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The Braille Monitor

June, 1989

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WHO IS BLIND

AND IS IT RESPECTABLE?

By Kenneth

Jernigan

It is

interesting to note how flexible the attitudes about blindness are. When an

individual with a little eyesight is trying to get a job, he or she is often

not blind at all; but when that same individual is filling out Social Security

or tax forms, he or she may be as blind as they come. A number of years ago

when some of us were going to the Baltimore airport to make a trial evacuation

of a widebodied airplane by going down the emergencyslide, the reaction of

a blind (or partially sighted or visually impaired, whichever way you want

to think of it) young girl (about nine, I think) was right on target. She wanted

to participate, but only the blind could go.

"I'm

blind," she said, "so I want to take part."

"You

can't," her father said. "You tell me all the time that you aren't

blind."

"I

don't care," she said. "That's different. I'm blind, and I have a

right to go."

The term

"legal blindness," with heavy emphasis on the "legal,"

is much in vogue these days, but what does it mean? Does it mean that the person

who is "legally blind" is not really blind but just caught in a legal

fiction, or does the term have meaning? Who created it, and why? Surely there

must have been some reason, or was it simply

arbitrary?

My

definition that many of us use is that a person is blind to the extent that

he or she must employ alternative techniques to do ef- ficiently those tasks

which the person with normal eyesight would do visually, and that a person

should be classified as blind when he or she must use enough such alternative

techniques that his or her patterns of daily living are substantially altered.

The standard definition of 20/200 visual acuity in the better eye with correcting

lenses or an angle of less than twenty degrees is presumed to be simply another

way of saying the same thing - that a person with such limited eyesight will

need to adopt so many alternative techniques to function efficiently that his

or her patterns of daily living are substantially altered.

Of course,

all of this hairsplitting is just that, hairsplitting. From the beginning of

history blindness has been equated with inferiority and lack of ability, so

people have done everything they could to avoid being thought of as blind -

even if they have had almost no eyesight at all. Underlying much of the work

which we of the National Federation of the Blind have done over the years is

the concept that it is respectable to be blind. Here we have taken a lesson

from the blacks.

As long

as black people tried to bide their blackness or point to the fact that this

or that black really had lighter skin than most, second-class status was inevitable;

for even the lightest skinned black was still black. T'he attempts at straightening

the hair and lightening the skin never worked. Mostly they were the subject

of ridicule. Only when blacks began to be what they were (and openly to say

that they were proud to be what they were) did the world change. Within reason,

others tend to treat us as we expect to be treated, so when blacks began to

feel and act and believe that it was respectable to be black, it was respectable.

After all, respectability is a social concept, not a chemical formula; and

it always begins in one's own mind.

Likewise

with the blind. A person who sees so little that he or she cannot drive a car,

read ordinary print, recognize faces at a distance, or do visually most of

the rest of the things that others normally do with sight is (by any reasonable

definition) blind and will be regarded as blind by friends and associates.

The blind person can react to this defensively or matter of factly. If the

defensiveness is sufficiently strong, friends and associates will pretend and

avoid the word blind, but they will not stop thinking about it. They will simply

add pity to the emotions they already feel.

So we have

blind people who avoid the word and tell people that they are not blind, just

visually challenged, visually impaired, or visually limited - or perhaps they

are suffering from a "profound reduction in their visual acuity. And no one is

fooled by the gobbledy gook, no one, that is, except maybe a few of the professionals

who love such fine and meaningless distinctions.

Meanwhile the blind (both the totals and the visually challenged) pay the price,

regarding themselves and being regarded as second class. Since believing a thing

tends to make it come true, they end up being as inferior as they think they are,

needlessly.

For quite

some time the Texas School for the Blind has been undergoing internal debate

and soul-searching. Bill Miller (one of its chief executives, writing

in the School's December, 1988, publication -which is significantly entitled

Insights) advocates changing the name of the institution from the Texas

School for the Blind to either the Texas School for the Blind and Visually

Impaired or the Texas School for the Visually Impaired. In fact, he flirts

with the notion of removing any reference whatever to loss of sight in the

School's name. The reasons he gives for making the change tell us more about

him and his philosophy than he probably realizes. They also tell us much about

the prospects for first-class citizenship and self-esteem of the School's graduates

both now and in the future. He talks of the resentment which some "legally

blind" people feel at being referred to as blind, and he makes comparisons

with the asylums which existed earlier in the century.

In sending

Miller's article to the Monitor, Norma Beathard (now Norma Crosby) says:

"I am sending a copy of SOMC inforrnation" which

concerns the possibility of changing the name of the Texas School for the Blind.

As you can see, the administrators at the school seem to believe that the word

'blind' is dirty and offensive. I don't know what use you might have for this

information, but I believe that it is a prime example of how far we have to

go before we make everyone understand that there is nothing shameful about

being blind."

Here

is the Miller article:

About

two years ago I drafted and enrolled legislation that would have changed TSB's

name to the Texas School for the Visually Impaired. However, the Board of Trustees

felt that there had not been sufficient advance planning and the name change

portion of the legislation was withdrawn. (It is very important to note, however,

that some quite significant changes in the Education Code which I authored

did pass into law. This new Code in relation to TSB will have a significant

irnpact on TSB's future role in Texas.) Now, back to that name changing

business.

At the

last board meeting in September I broached once again for discussion the mat-

ter of changing the name of the school. After a lively exchange, the board

requested that we conduct surveys, formal and informal, of staff, students,

parents, ex-students, other residential schools and professionals in the field

to determine their opinions. Cyral Miller has conducted three such "straw

polls" of TSB staff, students and parents of TSB students. These results

point to a majority of support for a change to either the Texas School for

the Visually Impaired or the Texas School for the Blind and Visually impaired,

with the nod going to the latter.

During

the survey of TSB staff it became clear that some staff were voting against

any name change because they felt that there would be a high cost associated

with such an alteration. Not so. Documents and all else from the past would

|retain the Texas School for the Blind designation, stationery is usually ordered

once or twice per year and thus the cost for a change would be minimal, and

adding some more plastic letters to the outdoor titles and decals on school

vehicles would also cost very little. In short, making any name change would

most likely incur a cost of perhaps $1,000-$2,000 during the first year and

nil

thereafter.

I am

convinced that a name change is essential for a variety of reasons. I'll describe

just a few: the "Blind" only in the name is anachronisticjust as

"Asylum" was by the turn of this century; approximately 80%of the

students who attend TSB are not blind as it is commonly understood

by

the public but have widely differing levels of residual vision; adding

"visually impaired" far more accurately describes the nature of the

population the school is mandated to serve; many of our students as well as

adult personswho possess residual vision (and may also be legally blind) are

uncomfortable, and frequently resent, being described as blind or having to

"defend" or explain being labeled blind or attending a school for

the blind when the public perceives them as having no visual disability or

impairment.

A number

of schools have already made the change in the past 5-10 years. For example,

the Illinois School for the Visually Impaired, New Mexico School for the Visually

Handicapped, Wisconsin School for the Visually Handicapped, Kansas School....

etc. Some few schools have opted for no "exceptional" designation,

such as Parkview School (OK) or the Governor Morehead School (NC).

The motive

to change TSB's name is, of course, not aimed at "joining the crowd"

but more simply to recognize that the perceptions of consumers, parents, and

the public have, or should be, altered in the past century. Tle mandate for

TSB and thus the students we serve has also changed dramatically. The time

has arrived for us to officially acknowledge that this school serves school-age

children who have no vision as well as children who possess a severe to profound

reduction in their visual acuity, but retain some degree of functional vision,

and thus are more accurately described as visually impaired.

Too

late for the April-May but right in time for the June, 1989, edition of the

MONITOR, we received the following announcement from Sandy Moyer of the Berks

County Chapter of the NFB of Pennsylvania: "Attention all you Federationists.

Congratulations are in order for Tom Kerr (President) and Jackie Heck (Secretary)

of the Berks County Chapter. They were engaged Chrisitmas of 1988 and will

be married May 20th of this year. (This is being written in late April.) Tom

and Jackie are shown here with Tom's dog Fay, who helps them keep in step.'

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