Replies

Blind Unfiltered is responding to this post, in which I said:

I’m not saying blind people shouldn’t attend to hygene. But claiming that sighted people will assume that all of us are smelly because they met one of us who happens to be is soft bigotry because it assumes that sighted people can’t treat us as individuals.

My response to their original follows.

Yes, it does happen. But where this becomes problematic is when those same sighted people aren’t seen as individuals, like when “if blind people do x thing then sighted people will” is deployed.

To continue this, and to get the necessaries out of the way, I have no doubt that the people cautioning other PWD with this sort of thing have the best of intentions. But either everybody is capable of making a choice to apply the specific to the general, or they aren’t. And assuming that sighted people will apply the specifics of a single interaction to an entire community, even for the sake of trying to improve the actions of others, is a denial of their ability to choose.

And I see it all the time, from this particular discussion about blind people and hygene, to the discussions about the conduct of dog handlers and just about every other discussion being had.

It’s all pretty ironic given the immediate leap to defend anyone accused of ableism and to attack the accusers.

There are absolutely individual sighted people who will assume that one blind person is all blind people. But there are also plenty of sighted people who make a point of not doing that.