Why Using ‘Blind’ Figuratively Is a Bad Idea

We’re all just a flash mob at a funeral

Hear me read this post on the Deep Sy podcast.

The Parable of Jake

Imagine a funeral. A man gets up to eulogize his father, Jake. He says his dad was a good man, beloved by his family and community. The mourners cry and laugh at stories reminding them of Jake’s multifaceted character, his trials and accomplishments, his hobbies and passions.

Then someone from the crowd yells out:

“Hey, remember when that scammer got all Jake’s money?!” The yeller is chuckling.

The son looks pained and taken aback.

“Yeah,” says the yeller, still laughing. “A guy called and said he was from the ‘American Bank of the USA’ and needed your dad’s bank info, and Jake gave it all to him!”

“Uh, okay, let me finish the eulogy. We aren’t looking for stories from the crowd,” says the son.

“He lost like all your inheritance!!!” screams the yeller, now slapping his knees.

“Sir, everyone here is quite sad and that’s a painful memory—”

“I’ve been making memes about it,” shouts the yeller.

“What?”

“Yeah, they’re doing really well online. A lot of people know your dad now.”

“I, I think you should leave.”

“For a lot of people, Jake basically means gullible twit,” continues the yeller, unabated. “It’s like his whole legacy for most people.”

“That’s horrifying,” says the son.

“Merriam-Webster reached out this morning. They’re going to add ‘Jake’ as a noun that means ‘dupe, especially one who loses his family’s wealth to a particularly obvious or untalented swindler.’”

“But he was so much more than that,” says the son, helplessly.

“Not anymore,” notes the yeller. Then he shouts, “Hit it!” and about a third of the people in the room form a flash mob, doing a choreographed dance to an Ol’ Dirty Bastard parody, singing, “Jakey lost all your money, all your money.”

Using “Blind” as a Figure of Speech

The parable of Jake (which shall be retold for centuries to come) helps us think about how people use the word “blind” as a figure of speech (though I’ve also spoken on this esteemed publication’s podcast about how the literal use of the word is also up for debate).

The usual turns of phrase are familiar and numerous: “going in blind,” “flying blind,” “blind faith,” a “double-blind study,” “turn a blind eye,” “blind panic,” “blinded by ambition/greed/love/rage/etc.,” to “blindside” someone with news, “the blind leading the blind,” and many more.

From this mountain of linguistic horse turds, we see which characteristics people most commonly use blindness to illustrate. A metaphorically blind person is: uninformed, unaware, ignorant, willfully ignorant, foolish, reckless, incompetent, unable, vulnerable, or immoral. These comparisons follow naturally if you primarily think of blindness in terms of a disability — if the whole of a blind person boils down to a lack of vision.

When I’m walking down the street, the “flying blind” school of thought zeros in on the fact that I can’t see the street signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, or a Google Map. Blindness is a lack of critical information. Perhaps even an outright danger because I can’t see where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

I, on the other hand, focus on the countless ways I can use my hearing, white cane, navigation apps, or accessibility features built into the environment like rumble strips on curb cuts or accessible crossing signals. Plus, I have all sorts of random tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years from other blind people. Moreover, I have all that because of countless blind teachers passing along knowledge, blind programmers making accessible apps, blind organizers creating and enforcing policy, and regular blind people maintaining the blind social organizations where those efforts incubated and developed. I also know all these people have worked against incredible odds. So, to me, blindness is inventiveness, curiosity, patience, persistence, courage, and a frankly colossal amount of stubbornness, just as much as it is an inability to see.

Stop Sharing the Yeller’s Memes

People who use blindness symbolically (nearly everyone in existence, including, sadly, me for quite some time) are the people reposting the yeller’s memes about Jake. They are the flash mob. Their understanding of blindness is solely and exclusively — to the point of absurdity — one aspect of the experience, the one that is most obvious and definitional to outsiders. And they’re spreading that narrow way of thinking. Blind people be damned. Jake means dupe. Blind means ignorant. Anyone with a different view is too irrelevant to be taken seriously.

So what do I want, practically? Stop using blindness figuratively.

That’s all. Truly. I don’t need performatively enlightened people horseshoeing “blindness” into conversation as a synonym for “inventiveness” or “courage” (“When you stood up to that bully, it was so blind of you”). You don’t need to “reclaim” the word. I’m not trying to deplatform people using “blind” the “wrong” way. Both because I think fights over consequences for vocabulary choices usually distract from substantive conversations, and because I don’t want testosterone pill-guzzling First Amendment bros jumping down my throat.

All I want you to do is stop. Use “blind” literally and otherwise leave it alone. The only alternative is to insist that your take on blindness must be so universally agreed upon that it continues to infuse our language forever. And you must insist on this even though it doesn’t benefit you in any material way, you lack experience with blindness, and you will have to ignore or suppress any blind person’s self-understanding that differs from your view.

You probably have used “blind” as a figure of speech in the past without thinking about any of this. That’s what I did for most of my life. I’m not worried about how it started. I’m saying that now you should stop. You should start stopping.

Does that maybe mean thinking a little bit harder when you talk to come up with phrases that don’t occur to you as easily? Might you have to question your love for some song, or poem, or movie? Could some creatine-slurping free-speech absolutist make fun of you while he looksmaxxes his face with a hammer?

Maybe. But it’s that or keep singing the flash mob’s song about how blind people are careless, ignorant dipshits.

Your call.

Welcome to year two of Deep Sy! If you missed my post on Monday with what I was writing during my time off, it’s here. Thanks for sticking with me!