How to Benefit from Sighted People’s Ignorance

Three stories about when you don’t actually need to fight for equality

Listen to me read this post on the Deep Sy podcast.

1. Security Breach

For a few years after law school, I worked at a federal courthouse. Each morning, I climbed the broad, Roman-style staircase, walked past statues and columns, went through one of the many doors, and entered the marble lobby with several-story-high ceilings and enormous murals. I wore suits and felt important.

Because I was an employee, I skipped the metal-detector line, approached the court security officers’ desk, and swiped my ID Badge on one of the sensors fixed to the top of several pylons. Every day, without fail, I forgot to take the badge out of my bag as I approached the front doors and stopped to fish for it right in front of the pylons. I was not the only person who did this. But a couple weeks into the job, the security officers waved me through the moment I went to get the badge.

“Don’t worry about it, sir. Go ahead.”

There was no one behind me, and no need to rush.

“Oh no it’s fine, I got it,” I said casually with a small smile as I found the badge.

I knew the moment I had this little interaction that it would happen again every morning for the next couple days, if not weeks. It’s a familiar pattern. Someone I interact with on a regular basis wants to be nice and make things easier on a blind person, so they offer to let me skip something others are required to do. I’m capable of doing whatever the thing is, and they probably know that. But they think I shouldn’t have to do it anyway.

Why? Not having to do something like take out an ID badge is a negligible convenience. It doesn’t matter. But it will become a constant reminder that people think of me as different than everyone else in some significant way and they should therefore treat me differently. It’s condescension. A tiny condescension, but I know from experience that if you let those go, they can add up quickly. And most of them, I can’t do anything about. So I try to get rid of them when I can.

As usual, the sheer tininess of this situation presented a problem. The convenience they were offering me was so small. Swiping an ID badge every day when the court officers know who you are is a little silly anyway. Just skip it; it’s fine. This is certainly not the kind of thing anyone needs to go getting all principled about. I couldn’t explicitly ask the officers anything like, “Why do you think I should be the exception to the rule here?” without a significant risk that they would feel uncomfortable or insulted. My casual, “I got it,” and my smile, they were there to give no opening for any reaction other than mild pushback followed by acquiescence. I was implicitly accepting the unspoken premise that this was all no big deal. I was no-big-dealing right back at them. I did this every morning until they stopped saying anything.

“But, wait, Sy, couldn’t you have solved this whole problem by just pulling the badge out ten seconds earlier and swiping before they had the chance to say anything?” you ask, reasonably.

No. That was not possible. That would have involved convincing my drowsy morning brain to disengage commuter autopilot. I knew from experience that was absolutely never going to happen. Certainly not on a consistent, daily basis. I was going to black out a few steps outside my apartment door every day and emerge from the fog standing right in front of those pylons. There was no avoiding that.