BLINDNESS: HANDICAP OR CHARACTERISTIC
                       by Kenneth Jernigan

     From the Editor Emeritus: The first formal presentation of
"Blindness--Handicap or Characteristic" was when I gave it as the
banquet speech at the 1963 convention of the National Federation
of the Blind in Philadelphia. However, I had been developing the
ideas embodied in it for more than a decade, using them in
classes at the Tennessee School for the Blind and later at the
California and Iowa orientation centers.
     After the Philadelphia convention I made a few revisions and
gave the speech again in Albuquerque--in either 1963 or 1964. I
don't remember which. In any case it was at a district meeting of
Governors' Committees on Employment of the Handicapped for a
number of southwestern states. The version presented at that time
is the one we have used ever since, and I think it is fair to say
that it has been (and still is) regarded as a cornerstone of our
philosophy. It has probably been the subject of more attacks than
most documents we have ever issued, and it has also been,
according to many Federationists, a great help to them in forming
their ideas about what blindness is and what it isn't.
     I think I haven't revised "Blindness: Handicap or
Characteristic" for at least three decades, nor do I think it
needs much revising now. It still represents the basic core of
what I believe about blindness. It occurs to me, however, that a
number of newer Federationists may not be familiar with this
germinal document, so I thought it might be well to print it
again in the Monitor.
     When I wrote it, I was Director of the Iowa Commission for
the Blind, and I have left it that way. Even so, a certain amount
of superficial changing has been done. Here and there I have
given a nod to political correctness, and I have done some
jumping backward and forward in time. This leaves a few rough
edges, but the body of the document is left intact. So here, with
the exceptions I have mentioned, is "Blindness: Handicap or
Characteristic" as I wrote it over thirty years ago:

     It has been wisely observed that philosophy bakes no bread.
It has, with equal wisdom, been observed that without a
philosophy no bread is baked. Let me talk to you then about
philosophy--my philosophy about blindness--and, in a broader
sense, my philosophy concerning handicaps in general.
     One prominent authority recently said, "Loss of sight is a
dying. When, in the full current of his sighted life, blindness
comes on a man, it is the end, the death, of that sighted
life...It is superficial, if not naive, to think of blindness as
a blow to the eyes only, to sight only. It is a destructive blow
to the self-image of a man...a blow almost to his being itself!"

     This is one view, a view held by a substantial number of
people in the world today. But it is not the only view. In my
opinion it is not the correct view. What is blindness? Is it a "dying"?

     No one is likely to disagree with me if I say that
blindness, first of all, is a characteristic. But a great many
people will disagree when I go on to say that blindness is only a
characteristic. It is nothing more or less than that. It is
nothing more special, more peculiar, or more terrible than that
suggests. When we understand the nature of blindness as a
characteristic--a normal characteristic like hundreds of others
with which each of us must live--we shall better understand the
real needs to be met by agencies serving the blind, as well as
the false needs which should not be met.
     By definition a characteristic--any characteristic--is a
limitation. A white house, for example, is a limited house; it
cannot be green or blue or red; it is limited to being white.
Likewise every characteristic--those we regard as strengths as
well as those we regard as weaknesses--is a limitation. Each one
freezes us to some extent into a mold; each restricts to some
degree the range of possibility, of flexibility, and very often
of opportunity as well. Blindness is such a limitation. Are blind
people more limited than others?
     Let us make a simple comparison. Take a sighted person with
an average mind (something not too hard to locate); take a blind
person with a superior mind (something not impossible to locate)-
-and then make all the other characteristics of these two exactly
equal (something which certainly is impossible). Now, which of
the two is more limited? It depends, of course, on what you want
them to do. If you are choosing up sides for baseball, then the
blind person is more limited--that is, he or she is
"handicapped." If you are hunting somebody to teach history or
science or to figure out your income tax, the sighted person is
more limited or "handicapped."
     Many human characteristics are obvious limitations; others
are not so obvious. Poverty (the lack of material means) is one
of the most obvious. Ignorance (the lack of knowledge or
education) is another. Old age (the lack of youth and vigor) is
yet another. Blindness (the lack of eyesight) is still another.
In all these cases the limitations are apparent, or seem to be.
But let us look at some other common characteristics which do not
seem limiting. Take the very opposite of old age--youth. Is age a
limitation in the case of a youth of twenty? Indeed it is, for a
person who is twenty will not be considered for most responsible
positions, especially supervisory or leadership positions. He or
she may be entirely mature, fully capable, in every way the best
qualified applicant for the job. Even so, age will bar the person
from employment. He or she will be classified as too green and
immature to handle the responsibility. And even if the person
were to land the position, others on the job would almost
certainly resent being supervised by one so young. The
characteristic of being twenty is definitely a limitation.
     The same holds true for any other age. Take age fifty, which
many regard as the prime of life. The person of fifty does not
have the physical vigor he or she had at twenty; and, indeed,
most companies (despite recent legislation to the contrary) will
not start a new employee at that age. When I first wrote those
words in the 1960's, the Bell Telephone System (yes, it was the
Bell System at that time) had a general prohibition against
hiring anybody over the age of thirty-five. But it is interesting
to note that the United States Constitution has a prohibition
against having anybody under thirty-five run for President. The
moral is plain: any age carries its built-in limitations.
     Let us take another unlikely handicap--not that of
ignorance, but its exact opposite. Can it be said that education
is ever a handicap? The answer is definitely yes. In the agency
which I headed (I was director of the Iowa Commission for the
Blind from 1958 to 1978) I would not have hired Albert Einstein
under any circumstances if he had been alive and available. His
fame (other people would have continually flocked to the agency
and prevented us from doing our work) and his intelligence (he
would have been bored to madness by the routine of most of our
jobs) would both have been too severe as limitations.
     Here is an actual case in point. When I was Director of the
Iowa Commission for the Blind, a vacancy occurred on the library
staff. Someone was needed to perform certain clerical duties and
take charge of shelving and checking books. After all applicants
had been screened, the final choice came down to two. Applicant A
had a college degree, was seemingly alert, and clearly had more
than average intelligence. Applicant B had a high school diploma
(no college), was of average intelligence, and possessed only
moderate initiative. I hired applicant B. Why? Because I
suspected that applicant A would regard the work as beneath him,
would soon become bored with its undemanding assignments, and
would leave as soon as something better came along. I would then
have to find and train another employee. On the other hand, I
felt that applicant B would consider the work interesting and
even challenging, that he was thoroughly capable of handling the
job, and that he would be not only an excellent but also a
permanent employee. In fact, he worked out extremely well.
     In other words, in that situation the characteristic of
education--the possession of a college degree--was a limitation
and a handicap. Even above-average intelligence was a limitation,
and so was a high level of initiative. There is a familiar
bureaucratic label for this unusual disadvantage: it is the term
"overqualified."
     This should be enough to make the point--which is that if
blindness is a limitation (and, indeed, it is), it is so in quite
the same way as innumerable other characteristics to which human
flesh is heir. I believe that blindness has no more importance
than any of a hundred other characteristics and that the average
blind person is able to perform the average job in the average
place of business, and do it as effectively as the average
sighted person similarly situated. The above average can compete
with the above average, the average with the average, and the
below average with the below average--provided (and it is a large
proviso) that he or she is given training and opportunity.
     Often when I have advanced this proposition, I have been met
with the response, "But you can't look at it that way. Just
consider what you might have done if you had been sighted and
still had all the other capacities you now possess."
     "Not so," I reply. "We do not compete against what we might
have been, but only against other people as they now are, with
their combination of strengths and weaknesses, handicaps and
limitations." If we are going down that track, why not ask me
what I might have done if I had been born with Rockefeller's
money, the brains of Einstein, the physique of the young Joe
Louis, and the persuasive abilities of Franklin Roosevelt? (And
do I need to remind anyone, in passing, that FDR was severely
handicapped physically?) I wonder if anyone ever said to him:
     "Mr. President, just consider what you might have done if
you had not had polio!"
     Others have said to me, "But I formerly had sight, so I know
what I am missing."
     To which I might reply, "And I was formerly twenty, so I
know what I am missing." Does this mean that I should spend my
time grieving for the past. Or alternatively should I deal with
my current situation, sizing up its possibilities and problems
and turning them to my advantage? Our characteristics are
constantly changing, and we are forever acquiring new
experiences, limitations, and assets. We do not compete against
what we formerly were but against other people as they now are.
     In a recent issue of a well-known professional journal in
the field of work with the blind, a blinded veteran, who is now a
college professor, puts forward a notion of blindness radically
different from this. He sets the limitations of blindness apart
from all others and makes them unique. Having done this, he can
say that all other human characteristics, strengths, and
weaknesses belong in one category--and that with regard to them
the blind and the sighted are just about equal. But the blind
person also has the additional and unique limitation of
blindness. Therefore, there is really nothing the blind person
can do quite as well as the sighted person, and he or she can
continue to hold his or her job only because there are charity
and goodness in the world.
     What this blind professor does not observe is that the same
distinction he makes regarding blindness could be made with equal
plausibility with respect to any of a dozen--perhaps a hundred--
other characteristics. For example, suppose we distinguish
intelligence from all other traits as uniquely different. Then
the person with above 125 IQ is just about the same as the person
with below 125 IQ--except for intelligence. Therefore, the
college professor with less than 125 IQ cannot really do anything
as well as the person with more than 125 IQ--and can continue to
hold his or her job only because there are charity and goodness
in the world.
     "Are we going to assume," says this blind professor, "that
all blind people are so wonderful in all other areas that they
easily make up for any limitations imposed by loss of sight? I
think not." But why, I ask, should we single out the particular
characteristic of blindness? We might just as well specify some
other. For instance, are we going to assume that all people with
less than 125 IQ are so wonderful in all other areas that they
easily make up for any limitations imposed by lack of
intelligence? I think not.
     This consideration brings us to the problem of terminology
and semantics--and therewith to the heart of the matter of
blindness as a handicap. The assumption that the limitation of
blindness is so much more severe than others that it warrants
being singled out for special definition is built into the very
warp and woof of our language and psychology. Blindness conjures
up a condition of unrelieved disaster--something much more
terrible and dramatic than other limitations. Moreover, blindness
is a conspicuously visible limitation, and there are not so many
blind people around that there is any danger that the rest of the
population will become accustomed to it or take it for granted.
If all of those in our midst who possess an IQ under 125
exhibited, say, green stripes on their faces, I suspect that they
would begin to be regarded as inferior to the non-striped--and
that there would be immediate and tremendous discrimination.
     When someone says to a blind person, "You do things so well
that I forget you are blind--I simply think of you as being like
anybody else," is that really a compliment? Suppose one of us
went to France, and someone said: "You do things so well that I
forget you are an American and simply think of you as being like
anyone else." Would it be a compliment? Of course, the blind
person should not wear a chip on the shoulder or allow himself or
herself to become angry or emotionally upset. The blind person
should be courteous and should accept the statement as the
compliment it is meant to be. But the blind person should also
understand that it is really not complimentary. In reality it
says: "It is normal for blind people to be inferior and limited,
different and much less able than the rest of us. Of course, you
are still a blind person and still much more limited than I, but
you have compensated for it so well that I almost forget that you
are my inferior."
     The social attitudes about blindness are all-pervasive. Not
only do they affect the sighted but the blind as well. This is
one of the most troublesome problems which we have to face.
Public attitudes about the blind too often become the attitudes
of the blind. The blind tend to see themselves as others see
them. They too often accept the public view of their limitations
and thus do much to make those limitations a reality.
     Several years ago Dr. Jacob Freid (at that time a young
teacher of sociology and later head of the Jewish Braille
Institute of America) performed an interesting experiment. He
gave a test in photograph identification to black and white
students at the university where he was teaching. There was one
photograph of a black woman in a living room of a home of
culture--well furnished with paintings, sculpture, books, and
flowers. Asked to identify the person in the photograph, the
students said she was a "cleaning woman," "housekeeper," "cook,"
"laundress," "servant," "domestic," or "nanny." The revealing
insight is that the black students made the same identification
as the white students. The woman was Mary McLeod Bethune, one of
the most famous black women of her time, founder and president of
Bethune-Cookman College, who held a top post during Franklin
Roosevelt's administration, and a person of brilliance and
prestige in the world of higher education. What this incident
tells us is that education, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and
that when members of a minority group do not have correct and
complete information about themselves, they accept the
stereotypes of the majority group even when they are false and
unjust. Even today, after so many years of the civil rights
movement, one wonders how many blacks would make the traditional
and stereotyped identification of the photograph--if not
verbally, at least in their hearts.
     Similarly with the blind--the public image is everywhere
dominant. This is the explanation for the attitude of those blind
persons who are ashamed to carry a white cane or who try to bluff
sight which they do not possess. Although great progress is now
being made, there are still many people (sighted as well as
blind) who believe that blindness is not altogether respectable.
     The blind person must devise alternative techniques to do
many things which would be done with sight if he or she had
normal vision. It will be observed that I say alternative, not
substitute techniques, for the word "substitute" connotes
inferiority, and the alternative techniques employed by the blind
person need not be inferior to visual techniques. In fact, some
are superior. Of course, some are inferior, and some are equal.
     In this connection it is interesting to consider the matter
of flying. In comparison with the birds, humans begin at a
disadvantage. They cannot fly. They have no wings. They are
"handicapped." But humans see birds flying, and they long to do
likewise. Humans cannot use the "normal," bird-like method, so
they begin to devise alternative techniques. In jet airplanes
humans now fly higher, farther, and faster than any bird that has
ever existed. If humans had possessed wings, the airplane would
probably never have been devised, and the inferior wing-flapping
method would still be in general use.
     This matter of our irrational images and stereotypes with
regard to blindness was brought sharply home to me in the early
1960's during the course of a rehabilitation conference in Little
Rock, Arkansas. I found myself engaged in a discussion with
Father Carroll, a well-known leader in the field of work with the
blind at that time. Father Carroll held quite different views
from those I have been advancing. The error in my argument about
blindness as a characteristic, he advised me, was that blindness
is not in the range of "normal" characteristics. Therefore, its
limitations are radically different from those of other
characteristics falling within the normal range. If a normal
characteristic is simply one possessed by the majority in a
group, then it is not normal to have a black skin in America or a
white skin in the world at large. It is not normal to have red
hair or to be over six feet tall. If, on the other hand, a normal
characteristic is simply what this or some other authority
defines as being normal, then we have a circular argument--one
that gets us nowhere.
     In this same discussion I put forward the theory that a
person who was sighted and of average means and who had all other
characteristics in common with a blind person of considerable
wealth would be less mobile than the blind person. I had been
arguing that there were alternative techniques (not substitute)
for doing those things which one would do with sight if one had
normal vision. Father Carroll, as well as several others, had
been contending that there was no real, adequate substitute for
sight in traveling about. I told the story of a wealthy blind man
I know who goes to Hawaii or some other place every year and who
hires sighted attendants and is much more mobile than any sighted
person I know who has ordinary means since most of the people I
know can't go to Hawaii at all. After all of the discussion and
the fact that I thought I had conveyed some understanding of what
I was saying, a participant in the conference said--as if he
thought he was really making a telling point, "Wouldn't you admit
that the wealthy man in question would be even more mobile if he
had his sight?"
     This brings us to the subject of services to the blind, and
more exactly to their proper scope and direction. There are, as I
see it, four basic types of services now being provided to blind
persons by public and private agencies and volunteer groups in
this country. They are:
     1. services based on the theory that blindness is uniquely
different from other characteristics and that it carries with it
permanent inferiority and severe limitations upon activity;
     2. services aimed at teaching the blind person a new and
constructive set of attitudes about blindness--based on the
premise that the prevailing social attitudes, assimilated
involuntarily by the blind person, are mistaken in content and
destructive in effect;
     3. services aimed at teaching alternative techniques and
skills related to blindness; and 
     4. services not specifically related to blindness but to
other characteristics (such as old age and lack of education),
which are nevertheless labeled as "services to the blind" and
included under the generous umbrella of the service program.
     For purposes of this discussion, categories three and four
are not relevant since they are not central to the philosophical
point at issue. We are concerned here with categories one and
two. An illustration of the assumptions underlying the first of
these four types of services (category one) is the statement
quoted earlier which begins, "Loss of sight is a dying." At the
Little Rock conference already mentioned, Father Carroll (who was
the one who made the statement) elaborated on the tragic metaphor
by pointing out that "the eye is a sexual symbol" and that,
accordingly, the man who has not eyes is not a "whole man." He
cited the play Oedipus Rex as proof of his contention that the
eye is a sexual symbol. I believe that this misses the whole
point of the classic tragedy. Like many moderns, the Greeks
considered the severest possible punishment to be the loss of
sight. Oedipus committed a mortal sin. Unknowingly he had killed
his father and married his mother. Therefore, his punishment must
be correspondingly great. But that is just what his self-imposed
blindness was--a punishment, not a sexual symbol.
     But Father Carroll's view not only misses the point of
Oedipus Rex--it misses the point of blindness. And in so doing it
misses the point of services intended to aid the blind. For
according to this view what the blind person needs most
desperately is the help of a psychiatrist--of the kind so
prominently in evidence at several of the centers and agencies
for the blind throughout the country. According to this view what
the blind person needs most is not travel training but therapy.
Blind persons will be taught to accept their limitations as
insurmountable and their difference from others as unbridgeable.
They will be encouraged to adjust to their painful station as
second-class citizens and discouraged from any thought of
breaking and entering the first-class compartment. Moreover, all
of this will be done in the name of teaching them "independence"
and a "realistic" approach to their blindness.
     The two competing types of services for the blind--
categories one and two on my list of four--with their underlying
conflict of philosophy may perhaps be clarified by a rather
fanciful analogy. All of us recall the case of the Jews in Nazi
Germany. Suddenly, in the 1930's, the German Jews were told by
their society that they were "handicapped" persons--that they
were inferior to other Germans simply by virtue of being Jews.
Given this social fact, what sort of adjustment services might we
have offered to the victim of Jewishness? I suggest that there
are two alternatives--matching categories one and two on my list
of four.
     First, since the Jews have been "normal" individuals until
quite recently, it will, of course, be quite a shock (or "trauma"
as modern lingo has it) for them to learn that they are
permanently and constitutionally inferior to others and can
engage only in a limited range of activities. They will,
therefore, require a psychiatrist to give them counseling and
therapy and to reconcile them to their lot. They must "adjust" to
their handicap and "learn to live" with the fact that they are
not "whole men and women." If they are, as the propaganda would
have it, "realistic" they may even manage to be happy. They can
be taken to an adjustment center, where they may engage in a
variety of routine activities suitable to Jews. Again, it should
be noted that all of this will be done in the name of teaching
them how to accept reality as Jews. That is one form of
adjustment training.
     In the case of Nazi Germany, of course, the so-called
"adjustment training" for the Jews passed the bounds of sanity
and ended in the death camps of the Holocaust. The custody and
control with which we as blind persons deal do not generally in
present-day society express themselves in such barbarous forms,
but it should be remembered that blind babies were uniformly
exposed on the hillsides to die in earlier times. Today's
custodial attitudes about the blind are more often than not
kindly meant--especially if the blind are submissive and grateful
and if they are willing to stay in their places. In fact, with
respect to the blind, the day of custodialism is hopefully
passing.
     We know what happened to the Jews and others in Nazi Germany
who rejected the premise that Jewishness equalled inferiority.
The problem was not in Jewishness but in the perceptions of
others. Any real so-called "adjustment" would have needed to
involve equal treatment and human rights. The problem was
centered not in the individual but in society and society's
perception of the individual. In such circumstances (even if
anybody had been inclined to use one) the psychiatrist would not
have been helpful. The so-called professionalism of the Nazi
psychiatrist would have made no difference since such
professionals likely had the same misconceptions about Jews as
the rest of Nazi society. The emphasis could not be on
resignation; it had to be on rebellion. That is how it might have
worked if even the rudiments of civilization had continued, but
Hitler's madness put an end to dialogue, and to a great deal
more.
     Even though we live in a different country and a different
time, there is much we can learn by contemplating the interaction
between Nazi society and the Jews. False perceptions about
minorities that begin as nothing more than distaste or a feeling
of superiority can magnify to a point of separation from reality.
What seemed unthinkable yesterday can become acceptable today,
commonplace tomorrow, and fanatical dogmatism the day after that.
Both minorities and majorities can be dehumanized in the process.
     Be that as it may, we must deal with the problems of our own
time and society (and in our case, particularly with the problems
of the blind). We must do it with all of the understanding and
freedom from preconception we can muster. There are still vast
differences in the services offered by various agencies and
volunteer groups doing work with the blind throughout the
country. At the Little Rock conference to which I have already
referred, this was even more apparent than it is today, and the
differences of philosophy repeatedly surfaced. For instance, when
blind persons come to a training center, what kind of tests do
you give them, and why? In Iowa (at least this is how it was in
the 60's) and in some other centers, the contention is that the
blind person is a responsible individual and that the emphasis
should be on his or her knowing what he or she can do. Some of
the centers represented at that Little Rock conference in 1962
contended that blind trainees needed psychiatric help and
counseling (regardless of the circumstances and merely by virtue
of their blindness) and that the emphasis should be on the center
personnel's knowing what the student could do. I asked them
whether they thought services in a training center for the blind
should be more like those given by a hospital or those given by a
law school. In a hospital the person is a "patient." This is, by
the way, a term coming to be used more and more in rehabilitation
today. (That is what I said in 1962, but I am glad to say that
more than thirty years later we have made a considerable amount
of progress in this area.)
     With respect to patients the doctors decide whether they
need an operation and what medication they should have. In
reality "patients" make few of their own decisions. Will the
doctor "let" him or her do this or that?
     In a law school, on the other hand, the "students" assume
responsibility for getting to their own classes and organizing
their own work. They plan their own careers, seeking advice to
the extent that they feel the need for it. If students plan
unwisely, they pay the price for it, but it is their lives. This
does not mean that the student does not need the services of the
law school. He or she probably will become friends with the
professors and will discuss legal matters with them and socialize
with them. From some the student will seek counsel and advice
concerning personal matters. More and more the student will come
to be treated as a colleague. Not so the "patient." What does he
or she know about drugs and medications? Some of the centers
represented at the Little Rock conference were shocked that we at
the Iowa Commission for the Blind "socialized" with our students
and invited them to our homes. They believed that this threatened
what they took to be the "professional relationship."
     Our society has so steeped itself in false notions
concerning blindness that it is most difficult for people to
understand the concept of blindness as a characteristic, as well
as the type of services needed by the blind. As a matter of fact,
in one way or another, the whole point of all I have been saying
is just this: Blindness is neither a dying nor a psychological
crippling. It need not cause a disintegration of personality, and
the stereotype which underlies this view is no less destructive
when it presents itself in the garb of modern science than it was
when it appeared in the ancient raiment of superstition and
witchcraft.
     Throughout the world, but especially in this country, we are
today in the midst of a vast transition with respect to our
attitudes about blindness and the whole concept of what handicaps
are. We are reassessing and reshaping our ideas. In this process
the professionals in the field cannot play a lone hand. In fact,
the organized blind movement must lead the way and form the
cutting edge. Additionally it is a cardinal principle of our free
society that the citizen public will hold the balance of
decision. In my opinion, it is fortunate that this is so, for
professionals can become limited in their thinking and committed
to outworn programs and ideas. The general public must be the
balance staff, the ultimate weigher of values and setter of
standards. In order that the public may perform this function
with reason and wisdom, it is the duty of the organized blind
movement to provide information and leadership and to see that
the new ideas receive the broadest possible dissemination. But
even more important, we must as blind individuals--each of us--
examine ourselves to see that our own minds are free from
prejudice and preconception.