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.
For over a year, my plan worked. I walked through security each morning knowing I had created this little bit of space, this room to breathe, by eliminating pointless condescension toward my disability. It was a nice reminder of the power I have to insist on equal treatment and make my day that much better.
Then I lost the badge and found out they were going to charge me like $35 or something ridiculous to replace it. So the next morning, I put on a little performance.
I walked in the front door, stopped by the pylons, reached in my bag, and furrowed my brow.
“Huh…” I said, perplexed, as I felt around all the sections of my bag. Then I started touching all the pockets of my suit.
“Hey guys, sorry, I can’t seem to find…”
“No problem, go ahead,” said one of the guards.
“Oh, really? Thanks so much,” I replied.
The next morning, I crossed my fingers, and walked right past the security desk without pretending to search.
“How’s it going?” I asked casually.
“Fine, sir. Have a great morning.”
Safely on the elevator up to my office, I allowed myself a smirk. I was happy they were, after more than a whole year of me insisting on independence, still ready to be condescending. Hopefully, they had spent the year thinking I was prideful, and I had now, finally, come to my senses.
Do you think this is hypocritical of me—that I would sell out my principles for such a low sum? Well I’m going to double down for a couple more stories before explaining myself.
2. Holding Hands
In high school, I and a friend, who I’ll call Dan, went to a concert. We were standing outside the venue waiting for the doors to open. The venue staff were running quite late, and a crowd had gathered outside. Dan needed a restroom. After a while, he decided to go find one rather than continuing to hope they would let us in soon. Predictably, the doors opened almost as soon as he was gone, and I was stranded.
This was a very awkward point in my experience of blindness. Until I was 15, I had low vision, but could get around alright without a white cane. My vision started degenerating during the fall of my sophomore year of high school. I often couldn’t navigate independently anymore, especially not in a dark, unfamiliar concert venue. But I wasn’t using a cane yet for a number of (bad) reasons I’ll get into in a future post. So I wasn’t going inside until Dan got back. Or so I thought.
Among the people waiting to go in were many kids from my school. As the crowd started pressing toward the building, a hand grabbed mine.
“Come on, Sy, we’re going in!” said a girl’s voice, excited the event was finally starting.
Normally, I can’t stand it when people take my hand. Someone tries it about once a week. I know they’re trying to help. The intent is good. But grabbing a person’s hand to guide them somewhere is what you do with a toddler. It’s also not as practically helpful as what blind people typically prefer, grabbing our guide’s elbow or shoulder, which gives us a better tactile sense of where they’re going. Another advantage to elbows is they eliminate the temptation, apparently pervasive among people holding our hands, to yank us around like a dog on a leash.
So I always refuse hand-holding. I believe people shouldn’t assume they know what kind of help I need without asking. I believe people should respect my bodily autonomy and refrain from using my disability as an excuse to grab me without consent. And I believe that speaking up about this consistently over time will multiply respect for disabled people, making a real difference in my community.
Except when I don’t care about any of that.
The girl holding my hand happened to be one of the prettier and more popular girls in my grade. So, the options were: 1) wait for Dan, who might have a hard time finding me inside if I left, 2) tell this girl, “Thanks, but I really prefer taking your elbow,” or 3) walk into this concert among lots of kids from school holding a pretty girl’s hand.
“Hope to see you in there, Dan,” I thought as I walked in, saying nothing about elbows.
By the way, remember in my post about going to punk shows while blind when I accidentally burned a hole in a friend’s shirt? That was also Dan. Poor Dan…
3. Garbage People
I frequently have to ask sighted people where I can throw away garbage when I’m out in public. It doesn’t matter who I ask or where in the world I am. Almost 100% of the time, the sighted person says, “Oh no worries, I’ll get it,” and takes whatever I’m holding.
I don’t usually like it when someone insists on doing something for me I could do for myself. Especially when they could easily enable me to do it by just answering my question and telling me where a garbage can is. This is patronizing in the same tiny way as the court officers. It’s that helpful, well-intended assumption that I will gratefully welcome any favor from a sighted person, even if I didn’t ask for it.
But this particular favor I never protest. And there’s a simple reason. I get a kick out of the fac that every sighted person in the world is my own personal trash butler. I can hold out any random piece of junk to any random person and ask, “Where does this go?” not remotely caring about the answer because I know where it goes: in their hands. What happens after that is not my concern. When the rare person actually tells me where a trash can is, I can mutter under my breath, “It’s hard to find good help.”
Have You No Integrity, Sy?
So what do these stories represent if not a willingness to instantaneously abandon my values for the smallest personal benefit?
Fortunately for me (and my mental health), I do not consider it my responsibility to convince everyone in every moment and every circumstance that my view of how blind people should be treated is better than theirs. That would be tiring. And my daily interactions with the sighted people whose understanding of blindness is, in fact, worse than mine are already tiring. So when I face one of the comparatively rare opportunities when people’s ignorance grants me a benefit, you bet I’m gonna take it.
You know what added a little sense of satisfaction to my humdrum commute as a young lawyer? Repeatedly waltzing into a federal courthouse against security protocol, saving $35 in the process. Are we really going to get mad at teenage Sy who, in the midst of navigating high school and vision loss, decided to ditch his friend for a minute to hold a pretty girl’s hand? And if I want a virtually infinite, ever-present army of trash butlers, then damn it, I deserve one.
When it comes to the daily work of changing how people interact with disabilities, why don’t you take on some of the work? Give me a break. And take this empty coffee cup while you’re at it.