Story Thirty

That time a dude had thoughts about blind people.

What you are about to read is, unfortunately, a piece that ran in the Atlantic. It’s about what some dude who isn’t blind thinks that blind people (or possibly aliens) think. It is worth noting that this author, Graeme Wood, also wrote that article for the Atlantic that referred to Richard Spencer as “nattily dressed,” and that said author went to a private boys’ school in Dallas which is where he met Spencer to begin with. Wood has, at various points, described himself as an intellectual, as someone capable of critical thought, and as a thinker. I have never met Wood. I often thank all the possible gods that I do not frequent the sorts of circles where people discuss which prep schools or universities they attended, because every time I am stuck with those suffocating status-obsessed mid-level minds I have to spend time in my own head thinking things like wait, in that one Don Henley song was the lyric ‘black, black sticker on a Cadillac’ or have I been mishearing it for twenty years while also smiling and nodding politely at some asshole who went to Choate talking about how his trades did today. (Thinking about potentially misheard song lyrics is my standard coping mechanism when I have to control my face, because otherwise when someone says something silly I will laugh at it, which is rude in certain circles.)

The author of the article that I’ll be quoting didn’t include any quotes from blind people. (Which is fine, for an op-ed! First-person pieces are not meant to be strictly factual.) So I called a bunch of blind and blind-ish people to see what they thought of the piece. In the interest of fairness, I’ll include the entirety of the original piece, which was titled “Kamala Harris’s Blue Suit” and was published on July 27, 2022.

The original piece will be in a bold quotation font and commentary from myself and other blind folk will be in italics. God bless us all as we embark on getting through this, the least intellectually stimulating article anyone has ever read.

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Yesterday Vice President Kamala Harris briefly caused a significant portion of the social-media world to think that she was hopelessly liberal or simply out of her mind.

It's really common, I guess, for people to associate any level of inclusivity with being hopelessly liberal. And I don't necessarily think that the out of your mind line is too far out of bounds for someone who's unfamiliar with sort of standard practice when you're around, you know, visually impaired people. But I can see how that might be sort of a strange thing to encounter initially. But a couple of seconds of sort of looking into what was going on there, I think you can arrive at a logical point of why someone would say those things. But I think I think framing it in that way rather than sort of using the article as an opportunity to educate people is not productive at all. —Jordan Cole (he/him)

If I had ever casually talked about Nietzsche in reference to white nationalism I would absolutely go out of my way to define what I was calling “social media.” Like is this Twitter or Facebook or whatever Donald Trump is posting on these days? I’m not saying it’s bad journalism, I’m just saying that in a time of stratified media I would personally choose to be very specific with my opening lines. —Linda Tirado (she/her)

At a recorded roundtable event in the Eisenhower Executive Office building, she introduced herself by saying, “I am Kamala Harris; my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.”

It’s worth knowing that everything that comes after this is about that single sentence. It’s about to be hundreds of words in which we will discuss alien influences and pod people in what we can only hope is a failed attempt at humor. But it’s all about this single sentence. —Linda Tirado, noted reader of essays

Not since Mitt Romney, as a Utah Senate candidate, announced that his favorite meat was “hot dog” has a factual statement made a politician sound so much like she was from outer space.

I think this is off-putting because he's basically calling an adaptation for the disabled equivalent to being inhuman. — @KariDru (they/them)

Man, really? You can’t think of anything since then that sounds a bit weird? From any politician in the US? I mean, I have “known knowns” tattooed on my forearm so Lord knows I love a political throwback joke, but you went with the hot dog gaffe. I mean, it’s Romney, you could have gone with that time he said he was poor in college because he only had dividends to live off of. Or the binders full of women. Or “corporations are people too.” My God, Romney is a font of jokes and you went with the one time he actually meant to be funny? —Linda Tirado, former resident of Utah

Was anyone in the audience unaware of Kamala Harris’s pronouns, and that she is a woman?

Probably not, but we’re not sure, as one can’t prove a negative. That’s why we take half a second out of our days just to clarify. There’s also the fact that it’s super handy for journalists who want to be sure to properly identify people they quote; you know what they say about what happens when you assume. —Linda Tirado, recipient of the John Aubuchon Award

Most puzzling was the end of the clip, where she described her attire for no apparent reason, then flicked her tongue across her eyeball and adjusted her notes with a dorsal tentacle. Okay, I made up that last part.

That is the most amusing and most interesting portion of this article, says a science fiction author. —@Chanter1944, (she/her)

Is this commentary, satire or science fiction? Because Kamala Harris is about 5’2” so you’d think reasonably a dorsal fin would be at 4’ or so, meaning that a dorsal tentacle would need to be be at least 3’ long, but he didn’t articulate whether said tentacle came with jointed ends. Also, it’s always super weird when dudes talk about tentacles because I never know if this is a Cthulhu reference or whether this conversation has now gone fully Hentai. — Linda Tirado, nerd.

On top of the joke not necessarily landing and just generally not being funny… I think it's sort of a reach. If you set me up with a meet-and-greet with Hulk Hogan, I don't necessarily think it would be a requirement for him to describe himself. He has a pretty iconic look. But he also has a pretty iconic voice. The importance of the descriptor, the identifier IS when you are in a room full of people you don’t know and it does become significant. And to act like it isn't is ignoring the experience that I've had [as a blind person] being in rooms full of people that I don't know. —Jordan Cole

As usual, context helps. Harris’s event was held on the anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act and focused on the effect of new abortion restrictions on disabled. One convention meant to accommodate blind and visually impaired audiences is a brief self-description by the speaker. Other speakers at the same event, all putative humans, did the same.

This is not the only part if this article where I thought he was projecting some bigotry. —KariDru,

The fact that he heard this before means that it's an emerging practice developed by the disability community and people were behaving in such a way as to be courteous the wishes of the disability community… or we could be extraterrestrial. It's telling that courtesy appears to be alien to him. It is incomprehensible.- Eric D. Harvey

I heard the same extraterrestrial boilerplate at a Microsoft virtual event that I discussed a few months ago, where the emcee and opening speaker said they were “an Asian and white female with dark brown hair, wearing a red sleeveless top,” and a “tall Hispanic male wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants.” That’s all Harris was doing: giving a quick aid for the blind.

Yes, that’s all Harris was doing. I do not understand why this is a problem? I’ve been confused for the last two decades to varying degrees because whenever someone does something that is harmless but kind, some asshole has to come complain about how they’re being oppressed, like they’ve just somehow seen the violence inherent in the system- Linda Tirado, definitely not an alien

When I was younger, I used to be really insistent that the only thing was wrong with me was my eyes. And this was because people would give me a very hard time and people made assumptions about my intellect. —@KariDru

Self-description is meant to be helpful to those who need it and unobtrusive to others. But to those unacquainted with the practice, it sounds like a failed simulacrum of human speech, the idiom of a pod-person.

I write for a living, so I know a little bit about how sentences are formed. This one is baffling to me, unless I am expected to think of the author as a particularly peevish old man who is annoyed that his favorite corner bar has made a switch between Miller’s and Old-style. Perhaps the joke here is that the author is himself a pod-person attempting what some AI has told him is funny. These sentences do not make sense on their own to anyone with a working sense of human empathy. —Linda Tirado, who makes a killer martini.

I mean, what I think is telling is that in the entire article, he treats blind people as a clever thought experiment rather than as real human beings. And so his characterization of us that they’re simulacrum of human beings is not inaccurate, to his conception overall, in the piece of real life, disabled people. —Eric Harvey

I am sympathetic to efforts to accommodate participation by as many people as possible. One of the arguments for unfamiliar practices like these is that by adopting them, especially at high levels, we make them familiar—so that announcing one’s pronouns, for example, becomes routine and people with unexpected pronouns will therefore feel less bashful when noting them. (I strongly suspect that social change doesn’t work like this, and that speaking in a way that people find off-putting mostly just alienates them from you. But I see the argument.)

I strongly suggest that social change absolutely happens like this, because people who study social change have told us that this is how it happens, and furthermore I suggest that someone who feels alienated by someone saying what color their suit is probably doesn’t have the kind of emotional or intellectual capacity that it would take to fathom how social change works, which leads me to also state that I am supremely disininterested in playing to the lowest common denominator, although it is often worth noting that any progress brings a backlash that is sometimes disproportionate and that we should all be aware that angry people who just wanted to keep drinking fucking Old Style can be erratic, and that further in a nation where basically anyone can get a gun, sometimes being nice means you get shot. -Linda Tirado, ACAB

Similarly, we might thank Harris for pioneering a practice that all decent people will someday adopt, which is giving cursory visual self-descriptions to bring the visually impaired on a level with the sighted. Then again, a blind person might hear “I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit” and conclude that sight is a gift wasted on the vice president.

I feel that he is perhaps accustomed to projecting his opinions on people. —KariDru

Absolutely no blind person would hear someone say what they were wearing and decide “sight is a gift wasted on” them. “Youth is a gift wasted on the young,” that is a bittersweet observation of life that most people will come to understand as they age. It is pithy and tone-perfect and true. “Sight is a gift wasted on the people who describe what they see” is a weird fucking sentiment. -Linda Tirado, pretty pleased for other people who can see well

The statement is true but also insipid. In fact the whole introduction gives the unfortunate impression that Harris thinks the blind are not only visually impaired but so uninformed about politics that they do not know whether the vice president is a woman and whether or not she uses sex-typical pronouns.

That's a word that middle aged men use about little girls. So yeah, I would think I would say that that is infantilizing and that he is also unaware of the degree to which such descriptions fill his life and writing and reading. -Eric Harvey

A fun thing that people do to people who are disabled is get really offended on our behalf about things that are in no way offensive. In this example, someone has concluded that blind people are generally so incapable of social context that we wouldn’t know why people provide pronouns, and find somone doing so to be specifically demeaning to us, even though my nine-year-old was asked what she thought about that one sentence of Harris’s and said “wow that’s cool that she’s being nice to both blind people and queer people!” Now, my rising fourth grader is admittedly more political than most kids her age. But if *she* gets it, it cannot be that terribly complex. The use of pronouns is not as difficult to grasp as, say, synthetic collateralized debt obligations. Also, never say a woman is “insipid” unless you’re referring to a 19-year-old who is an antihero in a Regency romance novel, ideally an evil stepsister. -Linda Tirado, Antihero AND Anti-Facist.

The standard script for these self-descriptions certainly suggests that the blind are into fashion. I can see just fine but routinely forget whether I am wearing pants and am sometimes accused of having dressed myself in the dark; I never notice whether Harris is wearing a suit or dress.

Whereas when I go out I want to look as good as possible. Because I like to look good. It feels good to look good.- Jordan Cole,

I asked a lot of blind people “are you wearing pants right now” and it turns out all of us knew whether we were wearing pants. I’m not sure what the hell is happening in this writer’s world but it isn’t to do with their eyes. —Linda Tirado, currently wearing pants.

I have not forgotten in my life, whether I am wearing pants, and all I can think is must be nice, because if I left the house, wearing no pants, or no skirt or whatever. I would find myself like in a conservatorship by the end of the day. -@KariDru, also wearing pants.

Do most blind people care about these things much more than I do? Does remarking on banal sartorial detail help them? I doubt it. But I should not speculate too much on the views of those with abilities unlike my own.

It is frequently the case that I want to know what other people are wearing so I can get a sense of whether style or fashion is important to them, whether they are dressed to the nines, if this is a big fancy event or whether they're set up a little bit more casual to see where they are relative to how I'm dressed. If I'm going out to dinner, I'll ask my partner or whoever I'm going up with what people at that place might typically be wearing, so that I can get a sense of what I shouldn't put on. —Jordan Cole

Blind people, generally, are not all one person. We have this giant range of talents and interests and yes, sometimes it’ll be something like fashion or art. I am a blind photographer, for example. But what kind of a writer doesn’t understand their own use of metaphor to the point they’d use a phrase like “I should not speculate too much on the views” of BLIND PEOPLE; I’d be so chagrined. It’d be like my writing “I hear that Deaf people don’t have the same abilities as I do” or “It’s often said that people who can’t speak…” Like what was going on there, generally? -Linda Tirado, Pirate.

Depends on our morphing abilities. Can we can we simplify the clothes with our alien skin? I still do have to wear clothes. You don't want the clothes to be an eyesore. You may wish to know what's in fashion. You may want to know the register of clothes a person is wearing in regard to formality or event appropriateness. And you may want to know if somebody is making a daring fashion choice or being very sort of incognito. —Eric Harvey

(In his memoir Deafness, the deaf poet David Wright describes the pleasure of feeling Bach’s Italian Concerto. I would have assumed the deaf didn’t care for music. Now when that piece comes on, I crank the subwoofers up in his honor.)

Oh, he read a memoir. Thank God. -Linda Tirado, memoir writer

The practice of drawing attention to professional women’s clothing also bugs me, for old-school-feminist reasons. I don’t welcome a new practice that asks women to take part in a compulsory fashion show at the start of every meeting. At least in the White House, the burden would fall more heavily on Harris than Biden, who like most presidents wears the same thing just about every day.

Somehow. Somehow, I doubt that “I’m wearing a blue suit,” where all the people at the table similarly self-identified, regardless of gender, qualifies for this dude’s “old-school feminist” critique. (For those of you wondering, the reason this is actually helpful to blind folks is that lots of people aren’t full-dark blind; we have trouble seeing much past fuzzy figures in the distance or perhaps we have to keep our eyes closed in fluorescent rooms until we’ve adjusted; it’s good to know that the voice from the right belongs to someone in blue sitting at the head of the table. -Linda Tirado, photographer of many blue items.

Finally, self-descriptions raise the issue of what we actually use our eyes for—as distinct from what we say we use them for. Here I must confess: When I look at people, the characteristics I note only partly correspond to the ones in their self-descriptions. It seems patronizing to simulate sight by pretending that if the blind could see, they would look with saints’ eyes, rather than assessing others brutally like the rest of us—noting their hotness or ugliness; the expressions that betray intelligence, contempt, contrition, etc.; whether they appear rich or poor; whether they have a naughty or thuggish look in their eyes.

Are you calling people thuggish? Really? The distinction about good people? He is definitely projecting to me and these are not the sort of things you could surmise about someone just by looking at them. —@KariDru

A self-description that did justice to a real feast of visual data would be worth paying attention to. But you’ll never get “Welcome to Microsoft! I am an Indian male, about a six overall, but dressed like I have money. I have pecs that suggest mild ‘roid abuse, and that I’d stomp you if you keyed my Tesla.”

This description radiates racism. —@KariDru

Of course no politician will ever self-describe in any revealing way—and they will instead default to the most reductive categories, namely gender and race. These attributes, along with age—which is, curiously, almost never mentioned in self-description—stick in one’s social memory, and others tend to evanesce. None of us can escape these categories. In self-descriptions, I hear speakers surrender to them preemptively.

No one is going to self-describe or self-report with any level of self incrimination certainly, but it is the case that I have encountered instances of self-description where people say, I am a bigger guy, or I'm a plus size person, or I am a petite woman, whatever it might be where the person does reference things about their body that other people might not find particularly attractive. It will always depend on the person's level of comfort with what they want to reveal. And I also don't want to hear a three minute diatribe on all the things that you do or don't like about your body. -Jordan Cole

If the vice president is going to transgress social norms for a virtuous end, maybe she could do so in a more ambitious way, and share something about herself not trivial. “I’m Kamala Harris. The latest poll says I’m running seventh out of 11 possible contenders for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination. I’m wearing a mask, so, conveniently for me, you cannot really tell how I feel about this.” Now that would be a norm-busting introduction by a politician.

The Atlantic is really dropping the ball. I follow crypto news relatively closely because I think that it's an abhorrent scam and that it is destroying the middle and low class and the working class America in a way that is absolutely just gutless and spineless. And the way that the Atlantic is covering a lot of the crypto shit lately is is is almost like complicit in the crimes. And it's unbelievable, so I wasn't necessarily surprised to see this from them. —Jordan Cole

And so that is our journey through the pain and trauma that is hearing pronouns and also the fact that the Vice President wore a blue suit to a meeting!

I also asked everyone I interviewed the following question: “Are you now, or have you ever been, an alien ?”

No. Although some people might wonder, I can definitely say I have never been an alien. —Justin Yarborough

I am not an alien. I AM an Anarchist though! -@KariDru

You know, I was under the impression that I was human until I read this. —Eric Harvey

I'm trying to come up with a suitable reference here. My designation is Seven of Nine. No, I'm not actually Seven of Nine. If you get that reference here, as nerdy as I am.- @Chanter1944