Organizing the Blind by Roberto Garvía

Author:Roberto Garvía [Garvía, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367349097
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Prejudices against the blind

Research on attitudes towards the blind shows that since pre-Christian times blindness has awakened a peculiar mix of responses ranging from fear and rejection to admiration and compassion. These attitudes make of the blind both a worse and better person than his sighted fellows.

Two cultural stereotypes, the Tiresias type and the Oedipus type are responsible for these attitudes (Kirtley, 1975, pp. 83–4). According to the Tiresias stereotype,the blind have a sort of supernatural power of second sight, explained by the state of internal reflection caused by their blindness. Though this extrasensory power may make the blind person wise, it does not make him happy, but profoundly melancholic. The blind are special people, gifted by a sort of inner sight that makes them particularly sensitive to the weaknesses, failings and falsehoods of their fellow men. But at the same time, living in a dark realm of shadows, the blind are acutely conscious of the precariousness of life, the vanity of sensual pleasures, the impossibility of happiness and the proximity of the grave. In this guise, the blind evoke feelings of respect and admiration. They are venerable and wise, they have knowledge to impart, and their advice should be sought.4

In the Oedipus stereotype, blindness is a divine punishment, inflicted because the sufferer, or his family, has transgressed, and so cruel that death itself would be preferable. The blind person is worthless, a ‘living corpse,’ someone who can scarcely take a step without stumbling.5 Given the terrible severity of the punishment, he deserves the pity of others. Pitiful, the blind person is also bitter and resentful, someone to be shunned. If he is suffering, it is because of his sins. Even worse, if he was wicked before being struck blind, he will now be all the more so, because he cannot see the suffering he causes and has neither compassion nor gratitude.6

These two stereotypes exist side by side in Western culture, casting the blind as both wise and foolish, kind and cruel at one and the same time (Lukoff, 1981). It is also the case that Western culture sees the blind as the ‘aristocracy’ of the disabled. This ‘privilege’ is due to the pity that blindness awakens, perhaps because of the activation of the Oedipus stereotype or maybe because of the sometimes aesthetic advantage of blindness over other disabilities, which might appear unsightly or repulsive (English, 1977). Be this as it may, in the philanthropy market those organizations that sell the product ‘blindness’ are more profitable than those that seek donations for other disabilities such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, paraplegia or tetraplegia (Kramer, 1972; Kirtley, 1975; Monbeck, 1973; Scott, 1969, pp. 60–1). Not surprisingly, then, in an Italian research on attitudes towards the blind, 56 per cent of respondents thought blindness the most severe of disabilities, even compared to total paralysis or mental deficiency. The respondents’ answers to the questionnaire reflected an apparently objective evaluation of blindness as an ‘illness,’ but a subsequent series of in-depth interviews revealed how deep seated the classic stereotypes and prejudices about the blind actually were.

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