Blindness

“Not Seeing, Unseeing, and Blind:” New Article and Blog-Only Bonus Content!

Posted on by Eric Harvey

I have a new article out in the Journal of Biblical Literature (vol. 42 no. 3). The title is “Not Seeing, Unseeing,and Blind: Disentangling Disability from Adjacent Topoi in the Hebrew Bible,” and it is part of a broader research project reassessing the portrayal and metaphorical use of blindness in biblical texts and the ancient Middle East more broadly.

It argues that Hebrew biblical texts have a very limited range of blindness metaphors, and that several texts that have historically been identified as blindness metaphors originally had nothing to do with blindness at all. I structure it around the famous biblical line “they have eyes, but do not see; they have ears, but do not hear!” Variations show up in five different places in the Hebrew Bible, meaning very different things and revealing different aspects of the boundaries of blindness and disability.

IF you want to read it but don’t have institutional access, just let me know.

Bonus Content!

Sometimes, when you write articles for academic journals, they make you stick to the word count and you have to cut out fun tidbits that, while fascinating, don’t really contribute to the argument all that much. But lucky you! Since you read my blog, you get to read about one such little tidbit.

That biblical phrase above? The Bible was not the first to use it. Centuries before any of the biblical texts I discuss were written, it appeared in a Sumerian poem first published in 1977 under the catchy title (The GIR5 and the ki-sikil.”*

This photograph shows the front side of a small clay tablet with the Sumerian elegy written in cuneiform script.

The obverse (front) of tablet BM 24975, which contains the poem in question

[Photo © Trustees of the British Museum]

The ki-sikil is quite clearly a girl or young woman, but the identity of the GIR5 (or KAŠ4, if that’s your style) is more ambiguous. The basic meaning of this term is some kind of runner, messenger, or traveler, but where the young man has gone and why are never clarified. In the first 20 of the poem’s 49 lines, someone tells the young woman to prepare for the arrival of the GIR5.

Then the young woman starts speaking, saying that her GIR5 has arrived, yet not arrived. She says

igi in-tuku igi nu-mu-ni-dug-a 

ka in-tuku inim nu-mu-da-ba-e 

He has eyes, (but) he does not see me.

He has a mouth, (but) he does not speak

(lines 39–40).

As her poetic monologue progresses, it becomes clear that the woman’s GIR5 has not returned alive from his journeys. Scholars are divided on whether the GIR5’s body has been literally returned or is being represented here by a figurine, but in either case the woman proceeds to fulfill the rites of death, mourning, and offerings for those who have gone down to the netherworld.

Just like most of the biblical versions of this line, “The GIR5 and the ki-sikil” uses it to describe something that

  1. has eyes
  2. can’t see
  3. isn’t blind

If the GIR5 is a figurine, it is similar to the litanies of mockery directed at foreign gods in Psalms 115 and 135. IF it is a corpse, it has no biblical parallel and represents a unique usage of this ambiguous and versatile couplet.

I should add that I’m not saying the there’s a direct line of borrowing from the Sumerian elegy to the pre-exilic biblical prophets—a gap of more than a thousand years separates the two. It’s just fun to note that someone had the idea long before the texts that made it famous.

 

*Samuel Noah Kramer, “The GIR5 and the ki-sikil: A New Sumerian Elegy,” in Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of J. J. Finkelstein ( ed. M. de Jong; Hamden, 1977), 139–142.

Book Review: The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland

Posted on by Eric Harvey

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I just finished The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, and recommend it highly!

I’m always a bit leery of blindness memoirs, but this one joins M. Leona Godin’s Their Plant Eyes (2021) as a truly excellent recent entry in the genre.

This one hit closer for me, since Leland’s experience has so many striking parallels with my own. Like me, he has one of the many genetic disorders that get lumped together into the junk diagnosis retinitis pigmentosa, though his vision is shrinking from the outside in while mine is fading from the center out. We both had visual impairments as children, but only had to confront the transition to blindness in our thirties, in the context of career, marriage, and life with young kids.

There were so many sparks of recognition as I read, an eery number of shared experiences. I also sat in those rolling chairs at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary for a visual fields test, wore the Clockwork Orange electrodes on my eyeballs for an electroretinograph, and encountered their strange reticence to inform patients that they had crossed the line to “legally blind.” I received braille training from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, though my teacher was more knowledgeable than his (and stricter about technique).

As Leland described his first experience at the annual convention of the national Federation of the Blind, I was thinking back to my first (and, to this point, only) experience there. Then he mentioned the topic of the presidential address, I realized that he was talking about the same year I had attended. In fact, I show up briefly in the book, unnamed, as one of the scholarship recipients he ignored to focus on a much more interesting conversation with a 10 year old at his table (a decision I do not begrudge!).

But the recognition went far beyond the surface parallels. Many of the questions Leland asks and themes he explores are the same kinds of things I have thought about as I entered into blindness. What will blindness mean for my own identity? For the ways others identify me? I, too, wondered where the point was on this gradual journey where I could legitimately adopt the label “blind.” I struggled with using my white cane in public and the shifts in perception it provoked. I wondered about the changes that screen readers and braille would make to my writing and scholarship. I felt the frustration of reading children’s books more slowly than a first grader.

Questions of blindness and disability in society also gained sudden urgency, and I too left my vaguely benevolent obliviousness to explore evolving frameworks of disability rights, disability justice, and intersectional cross-disability solidarity. I became aware of the care and ingenuity of disabled communities and the creativity and innovation that they apply to the misfits between their bodies and the built environment.

All of these things Leland examines with curiosity and nuance. He can only do so much in a memoir of readable length, but he leaves plenty of breadcrumbs for readers who want more, pointing toward works in disability theory, history, and literature that can provide more depth and detail.

When I was first coming to grips with my own transition to blindness, I made everyone I know read John M. Hull’s memoir, Touching the Rock. It is a movingly written and insightful account of his loss of sight, but the longer I live as a blind person the more I think it gave the wrong impression. Hull emphasizes the negative and the tragic in a way that reinforces the pervasive assumption that blindness is to be feared and pitied.

Leland, on the other hand, presents blindness simultaneously as loss and gain—as a disability that obscures visual knowledge but also brings revelations about self, society, and human possibility. This is much closer to blindness as I have experienced it. Without eliding the difficulty of losing vision and learning new ways of being and living, he makes it clear that blindness is not all loss and not a tragedy.

At this point in my life, I’ve mostly left the liminal state Leland inhabits in the book behind. Blindness is solidly a part of my life, and though practical accommodations and adaptations will continue as the rest of my sight fades, the fundamental shift of identity no longer feels as intense or urgent. Although I have blog posts (and abandoned drafts) aplenty on many of the topics Leland covers, I don’t think a long form treatment of becoming blind is in my future. Now I’m just glad I have The Country of the Blind to recommend to anyone who is curious, and I wish I’d had it years ago!

Audiobooks are Books, Too

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Every so often, some iteration of the same debate pops up somewhere on the internet: does listening to audiobooks really count as reading?

Predictably, this takes the form of one person calling out another because they didn’t really read a book, they just listened to it. Audiobooks, in other words, Don’t “count” in the same way print books do.

Now, I’ve interacted with the written word in a lot of ways—eyes on print, fingers on Braille, and audio red by humans and synthesized by text-to-speech. So I have some thoughts about this. I wrote them out in a massive twitter thread, and a few people asked me to publish it here as well. Here it is (slightly cleaned up and with links to relevant resources).

***

 

First Things: Words and their Jobs

First, let’s take a brief foray into linguistics and acknowledge that words do not have inherent meanings. People use and combine words to create and communicate meaning with others.

As semanticists say, “Words don’t mean. People mean.”

And in different contexts, people use words to mean different things. For the verb “to read,” there are three relevant usages to consider:

  1. reading as an ability
  2. reading as an activity
  3. reading as an accomplishment

To understand the differences and why they matter, we have to think historically. As time passes culture, technology, and lifestyles change in ways that create new communicative needs. Most of the time, these needs are met not by inventing wholly new words, but by adapting pre-existing words by analogy. The process by which this happens is seldom reasoned or systematic, tending rather to be intuitive and incidental.

Tactile writing is only two hundred years old and audiobooks are less than ninety, so it shouldn’t be surprising that our language has not fully adapted to their use. We are recycling the language of older technologies—spoken language and visual writing—to describe these new things and the ways we use them.

In the case of Braille and other tactile writing systems, the analogy with visual writing was clear and straightforward. Both used characters in a sequence to represent language across a page or other flat surface, and both were stable over time. Thus, the adoption of “reading” and “writing” language presented few problems outside of very technical contexts.

(Note—I don’t know if there were debates in the 1800s over whether the verb “to read” could be legitimately applied to Braille. If there were, that would be super interesting and I’d love to see them. In either case, reading quickly became the dominant way of talking about consuming Braille)

Controversy over audiobooks, I think, stems from uncertainty over which pre-existing technology they should be analogized to: printed texts or spoken language. The format is auditory, and thus resembles speech, but books, magazines, newspapers, signs, menus, etc. . are understood as essentially textual entities, which are read.

So in our language, do we privilege the format and delivery method, or the original/essential nature of the content?

The problem is different in each of the three usages of the verb “to read,” because each at its heart is trying to convey different information. Lets consider each in turn:

1) Reading as an ability

Basically, this answers the question “can you read?” In other words, if presented with a given physical object containing text, will you be able to decode its meaning?

There’s a lot to unpack about reading as an ability, but I’m not going to do it here. In this context, I think it’s safe to say that if you cannot read at least one print or tactile script in at least one language, you should not say you can read.

However, that doesn’t get to the heart of the debate or the ways people use the reading/listening distinction to flex on each other.

2) Reading as an activity

This answers the question “what are you doing?” Consider four answers:

  1. “I’m reading a book.”
  2. “I’m listening to a book.”
  3. “I’m listening to an audiobook.”
  4. “I’m reading an audiobook.”

If we imagine ourselves as sticklers who insist that print and audiobooks are so different that they require different verbs, then only the first and third answers make any sense at all. I mean, I suppose I could press my ear to my paperback copy of War and Peace, but I won’t get much out of it).

Now consider another scenario. I am pointing my phone at a large sign. I have the Seeing AI app up and it’s reading any text that comes into my camera’s view. You ask “what are you doing?” Two possible answers:

  1. “I am trying to see what that sign says.”
  2. “I am trying to read that sign.”

Now, you and I the imaginary sticklers know that both of these are absurd. I am not reading, in a literal sense, nor will I ever truly *see* what it says. What I should say is “I am pointing my phone at that sign so it can feed the image into an optical character recognition engine then translate the results into sound using text to speech software so that I can apprehend the information encoded on its surface.”

But the point of the first two answers is not to communicate the sum of their words. They are trying to communicate a more general point: I am trying to get the information from that sign into my head using a newfangled kind of technological mediation.

There are times when we can all turn off our inner literalists and realize that “reading” can be shorthand for getting textual information from a physical object into our heads.

So let’s not be sticklers, ok?

Of course, there may be times when it is important to specify the exact mode and method we used to apprehend some bit of text. This should be done to prevent or correct misunderstandings, but it applies equally to Braille and print.

For example, if a sighted someone asks to borrow your copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you might disappoint them by saying you have it on audio, but they would probably not be thrilled if you dropped off ten massive Braille volumes, either.

And that leads to usage number 3.

3) Reading as an accomplishment

This is where it gets real, because this is where people start adding value judgments and putting each other down.

The pertinent question here is “did you read X?”

I often hear people say things like “you didn’t actually read X, you just listened to it.” What’s the point of saying this? It does more than maintain a procedural distinction, it establishes a hierarchy where reading is superior and listening is inferior. It implies that listening to a book is not an accomplishment in the same way that reading it visually or tactilely is. In some sense, it doesn’t “count.”

The foundations of this hierarchy lie in cultural notions regarding the types of material that are usually conveyed in written and oral form and the relative merits of each. Books, especially, are prestige objects because of their historical associations with education and class privilege. Historical roots notwithstanding, though,, is this hierarchy justified? Is there any inherent superiority to reading words from a page by eye or finger as opposed to hearing them read or synthesized into speech?

It depends on our goals. In my research, I use Braille for close reading (especially in non-English languages) and audio to work quickly through long articles and books. Keeping two lists in my head—one of things I have read in Braille and one of books I have listened to—would be untenable and pointless.

This is because the point of saying I have read something is to indicate that I have interacted with the information it contains and internalized it to some degree. If it could be demonstrated that comprehension and retention rates differed significantly between auditory and visual/tactile book input, then I could be convinced that we should insist on the terminological distinction. But they do not.

Neurological imaging studies reveal that listening to audiobooks activates the same cognitive and emotional regions of the brain as reading print, and tests of comprehension and retention do not show significant differences between audio and print consumption of text.

Additionally, a moment’s reflection reveals that not all visual or tactile reading leads to the same learning. Sometimes print and Braille reading are done with care and attention, and sometimes they are done while unwilling or distracted. I have learned a lot from reading print books and articles, and I have finished others and realized immediately that I could not tell you anything about what I had just read. The same can be said for audio reading. Most often, the returns we get from the time and energy we invest in reading have more to do with our focus and attention than with inherent qualities of the medium or modality.

To my mind, then, insisting on a value distinction between print/Braille and audio is baseless and counterproductive. The value of tine spent reading is in the changes it makes to your base of knowledge and depth of thought. Neither of these result directly or necessarily from the part(s) of your body you use in the process. So as a flex?? To boost your own intellectual achievements and cast doubt on those of others? It doesn’t work and it doesn’t make sense.

To sum up, here are a few takeaways:

Should we learn Braille? YES. I hope nothing I’ve said here implies that I don’t think Braille is important. Learn Braille to the extent that you are physically and neurologically able, because it gives you the opportunity to interact with information in a greater variety of ways in a greater variety of circumstances. Even if all you can do is read bathroom signs and label your medications, that’s better than nothing. And if you gain the fluency to read whole books? Go to town!

But should we enforce the distinction between Braille and audio, relegating audio always to second place? NO. Indulge your curiosity. Read widely in whatever medium is most accessible to you. Expand your perspective with print, Braille, audio, whatever. Don’t be discouraged and don’t be held back. Read read read read read!

And come on, people, if someone says they read a book and you KNOW they listened to the audio, don’t call them out or “correct” them on it. There’s no point to it and it’s not a good look.

Basically, be as precise as you want but don’t try to prove Braille is important by denigrating audio.

Braille is important.

Audio is important.

Nitpicking each other’s language to enforce a baseless distinction between the two is not.

Scholar Strike 1: I Don’t See Color

Posted on by Eric Harvey

“I don’t see color.”

We’ve all heard this line in conversations about race. It is almost a standard response to accusations or insinuations of racism or racial prejudice. It is the mantra of so-called “Colorblind Ideology,” the belief that the best way to end racism is to stop considering race altogether.

The assumption, I guess, is that racism stems directly from the perception of skin color, and simply wouldn’t be possible without it.

I have a problem with this. You see, I don’t see color.

No, but like, literally. I really don’t see color, not real color anyway. Sometimes my visual field pulses with red and blue light, or turns entirely pink for no apparent reason, but those are artifacts of my optic nerve and brain. Colors from the outside world don’t make it inside. Not anymore.

I grew up with color perception, so as a child and young adult I could see skin tone as well as anyone else. But as my vision has deteriorated, I find myself less and less able to tell the color of a new person’s skin. My color perception is nonexistent, and even my ability to tell contrast is greatly diminished. 

Often, I find myself a bit adrift, thinking that some information about someone’s racial or ethnic identity would be useful. So despite being literally colorblind, I cannot deny the importance of race.

But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just used to thinking about race because I grew up sighted. Maybe I’m just missing the visual information that once came so easily. Wouldn’t people who had always been blind be free from concerns about race? Wouldn’t they “not see color” in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense?

Good question., Luckily someone did some research on that.

In his 2015 book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind, legal scholar Osagie Obasogie undertook to discover the link between the visual stimulus of skin color and the social and legal phenomena of racial classification, prejudice, and discrimination.

Obasogie was motivated by the basic question “how do blind people understand race?” (p. 1).

and he is reacting against the naive general assumption that “blind people simply cannot appreciate racial distinctions and therefore do not have any real racial consciousness” (p. 2).

This assumption rests upon a common sense view of race that he calls race ipso loquitor, or “race speaks for itself” (). That is, race is an obvious category that derives directly from salient visual markers such as skin color and physical features. If race is visually self-evident, how important can it be to the blind? In interviews with sighted participants, Obasogie found that most thought race would be irrelevant or unimportant to the way blind people live their lives.

Interviews with blind people showed something quite different.

Obasogie interviewed 106 participants from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds who had been totally blind from birth. Unlike me, they had never had vision and thus had never experienced race as a visually self-evident phenomenon. 

It was striking, therefore, that the blind participants defined race primarily in visual terms. Despite having no direct access to visual information on skin tone and other physical characteristics, most participants initially described race in terms of color, and then supplemented that definition with other factors such as ethnicity, ancestry, geography, and genetics. Some described their attempts to use other other information—accents and speech patterns, hair texture or body odor—as proxies for visual information when trying to ascertain peoples race, but noted also the high error rate in attempts to do so.

Regarding the significance of race, understandings varied more across lines of race than across lines of visual acuity. That is, blind white people and sighted white people had more similar views on race than blind people of different races or sighted people of different races. Most notably, blind white people across the board tended toward a view of “white racial transparency”—that is, they thought of race as something that other people had, not themselves. This view has been characterized as a view of white as the default—a baseline to which “ethnic” attributes are either added or subtracted. Non-white participants, on the other hand, tended to see race as an attribute possessed by and significant to everyone. 

Blind white participants were also the only ones to use discrimination against disabled people (ableism) as an analogy for racial discrimination, and to understand the struggle for civil rights by both racially minoritized and disabled communities as essentially the same. Non-white participants, on the other hand, tended to frame disability and race as two entirely different and separate experiences and identities. As a side, note, this has long been and continues to be a common point of strife in the disability activist community, which skews heavily white and has historically marginalized the voices and perspectives of disabled people of color.

So far, the findings show more similarity than difference between blind and sighted people of the same racial background. This alone calls into question the notion that race visually speaks for itself, since blind people tend to share the same racial identities and assumptions as the rest of their racial group.

This became explicitly apparent when participants were asked to describe how and when they became aware of the existence and significance of race, and how it factors into their everyday living and decision making. Participants told story after story of parents and authority figures who made sure to instill racialized knowledge in blind children and, to some extent, in blind adults as well. 

Sighted children can pick up on racial cues non-verbally, noting in course of regular events the correlation between racial identity and adult attitudes, body language, and types of speech. Blind children cannot correlate behavior with visual features in the same way, and thus did not generally come to awareness of race on their own. Instead, many adults felt compelled to make the implicit explicit—to ensure that blind children receive the racial information that they deem necessary to live within their place in society.

Blind participants recounted common experiences in their childhood, wherein they would meet and converse with someone without knowing their race. Afterward, and adult would inform them of the person’s race and perhaps give cues about whether the person was suitable to socialize with or not. Such experiences reinforced the idea that race was an important marker not only of identity, but also of status.

White parents also made sure to highlight the racial housing segregation that still exists in many cities and towns across the United States. They would inform their child when they would cross over the line dividing white and Black sections of town, emphasizing that Black people lived in separate areas, that the conditions in these areas were inferior, and that these inferior conditions resulted from the inherent shortcomings of their race.

Racial boundaries were drawn and enforced with special vigor when it came to romance, particularly for young blind white women. One participant related a story in which she brought home a picture of her third-grade boyfriend. Her parents looked at it and said “Crystal, he’s colored.” 

Confused, she confirmed that it had been taken with color film.

They then gave her a lecture on race and the unsuitability of Black boys as romantic partners. She describes the potent mixture of bewilderment and shame that she felt, driving her to destroy the photograph and cease speaking to the boy completely.

Quite a few participants reported that these childhood lessons stayed with them and still guided their behavior. Many were uncomfortable dating across racial lines, and made special efforts to ascertain the race of the people they dated before committing. 

Blind people’s experience with race is not a mere curiosity. It cuts to the heart of the illusion that underlies colorblind ideology. It shows that race, though understood visually by sighted and blind alike, is not an obvious or self-evident characteristic. It is not learned by observation, but by implicit and explicit instruction from a very young age.

The example of the blind throws the disconnect between colorblind ideology and social reality into stark relief. The racial distinctions, classifications, and hierarchies that sighted children learn implicitly from observation must be actively and intentionally taught to those who cannot perceive visual cues.

In some cases, parents went to extreme lengths to impress the importance of race on their blind children. Leaning into the apparent impunity with which they could lie about visual matters, they said things that would be amusingly bizarre if they were not so damaging. One mother told her daughter that mixed race relationships would lead to polka-dotted children. A small blind black girl was told she should not bathe with her white friend, because her black would rub off on her. 

As strange as these lies are, they are no more strange than the counterfactual definitions of race we use without question every day. No person has truly black skin, or truly white skin. Skin tones exist along spectra of colors and tones, which do not divide neatly into clear categories. Consider how often people are described as racially ambiguous, or the recent cases of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, two white women who successfully pretended to be Black for years. If race were a self-evident function of skin color, these cases should not be possible.

Race is not color, and color is not race.

Race is a socially created and maintained classification scheme with no defensible biological basis. The social processes that construct and perpetuate racial categories are not straightforward or empirical, but they cast themselves as such. Thus, colorblind ideology manages to hide its social construction behind a veil of straightforward common sense. Race becomes obvious. It becomes what is seen, not what is made and reinforced over centuries of social relationships and representations. 

But this is an illusion. Behind the common sense of racial self-evidence, the social creation and perpetuation of racial divisions and hierarchies continue. Racism cannot be undone simply by not seeing it, or by pretending not to see it. The next time you hear someone say they do not see color, or the next time you are tempted to say it yourself, think of me. Think of those who cannot see color in the most literal sense, but still recognize that they are not exempt from the racialized system in which we live. Race is all of our responsibility, and the first step toward dismantling racial injustice is recognizing its foothold in our minds.

 ***

For further reading on the shortcomings of colorblind ideology, see here and here. Also read Part Two of Obasogie’s Blinded by Sight and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

 

For further reading on the experience of blind people of color, see this recent piece by Anil Lewis: Being Black Helped me be Blind and Being Blind Helped me Realize that #BlackLivesMatter.”

Music and Blindness in Babylonia: New Piece on the Disability History Association Blog

Posted on by Eric Harvey

This is just a quick notice that a piece I wrote was just published on All Of Us, the peer-reviewed blog of the Disability History Association.

Don’t worry, though, there will be new content here soon! I’ve been writing and planning a few posts for the coming weeks and months, and should be posting them here in the next few days. In the mean time, check out the article, The Songbird: Linking Music and Blindness in Ancient Babylonia.

My Year in Books: 2018!

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Picture: A collage composed of the covers of many books i read in 2018

Continuing the tradition I began last year, I’ve decided to celebrate the increasing availability of books to the blind by sharing my full 2018 reading list, with some of the best and most meaningful given special comment.

In 2017 I read 59 books, and thought I might have to slow down. So of course in 2018 I read 67 books! Many of them were meaningful and formative, and I struggle to narrow down the list to recommend just a few. Below are some notable works in no particular order, followed by the rest of my reading list.

Top Picks

Fiction

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy by Cixin Lio (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s En)

This imaginative, thinky trilogy is quintessential speculative fiction for super nerds. If you like your novels pumped chock full of wonky physics and written in a non-Western cultural idiom, these books are for you. 

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky)

I thought I had lost the taste for straight fantasy, but then I read this series by N. K. Jemisin. The world she builds here is spectacularly creative, and she delves deep into some very real and very rough parts of human nature. There’s a reason she’s just become the first author to win the Hugo award three years in a row (once for each of these books)—you won’t regret reading them. 

Non-Fiction: Race, Society, and Inequality

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

A detailed and masterfully-argued examination of the changing face of racial discrimination in America. Writing at the height of the Obama era, when many Americans were heralding the onset of a post-racial society, Alexander revealed their optimism to be largely unwarranted. Discrimination is still rampant, though it now adopts subtler and less explicit means than slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Alexander shows how the construction of an unnecessarily punitive and differentially-applied justice system has effectively created a new iteration of the same old racial caste system—exploiting Black Americans for free labor, diminishing their economic prospects, and reducing their access to voting and other rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. All of this goes on within a culture of nominal colorblindness, a thin veneer of propriety and unbiased objectivity that peels away under Alexander’s relentless scrutiny.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

This book is dizzying in its scope and utterly surprising for many who learned a sanitized version of American history in school. Kendi defines three strains of thinking on race and traces them across four centuries through the life, work, and context of five paradigmatic American thinkers: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis. Each of these individuals exhibits one or (more often) more than one of Kendi’s three strains of thought: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. Kendi does an excellent job of showing how racist ideas were created and perpetuated to justify exploitative economic practices, as well as how the particular expressions of those ideas changed and adapted to new cultural, legal, and economic context. Racist thinking has changed, but never disappeared from American life.

I have a few residual questions about the nature and scope of Kendi’s assimilationist category, but they do not diminish the overall value of the book. This book would pair well with Paul Ortiz’s An African-American and LatinX History of the United States  or Karen Fields’ Racecraft, mentioned below.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

The world of big-money philanthropy operates under the assumptions that market solutions provide the best hope to rectify societal ills and that it is possible to become extremely wealthy in a way that also benefits society as a whole. Long an insider to this world, Anand Giridheradas has become disillusioned with these beliefs and argues effectively against both in this incisive book. He questions the basic premise that one can “do well by doing good,” that every problem has a win-win solution that allows for both the reduction of inequality and the accumulation of fabulous personal wealth. Instead, he urges the creation of more democratic and more egalitarian institutions and social structures to combat growing inequaltiy and the worsening prospects faced by many Americans. 

Non-Fiction: Bible

Womanist Midrash by Wilda C. Gafney

Gafney combines rigorous scholarship and imaginative storytelling in this quest to rediscover important female characters of the Hebrew Bible. She provides fresh and well-argued interpretations of the text and explores the evocative importance of its gaps and holes. This welcome and challenging contribution honestly probes the concerns and perspectives of biblical women, addressing in the process a host of neglected questions that will benefit all readers and interpreters.

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity by Eva Mroczek

The Bible was not always the Bible. Before the diverse texts we now call biblical were gathered into one binding, each of them had a life of its own (and some more than one). They existed alongside and together with a vast library of other writings—some were lost to history and others survived in non-biblical contexts. How did people think about these texts before there was a Bible, before there were even books? Mroczek approaches that question with clarity and creativity, suggesting a number of productive metaphors that can guide our thinking about the Bible before there was a Bible.  

Nonfiction: Blind Lit

Crooked Paths Made Straight: A Blind Teacher’s Adventure Traveling Around the World by Isabelle D. Grant

Dr. Isabelle Grant was a Scottish-born Los Angeles schoolteacher who was forced out of her job after she went blind as an adult. So of course she embarked on a trip around the world with her cane and Braille typewriter. Alone. In the 1950s. She visited five continents and many countries to observe and assess the quality of education for blind children, encouraging teachers and authorities to invest in blind youth and improve their self-sufficiency and self-determination.. Her intelligence, good humor, and openness to new ideas and relationships make for a delightful and surprising read. Foreword by Debbie Kent Stein, who found this manuscript decades after it was written and saw it through to publication. 

Non-Fiction: Personal Growth & Effectiveness

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris

A master class in humility. Tavris digs deep into wrongness—why it’s inevitable, why we have trouble recognizing it, and why we avoid doing anything about it. The process is so universal and so relatable that you can’t help but begin to recognize unwarranted certainty and misplaced confidence in your own life and thinking. Everyone should take the lessons of this book to heart.

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

This book can help address some of those pernicious human problems described in the last entry. Duke applies her experience as an international poker champion and Ph.D. in psychology to the problem of making good decisions in an uncertain world. Excellent theoretical frameworks as well as practical tips. Let’s all work on thinking better!

French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered Ten Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon

A much more nuanced book than the title implies. I found it extremely helpful—not for definitive answers, but for opening up new avenues of thinking about food and food education within the family. French parents consider good eating a crucial skill to be acquired, and teach it as intentionally as reading, writing, or math. They do not consider children’s tastes to be immutable, but condition them by repeated exposure to and discussion of healthy and diverse foods. A great read for parents of young children trying to escape power struggles over food.

The Rest of the List

  • The Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time)
  • You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith by David Kinnaman
  • How to Write Short: Wordcraft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark
  • So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
  • Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
  • How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation by N. J. Enfield
  • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  • R. J. Rommel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions, edited by Nils Petter Gleditsch
  • Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey
  • An African-American and LatinX History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
  • Can We Talk About Race? and Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong
  • Rethinking Expertise by Harry M. Collins
  • God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says by Michael D. Coogan
  • Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
  • Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein
  • Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein
  • Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just by Timothy J Keller
  • The Formation of the Jewish Canon by Timothy H. Lim
  • Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary F. Marcus
  • What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker
  • The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
  • Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich
  • People of Vision: A History of the American Council of the Blind by James Megivern
  • Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
  • The Anne Shirley Series by L. M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside)
  • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  • Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love by Rob Schenck
  • What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel
  • Manhood: How to be a Better Man or Just Live with One by Terry Crews
  • Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
  • How the Bible Became Holy by Michael L. Satlow
  • The Akata Witch Series by Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch and Akata Warrior)
  • The Blind Doctor: The Jacob Bolotin Story by Rosalind Perman
  • Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
  • Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance by Tom Digby
  • On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields
  • How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley
  • Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind by Osagie Obasogie

What is the best book you read in 2018? Leave a comment and help me build my 2019 reading list (as if it isn’t 20 books deep already)!

White Cane Awareness Day!

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A photo of me and my daughter walking on a sidewalk. I am carrying my white cane and we both have umbrellas, even though the rain has stopped.

Today is White Cane Awareness Day, a day to celebrate a tool that, despite its simplicity, remains one of the most powerful for independent living and travel among the blind.

I got my first cane in 2015. It came with my Orientation and Mobility training, provided free-of-charge by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when I registered as legally blind. I will always be grateful that I went blind in Massachusetts, because the state-run Commission for the Blind provides excellent services and training for blind residents who want to keep working or re-enter the workforce. They gave me assistive technology and Braille instruction before I even needed them, so that I would be prepared when I did. 

Also there, and also before I needed it, I received training in proper cane technique—when I’m in motion the cane is in motion, skimming the ground or tapping in front of my hind foot. I learned how to make sure an area was clear before I stepped up or down a curb, and how to navigate staircases, using my cane to sense the beginning and the end. I learned how to read the traffic patterns so I could gauge when it was safe to cross, and how to aim so I would end up on the sidewalk instead of the middle of the intersection.

 I walked for miles through the chilly autumn air, wearing a blackout blindfold. My instructor followed a few steps behind, sometimes offering correction or advice, but mostly letting me find my own way using my cane, my ears, and my memory as guides.

It was challenging, sometimes frustrating, but I’m glad I got that training when I did. 

In 2016 we moved to California, and the cane didn’t leave my bag for a year. It’s not only that I avoided using it. I knew our neighborhood and felt safe enough walking most places without it.

But throughout that year I had the growing realization that I should probably start using it more often, especially at night and in crowded places. Yet that thought also filled me with that potent mixture of pride and fear familiar to many of us who are losing our sight. It is one thing to learn how to use a white cane; it’s quite another to need to use it.

In 2017, I wrote a long reflection on the emotional struggle, the pride and fear that keep us from carrying canes and the reality of prejudice and discrimination that justify that fear.  It is hard to so openly wield this signal of blindness, especially since most of us have tried for years to hide our fading sight from others.

But pragmatism has won out, as it usually does. Over the last year, my cane use has gradually increased. I carry it most of the time now, outside the house and a few short routes nearby. I wouldn’t imagine going somewhere new and unfamiliar without it. 

In many ways, it’s surprisingly comfortable. I’m sure people stare, as Kristin pointed  out last year, but I don’t notice that. Mostly I notice the stress that it removes from my walk, since I don’t have to stay on high alert for trees and people that materialize in front of me, or obstacles that leap from nowhere into the path of my shins.

My three-year-old daughter takes it in stride. Sometimes she tries to take it in hand, too, but I think we’ve mostly broken her of that habit. She knows it’s “daddy’s stick” and asks for one of her own. I might buy her one.

There are a few funny things. If I’m walking with friends and take my cane out, they often start giving me tips and information about the environment.

“There’s a curb coming up.”

“Trash can on your right!”

It’s ironic, because I took the cane out to get exactly the sort of information they are now providing. It’s like the cane primes them, reminds them that I’m blind, and prompts them to offer advice, just when I stop needing it. 

Every year, I’m sure the cane will become more comfortable, more indispensable, a more natural extension of my arm and my sensory field. My white cane is part of my life now, necessary for the basic functions of life. When I think of it these days, I don’t fear the message it broadcasts to the world; I simply appreciate its utility and the freedom it brings.

I know that the cane is still a marker of my blind identity, and that that identity will certainly create difficulties for me in this life, but that’s not the cane’s fault. It’s just doing its job.

Happy White Cane Day, everyone! 

Dark Side of the Cure, Part Three: Those Left Behind

Posted on by Eric Harvey

(This is Part Three of a series. Start with Parts One and Two, if you haven’t read them already)

Photo of five blind hikers on a mountain trail with a slope upward on one side and a steep dropoff on the other.

Photo Credit: Volker Corell

“Better never means better for everyone,” he said. “It always means worse, for some.”

So goes the Commander’s famous self-justification in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, as he tries to defend the brutal social and political order his party has created. 

Now his is a pretty extreme dystopian case, and maybe invoking The Handmaid’s Tale is a bridge too far for this post, but that quote keeps bouncing around my head as I write this series, and it seems appropriate.

Curing blindness will make the world better, right? That’s why we’re doing it, right? 

Well, maybe. I’ll leave the more ambiguous parts of that question for the next post, but first we have to consider the unambiguous part—those who will get no benefit from a cure for blindness, and those who will actually be harmed.

So who suffers from the quest to cure blindness? The blind.

I’m not talking about the ones who get a cure; I’m talking about the ones who don’t. No matter how many causes of blindness we can cure or prevent, there will always be others we can’t. Injury, genes, disease, stroke—some variation or combination of these will always exist and cause blindness for some. We may decrease the number of blind people, but the truth is, the fewer there are, the harder their lives will become.

***

Let’s face it, for most of human history, life has not been kind to the blind. Prior to the 20th century, the two most common occupations for blind people were 1) begging and 2) nothing. There were some lucky few, fortunate enough to be born into wealthy families or supported by benevolent institutions, who could live well and developed their potential, but these were exceptions to the rule.

As a class, the blind still struggle, but their lot has gotten better. In the 19th century, Braille brought literacy to blind people in a way that had been impossible before, and in the 20th mobility aids like white canes and guide dogs opened up new possibilities for independent travel. In the same time period, a few forward-thinking schools for the blind shifted their approach from seclusion and protection (or seclusion and exploitation) to education and development.

But perhaps the greatest change has come through self-organization. In 1940, a group of blind people founded the National Federation of the Blind, the first education and advocacy group created and led exclusively by blind people, instead of just for them.

Nowadays there are three main organizations of the blind in the United States—the National Federation of the Blind, the American Council of the Blind, and the Blinded Veterans Association—and there are many more internationally. These organizations have different specific cultures and interests, but they all share one important feature: their leadership are all blind. 

These organizations understand the potential of blind people in a way that others never could and can advocate for their interests in a way that others never would.

The growth of the Organized Blind Movement, as it is called, was a turning point in the history of the blind. It allowed blind members of society to resist and transcend the paternalism and custodialism that characterized charities for the blind at their best, and the outright seclusion and exploitation that showed up at their worst.

This movement required a critical mass of blind people with the skill, knowledge, and motivation to form and administer alliances of their own. Blindness is a low-incidence condition, and many people (the blind included) do not regularly encounter blind people in their daily lives. Self-organization appeared in places where there were higher concentrations of blind people, and the effectiveness of these organizations has grown as more have heard about and been attracted to the movement.

It goes without saying that these organizations would be less effective if there were fewer blind people to join, run, and fund them, and fewer blind people advocating for their own interests.

So what lesson should we take from this? We can’t just call a halt to medical research so we can fill the ranks of our advocacy groups. We can’t deny people a cure based on the fear they will leave us behind.

But we can acknowledge the real cost that can accompany even good things, and we can listen to the concerns of those who foresee their own marginalization.

We cannot and should not stop the research, but we can strive to make sure that progress for some will not mean a return to the past for the rest—those who are, those who will remain, and those who will become blind

And maybe then, better can mean better for everyone.

Dark Side of the Cure, Part Two: Mixed Messages

Posted on by Eric Harvey

(This is Part Two in a series. If you haven’t read Part One already, you should)

 

A photo collage featuring images of blindfolded people from the How Eye See It campaign.

In the last post, I described how spending my time hoping for a cure crowded out and actually worked against me pursuing my other hopes and ambitions.

It doesn’t just work that way for people, though. 

The same thing happens on a societal level, when the quest to cure blindness takes place at the expense of those who are already blind. 

This might seem counterintuitive, so I’ll give an illustration. A few years ago, a non-profit organization launched a fundraising campaign called #HowEyeSeeIt, which has since become infamous in the blindness community.

 The goal of this campaign was to create a viral video sensation—kind of like the Ice Bucket Challenge, which raised so much money for ALS research. Instead of just doing a silly gag, participants were supposed to film themselves trying to do a basic task while blindfolded. Suggestions included making and eating lunch, doing household chores, or caring for your children.

But why would people watch the videos? Because it would create a spectacle, an amusing showcase of inept bumbling.

Blindfold yourself and make a mess of things—just like real blind people!

And why would people donate? Because participating would convince them of just how impossible it is to do anything without using their sight.

Blindfold yourself, and learn how unbearable it is to be blind!

Fortunately, the campaign never went viral, which is why you’ve probably never heard of it. Unfortunately, the other part does seem to be true. Blindfold simulations do make people more afraid of blindness and less confident in blind people.

A study by Dr. Arielle Silverman (herself blind) showed that participants in blindfold simulations actually leave with a lower opinion of blind people. From a blog post summarizing the research (the entire post is worth reading if you have time):

In one part of the study, after simulating blindness by having their eyes covered, participants believed people who are blind are less capable of work and independent living than did participants who simulated other impairments like amputation, or had no impairment.

In another part of the study, participants who were blindfolded said they would be less capable if they personally became blind and slower to adjust to their new world compared with study participants who weren’t blindfolded.

But isn’t it good that they’re learning what it’s like to be blind? Won’t it make them more considerate and sensitive to the needs of blind people? It would, if simulations really showed what it’s like to be blind. But they don’t. They only show what it is like to be blind with no education, skills, or experience.

It’s true that losing your sight can be scary and disorienting. But with education, skills training, and lifestyle adaptations, blind people can—and often do—live confident and fulfilled lives. The power of skills and experience cannot be communicated in a fifteen minute exercise, and participants leave with half the story.

The #HowEyeSeeIt campaign is just one example, of course, and most fundraising efforts aren’t quite so demeaning to the people they aim to help. But this one example reveals a fundamental question that looms over any effort to cure blindness: is it possible to respect the dignity and capability of people who are blind and still maintain the same urgency to find a cure?

For many blind people, thees two ideas exist in tension. Efforts to prevent or cure blindness are essentially good, but at the same time no cure is necessary to make life happy or worthwhile.

So go on, fundraisers, search for a cure. Just don’t frame it as the only hope for blind people. Don’t exploit sighted people’s fear of losing their sight. Don’t perpetuate false and frightening images of blindness. Don’t reinforce the low opinions and low expectations that have plagued the blind since time immemorial, because these burdens weigh much more heavily on the blind than blindness itself.

Low opinions and low expectations deny education when the students are apt and eager to learn.

They deny jobs when the skills are sufficient.

They deny a voice to those who are capable of understanding and advocating for themselves.

They deny the blind full inclusion and integration into society.

Prejudice and patronization are maladies that plague society, as real and as harsh as blindness itself. Any quest that seeks to cure blindness without also curing these is incomplete at best, destructive at worst. Let’s not pit these problems against each other. Let’s work on curing them both.