ello ello, people. Wellcome back to the blog more reliably unreliable than your dad’s milk runs. In this here post I’d like to propose the many a times asked question that plagues most of us blind people, *ha’y clinton*, on the dayly. Why is it so hard to make a sighted friend?
Now, growing up I would often let my mind race between theories: Maybe it’s because of how I look. Or how I act. Or how dependent on others I seemed. But I think after many an hour of deliboration I’ve come to the verry subjective opinion that it all comes down to 1 reason.
We don’t try to integrate with them, and they don’t try to integrate with us. It’s a pretty common fact within both communities that our cultures are vastly different. The games we play, the experiences we had growing up, even the ways we use a phone/computer. All vastly different, but at the same time, surprisingly similar. Realistically, there’s nothing stopping a blind person from going out and learning the lure behind a genre of music, or a video game. Most of us abstain from the ladder, however, because where’s the fun in learning about a game you’ll never be able to play?
similarly, there’s nothing stopping a sighted person from going down a rabbithole at the bottom of which they find them selvvs on the audiogames.net forrum, or just watching a film with audio discription turned on. But in my opinion, they don’t because of this stigma within their community that it’s tabu, and it’s not part of their culture.
this all results in a big community to community divide between us and them. People go out and look for people they can relate to. This goes all the way back to early humans, who formed tribes bassed on how similar they were to each other. But anyways, when one starts to zoom in on the 2 communities and take into account the factions of the afor mentioned, like with every culture, there are going to be certain groups that are more extreme in their beliefs and commitments than others. The common opinion most of us share when meating someone who is exponentially different than you is that you should shy away from that difference. This, because of a fiew possible reasons: Maybe you don’t know how to handle the difference in question. Or maybe you don’t want to get out of your comfort zone. whatever the case may be, the sad truth is that it forms a sence of exclusionism between certain factions. Some of us blind folks are staunchly aposed to sighted people finding out about our community, and some sighted people equally so about theirs.
How do we address the problem?
As a blind person myself the coping mechanism I default to when faced with a cenario outside of my comfort zone is that I revert to 0. I don’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to me. I sit in a corner and let the world go on as if I don’t exist, which I’m quickly learning is not the way to go about things. Most people use that same thing in variation as a tactic, and if you don’t talk to them, they probably won’t talk to you for those exact reasons.
a fiew weeks ago I was tasked to help this sighted girl at my college with a computer problem she was having, which required a lot of back and forth talking. The here, have my number that followed was meant for nothing more than my being able to field any questions she had about said problem, but for whatever reason conversation started to flow and the next thing I know I’m being asked out on a date for this weekend.
Moral of the story, little chitlins, is that if we wanna make any progress what soever to close that divide between our communities, we all have to work towards proving to the other side that we’re all just humans. sure, we might not have eyes, but we can still interact and socialise with you. And just because our cultures are so different is not, in the slightest a good reason for not wanting to go up to a person and try to establish a bonding piece.
5 responses to “a world of 2 cultures: my experience dipping my tows into the relm of the sighted”
just to clarify a bit, our not relating to our sighted counterparts is in my opinion not for a lack of will to do so, more so the communitarian restraint most blind/low vision individuels hold against intigration. IE, the idea that we’ve got our own culture and they’ve got theirs. Now, by saying this I in no way mean to imply that this divide is one sided. What I do mean, however, is that there are the world’s population minus give or take 200000000 worth of people with working eyes, which makes it quite a bit harder to form a community. Now this being said, at surface level 2 blind people meeting for the verry first time can verry easily start bonding over navigating the world with an at best limited amount of vision and the journey they’ve taken to get to where they are, in that moment, bonding over navigating the world with an at best, limited amount of vision. Whether they continue is completely up to them, but you can be almost sure that that surface level bonding will take place. And when a group of people bond, they form a community, formed around the at leest one thing they’ve all got in common. When a community is formed, there’s always trepidation when a new member graces it’s ranks for the first time. Be it as wellcoming as it may, there’s always some wariness towards the afor mentioned new member untill everyone gets a read on them. Now, something objectively true is that the blind community is a rather exclusive one, and for verry good reason. But that does make it so that we tend to cluster around each other, inadvertently making it harder for us to eventually socialise with most sighted people. And because it’s a natural human compolsion to shy away from that which we don’t understand, sighted people, in their turn have a hard time approaching us. Now there are obviously outliers, and this opinion relies heavily on my experience with the world, but I can confidently say that I’m not the only blind person who has historically struggled to approach my sighted peers.
I don’t think that we don’t try integrate to them. Because why do we stand sidelines and being quiet and let world passed by us? Because we can’t see the visual social signals and signs if and when to start a conversation, where is the other person, there is or already not, signalling them to we want to talk to them visually and so on. I experienced this at university where I wanted to talk to someone but when I tried it, then that person leaves the room because sighted people are very fast, you have no time to just signalling them by words. Lots of times, sighted people don’t say others anything, just send a non-verbal cue or, as I can hear, stand beside someone until they notice them. Consider that blind people don’t receive 90% of the world, aka incidental learning. Incidental learning is a term, referring to a sighted child sees a firework, how to fold laundry, how to pay a bill, how a parent is interacting with objects and people, how they react to different races if they’re racists like with different body posture or changed body language or how a parent accepts them aka by smiling (I just did put there because it can be crytical in avoiding problematic people), how to recognize a suspicious person on the street and so can avoid them, how to identify shit of dog on streets, how a peer builds tower, how a pet happy due to our presence, how look like a dangerous thing, how to find a book, location of things in the space, who are in a room, how someone treats people around them, what items in the local shops, how to select a not rotten food, what options are awailable in the society (imitation and so incidental learning is based on the fact that a sighted child can see a new thing and it feeds the curiosity and causes expansion of interests and experiences and experience and attempts and experimenting by default and passively), how and if and when to take a ball, knowing who wants to befriend with us, know who dislikes us, knowing our first impression on people, how to take a book down from a shelf, how a body looks, how much someone is clean, how many a product price is, knowing who is homeless and who is not, knowing that someone is drunk or drugged or not, how a body looks like, how do someone knows who is approachable and who is not like someone touches his or her phone or just sit there or is thinking about something or is daydreaming or sad or happy or is busy with something, how to draw attention on ourselves in small cyrcles and groups and in crowds, how to signal your interest towards certain topics, how a peer approaches a crush, how a parent looks when angry, how to signalling something with eye or how to make eye contact, and, obviously, our eyes can’t focus on people as sighted do. Etc. . Because lots of sighted people assumes about blind children in classrooms at school that they just talk to themselves while they want to say something to sighted peers, or even talk into the air when try to turn the peer’s direction and either ignore them or ask them that why do you talk with yourself or do you want to talk to someone, who? And even sighted people don’t talk to blind people but just their accompanying person like a sighted person who helps them, and based on my sighted relative, it’s cause because ‘You can’t look in the eye as sighted are able to do so’.. And it can be unconfortable or our eyes don’t look beautiful, it can be look like unhealthy, like dim eyes.
Well again you do have a point. I meen heck, I won’t be even able to drive, unless I get a self-driveing car, whitch will probably be never sadly.
1. What I meant is that generally speaking blind people have a harder time integrating with sighted people, at least in my experience. The 2 communities in question have verry different cultures to each other which form by way of the experiences people within the groups share. I would actually venture to say that sighted people have a harder time understanding us and our cultural stance on things by way of their stuff being a lot more mainstream. This, again, because there are a lot more of them than there are of us. As an example, like I said above, there’s nothing stopping you from learning about the latest and greatest in punk rock culture, but a sighted person might have a bit harder of a time finding out about Survive the wild because they wouldn’t even know where to look.
And 2. I suppose that that stereotype, while some might call it abelism, is quite justified. Cause as blind people, a lot of doors are closed for us. We’re never realistically gunna be racecar drivers, or brain cergions for example.
Well, @Starchild you do have a point. But my only question is, and maybe you all ready answored it it but why can’t we intagrate with sited people? I meen I went to a public school in cindergarden that was for sited while I’m blind. But I had a vision teacher and an ea helping me. Another question. Is there some stariotype that sited people can do more things than blind people? I just thaught to ask. And sorry for commenting on your blog alot, I just find the info intresting.