do not think I suffered any less discrimination when I was a more poorly functioning person pretending to be sighted than when I became a competently traveling person who knew he was blind. I lost none of my friends once I began using a cane and would not attribute my friendship with them to the fact that they knew me first as a person who did not use one. The fact that I appeared blind by carrying a cane did not deter my present employer from hiring me, though the inability to get to the interview independently probably would have.
Finally, I learned that I could do far more to advance the interests of blind people generally as a competent, cane-carrying traveler than I could do as a person pretending to be sighted. Whether I believed it or not, refusing to carry a cane when I really needed one was a way of saying that it was not quite respectable to be blind, that the only way for a blind person to fit into society was as a sighted person, and that my interests and those of the totally blind were different. After all, they could never quite fit in, being unable to hide their blindness completely.
I don't know whether relating my personal experiences and our discussions persuaded my friend to begin to use a cane. I find, however, that most blind people who look closely at their travel skills discover that the white cane can be useful to them. Their reluctance to use it is motivated by their own learned misconceptions about blindness, underlying all of which is the belief that respectability varies in direct relation to vision.
As long as false distinctions between the totally blind and the partially sighted exist, progress for the blind will be a partial progress--never achieving its full force and effect. But such distinctions are vanishing, in large part due to the Federation's philosophy about blindness, and as a result the blind--all of us--are today making progress more quickly than we ever have.
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