Reflections on Disability Pride
This article is going to be something completely different from the previous five articles I’ve published on LinkedIn. July is Disability pride month, and as the month draws to a close, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my personal feelings towards my disability, and the idea of being proud of it. In general, whenever I write anything, I have a strongly held set of beliefs, based on experiences that feel somewhat universal to a group of people I identify with. In this case, I don’t. But perhaps if I waffle on for the next four hundred words, I’ll achieve some personal clarity, and the process might be helpful or insightful to people reading. If the idea of that sounds dreadful to you, that’s perfectly OK.
Whenever I read or hear some negative Nelly in the blindness community push back against the idea of being proud of blindness, I immediately become defensive. They always claim that blindness isn’t something we can be proud of, because it’s something we’re missing, not something we have. “How can you be proud of being broken?” they seem to complain. But I don’t *feel* broken, and I know I’m not! I was born blind, so I don’t even have any former vision to miss. If someone could “fix” me, I would refuse the cure; becoming sighted in my middle 30’s feels difficult, frightening, and all together unsatisfactory. Mostly, what I feel is annoyed. Annoyed that traveling without a car takes forever, that half the websites I use require tedious work-arounds just to complete daily tasks, and that so many of the things I do every day would just be easier with sight. But in the process of finding the work-arounds, and figuring out how to get on with life, blind people have come together to form a robust, creative, artistic, and supportive culture. We’ve built our own spaces (both offline and online), we’ve started our own businesses, we’ve developed our own talents, and we’ve implemented our own solutions. I’m incredibly proud of blindness culture, and so grateful that I get to be a small part of it.
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On the other hand, whenever I feel harangued by someone demanding that I demonstrate blind pride, I once again immediately become defensive. “Capitalize the word Blind! Braille is upper case,” they seem to yell. “How dare you ever insinuate that blindness can be negative! Blindness is a nuisance, nothing more.” Really? Do you have any idea how long it took me to start my career? Do you have any idea how hard education, travel, and everything else can feel sometimes? I’ll show you nuisance, buddy! Why should I be proud that I have to struggle?
Perhaps that question is where the answer lies. I’m proud of my talents; I can listen at 800 words per minute, I can read and write Braille, I can use a screen reader in my sleep, and I can navigate in the dark. I’m proud of my culture; it developed the NVDA screen reader, created some of the finest advocacy groups in the world, and contains some of the best people I’ve ever met. But I’m not proud of my blindness, anymore than I’m proud of my beard; I’m not ashamed of it, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything, but proud? No. It’s given me many good things, and it’s also given me an equal amount of frustration and negativity. Perhaps one day, when we live in a world that isn’t entirely built on the assumption that everyone can see, where being blind isn’t a struggle at all, where blindness doesn’t just really suck sometimes, and where blind people have achieved true equality, I’ll be able to unequivocally say I’m proud of my blindness. We don’t live in that world. Someday we could, though!
Access Technologist at Shared Services Canada
1yHi Sam, Linkedin won't let me have my full rant. :-) But I wanted to clarify one point. The full quote about blindness being a nusance is something like, "Blindness is a characteristic. All characteristics are limiting, but blindness need be no more limiting than any other characteristic. In fact, given training and opportunity blindness can be reduced to a nusance." So, in order for blindness to actually be reduced to a nusance, the training and opportunity have to be part of the equation. In places where training is state of the art, and blind people work together to create opportunity, blind people do extrordinarily well. In Canada, training and opportunity are hit and miss at best, and attitudes about blindness are outrageously bad. We need love for blind people. There needs to be an intrinsic desire to pull together, and create the training and opportunity we need for ourselves against the tide of corporate blindness, disinformation and fearmongering about us.