N.Y. Governor Paterson
Blind to Tools of Success
By Deborah Kendrick
Several years ago, when I received some mystifyingly bad
treatment at the hands of other people who shared my disability, a friend who
was both black and blind comforted me with her insight. “Blind people can
sometimes be like a basket of crabs,” she told me. “When one of them
makes it to the top, the others scramble to pull him down.” Folks I
thought to be my peers, in other words, were attacking me out of envy.
I vowed I would never do that. I would fervently support
anyone with any disability who achieved success in any field. We should all be
one happy family, right?
Then, following the 2006 elections, alarms went off that
challenged that personal pledge. The good news was that New York state had
elected a lieutenant governor who was both black and blind. The more troubling
news was that David Paterson, that newly elected official, by declaring that he
didn’t use any of those blindness tools – Braille, assistive
technology, a white cane – indicated to those who don’t have
disabilities that he was too cool for all that nonsense. Those of us who
proudly use the tools of blindness, who depend on them to give us a competitive
edge in a host of professional and educational environments, tried to be
tolerant. I wanted to be first and foremost proud. A blind guy – a sort of
brother to me in the disability family – was rising to the top, and it was
cause for serious celebration. 
Of course, when Eliot Spitzer was caught with his pants
down, so to speak, and Paterson rose to the very top of his state, sworn in as
New York governor on March 17th, 2008, the media made even more noise about how
this brilliant guy didn’t need Braille or talking computers or any of that
blind nonsense. He had a superhuman memory, we were told, and relied heavily on
staff. His staff read important memos and documents into voicemail messages
that he listened to at all hours.
Voicemail messages? What?
He’s governor of one of our most important states,
and he doesn’t use a computer? Still, I reminded myself to be tolerant.
Each of us has different techniques, different ways to accomplish the same
goal. One deaf person reads lips. Another uses American Sign Language. Another
uses Signed English. And on it goes. The man was governor, after all. He
didn’t have to do things the way other blind people do them to earn our
support. He was one of us, and we should stand behind him.
Then Paterson started doing really dumb things. He
didn’t always know the facts. He made decisions and then, under pressure
of one kind or another, reversed them. He appointed a lieutenant governor when
nobody was sure he was even allowed to do that and who, to add insult to
injury, had trampled with dirty boots on transportation prospects for New
Yorkers with disabilities.
He seemed to “get it” when he responded with
disdain to the "Saturday Night Live" skit that ridiculed his blindness. And
yet, he didn’t hesitate to grab a few laughs himself at the possible
expense of people with disabilities when he appeared in a wheelchair for a
charity gig.
More recently, he has vetoed one bill that would prevent
discrimination against people with disabilities in public facilities in his
state and another that would require all polling places to be made physically
accessible.
OK, we could argue, just because he has a disability
doesn’t mean he has to always agree with us, supporting every bill that
comes down the political pike to improve the quality of life for New Yorkers
with disabilities. Shouldn’t we still support him? He’s both black
and blind, after all.
The proverbial “last straw” in struggling to
hang on as a cheerleader for this New York governor came when I started seeing
references in the press linking his failures to his blindness. One New York
state senator, Diane Savino, was widely quoted as saying, in effect, that hey,
even though the guy is brilliant, he’s blind, after all, and being
blind means he can’t use the same digital tools -- such as e-mail or a
Blackberry -- as his peers.
Wait a New York minute! And let me do some deep breathing
so as not to do anything undignified like spew bad words in my own e-mail or
Smartphone messages!
One headline read: “It’s not his race, it’s
his blindness.” Let me set the record straight: “It” -- his
failure to lead -- is not because of his race or his blindness. It’s the
man himself. But blindness is something I know well and know more than a little
bit about with regard to tools and techniques, so let me tell you now what I
was suppressing all along.
His avoidance – since childhood – of tools
related to blindness, don’t make him superior to other blind people, but
rather inferior. He can’t read print but refused to learn Braille.
That’s denial to the point of masochism. In other words, he’s
illiterate by choice! Why, I wonder, if he’s so “brilliant” did
it take him 12 years to get two advanced degrees, when lots of
“ordinary” blind people have obtained those same two degrees in six?
And even though the second of those two degrees is a law degree, he never went
into practice as a lawyer because he couldn’t pass the bar exam. Why was
that? Was it because he couldn’t read Braille or use a computer? Now, in
all fairness, I don’t know the answer to that question, but his
explanation is that he didn’t receive adequate accommodations. But what
would those accommodations be, anyway, for a man who is blind but doesn’t
know how to use any of the tools that similarly educated blind people avail
themselves of daily?
You could say it’s not his fault. When he was a
child, New York City schools couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t
receive any special education, and his parents moved to a suburb where he could
go to public school “unhindered” by special ed. Now, maybe that was a
good thing. I wasn’t there. But it sounds to me like being perceived as
sighted was more important to the family than getting the best education
possible.
And so, here we have a 21st-century governor
– the first legally blind governor to serve in any state longer than 11
days – and he’s using 1960s or '70s tools to do his job. Staffers
read materials onto tapes and into voicemail for him. He has no means of
prompting himself with notes, which would be effortless had he taken the time
to learn to read and write Braille.
Had he been governor in 1975, the tools he now uses would
have been adequate because sighted people at the time were using them at the
same level of sophistication. But those tools now are inadequate.
Why doesn’t Paterson use a computer with one of the
popular screen-reading programs, such as JAWS or Window-Eyes or System Access?
If he did, 99 percent of all documents generated by other computers could then
simply be e-mailed to him. If he wanted to travel light, he could carry a
netbook (a small laptop computer) or a thumb drive, into which staffers could
pop anything he needed to read. With practice, he could do what blind
professionals all over the world do – crank their reading speed up to
several hundred words a minute and get through material as quickly as any
sighted politician. Add that to his amazing memory, and he could have been a
governor to make us proud.
Why does he have staffers read newspapers to him? For
free, he could sign up for the National Federation of the Blind's NEWSLINE, a
telephone service that would enable him to read any of 220 newspapers around
the country, from any phone anywhere, at any speed he chose. He could zip
through articles at his own speed as quickly or even quicker than his sighted
peers.
Now, this “brilliant” guy is using tools that
were state of the art when Jimmy Carter was president, has an approval rating
that has dropped at a staggering rate, and against even the advice of President
Obama, said he’ll run again in 2010. It’s pitiable, really, but
I’m not feeling sorry for him. How can I when, along with his own failure,
he’s pulling the overall acceptance of and employment opportunities for
other blind people down with him?
I’m not saying I could do his job. I don’t think
I could. But I am saying that lots of people who are blind could and do it
brilliantly. He wanted so much to hide his blindness that now, in his appalling
unpopularity, it’s the one thing that outsiders are interpreting as his
weakness. It hasn’t been. His weakness has been his own arrogance and
denial of reality. It’s a shame. With proper training, he might have done
a good job.
But he isn’t doing one, and I’m OK with having
broken my promise to myself. I know now that just because he has a disability
doesn’t mean I have to like him. And if he’s going to fall headlong
into the basket, I don’t want him to kick the rest of us down to the
bottom as well.
Deborah Kendrick is a newspaper columnist, editor and
poet. She is currently working on a biography of Dr. Abraham Nemeth.
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