Passive, Perhaps

Having returned to writing about my eyesight every day makes me more conscious of vision-related occurrences.

Today I met with my current co-facilitators and told them about my experiences from Tuesday and asked for support when it comes to calling on people. Because the workshop is about race, undoing racism, and about being a good ally, my colleague drew parallels between those who neglect the needs of people of color to those who neglect the needs of people with dis/abilities: if the former is engaging in passive racism, then the latter would be engaging in passive ablism.

"I don't see it that way," I said, "because they are not doing that thing thing to me." And we moved on.

As I write this 12 hours later, I kind of disagree with the me that said that 12 hours ago. If someone doesn't support me once, or twice, or a few times, sure, that's just not knowing what I need. But if I tell them again and again, and they continue to not support me, then that is neglect and it's ablism. Passive, perhaps, unless they really have it in for me.

The Teacher's Pet's Pet

Every Wednesday I go to my yoga teacher's home where she runs an advanced practice for fellow yoga teachers. I set up my mat right next to hers, and I think that always practicing at her side makes me something of a teacher's pet. But I wonder if that's true and why. Do I practice close to my teacher because I want to be a teacher's pet, or because I'm visually impaired and just need to see what's going on? Does having this dis/ability make me more likely to play the part of teachers pet, to be perceived as a teacher's pet, and/or to be treated like a teacher's pet? And what about the actual teacher's pet? You know, the cat who always comes in toward the end of class and gets in the way of everyone trying to hop up into forearm stands? Does the fact that I'm the one who always picks him up and puts him in the other room make me more of a teacher's pet? Or am I just the teacher's pet's pet?

Wrong Hunch

I have a new friend who tends to hunch. I thought that her stooped posture was maybe because she's tall, but then I found out she's extremely nearsighted. Guess my hunch was wrong about her hunch.

Blind Film #8: The importance of the worst cartoon ever made

What else can one say about that one-joke wonder, Mr. Magoo? As a kid I suffered through this poorly animated cartoon about an oblivious old myopic white guy and his manservant Charlie, depicted as a pigtailed, slanty-eyed, bucktoothed, Asian stereotype who's always shouting, "Mistah Magloo!" and calling the man "Bloss."

Hoo boy. A popular cartoon that's racist and ableist. I'd like to say that I can't believe I was allowed to watch it, or even that the TV station was allowed to air it. I'd also like to say that it's been discarded and forgotten as an antiquated artifact from the pre-PC era, but none of these statements would be true: Magoo lives on into another century, perpetuated in part by Disney's live-action remake. They even tried to PC-ify their version by transforming Charlie into a pan-global female love interest for Magoo's nephew, and then inserted this end-of-film disclaimer:

Siskel and Ebert sum all of it up in their review:

So Disney made a crappy film, based on a crappy cartoon. But Magoo serves an important role in popular culture. While other movies portray people with visual disabilities as having absolutely no vision, Magoo is one of the few mainstream media representations of someone with low vision. He's become an ableist cultural icon, an insult lobbed at people who act like they don't see something that's right in front of their faces. Magoo also gives context for understanding how people with disabilities can be misunderstood when they pass as abled—like a very nearsighted person who doesn't walk around with dark glasses and a white cane. To Magoo's credit, his antics are somewhat accurate. Too bad they couldn't have done that with a good film.

Colorblind Sometimes

Last night I saw interdisciplinary hip hop artist Baba Israel perform. The roots of Baba's beatboxing, storytelling and radical pedagogy run deep within his DNA: From the 50s through the 80s, his parents were members of legendary anarchist performing arts ensemble The Living Theatre, and Baba's own work traces a vibrant through-line from his folks' relationships to New York's jazz revolutionaries, Beat poets, Yippee upstarts, squatter cartoonists and avant gardettes, coupled with brushes with his own generation's most talented MCs and DJs of more recent decades.

I sat close so I could see the man more clearly, and was surprised when, 50 minutes in, Baba mentioned his own "white skin." I thought he was mixed, Black and Ashkenazi Jew, but later learned that presumed African half was actually Anglo. And, "Yeah," he later told me when I told him what my head had done, "I get asked if I'm Latino sometimes."

Being a person who sometimes sees only in shadow, I often cannot determine details such as skin tone. In this specific instance, I thought of Adam Mansbach's 2005 novel, Angry Black White Boy, a modern nod to Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but about a white cab driver steeped in hip hop culture. When the cabbie starts robbing businessmen at gunpoint, the papers all report that he's black because those robbed don't see their assailant's skin beyond the barrel of a gun and that B-boy affect in his voice. 

I've been told and consoled, "the blind are also colorblind," but Adam Mansbach and Baba Israel show that the sighted can also be blind. Seeing skin tone and ethnicity is a multi-sensory process, and one infused with judgments based on our own experiences—a brown paper bag test that continuously constructs the façade of race. That façade may be a bit more malleable for someone like me who sometimes doesn't see and can't differentiate subtleties in skin pigment, therefore other senses and experiences must play a bigger part: a voice, a narrative, an accent, a gesture, a stance and all other aesthetics coalesce into a picture of personhood, with my mind sussing up said person's culture and then creating some imaginary color that corresponds to it. For Baba Israel, that color was "black"—not the kind in the Crayola 8-pack, but a complex cultural blackness that could also include swaths of "white" (or pink, or beige, or whatever color "Caucasian" is). But at the mention of his own "white skin", the fictitious pigment began to fade and presumed melanin grew thin.

Colorblind? Sometimes. And sometimes just colorblinded by judgments picked up that I can't quite put down, no matter how hard I let go.