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coffeeandink) wrote2007-08-27 10:54 am
coffeeandink) wrote2007-08-27 10:54 am
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Blindness &/as metaphor
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jesse_the_k criticized my use of "blindness" as an ableist metaphor and has continued the discussion here.jesse_the_k criticized my use of "blindness" as an ableist metaphor and has continued the discussion here.
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1) My husband, who is actually red-green colourblind, is mostly amused by the misunderstandings and misuses of colourblindness. It's vaguely disconcerting, though, to see people brandishing the word "colourblind" in a way that they think is *good* and that in fact ends up equating colourblindness with being, well, kind of a jerk. It's probably not a big issue because actual colourblindness is a very mild disability, and not very central to most people's self-understanding.
2) I am far more sensitive to ableist language than I used to be because of the way that "autism" has become the journalists' current favourite metaphorical pejorative, usually in vastly inaccurate ways. While the "blind" and "deaf" metaphors are far more embedded in the language, and I can see where removing them seems impoverishing, I can also see where saying "Be less blind!" (good advice though it is on a metaphorical level) could be hurtful to someone who cannot, in fact, be less blind, and who doesn't like hearing their physical condition used to represent pigheadedness.
3) On the other hand, my husband and I have an ongoing disagreement about the use of the words "black" and "dark" to represent negativity, evil, badness. He maintains that these are racist metaphors and shouldn't be used. I maintain that the root of the metaphors is much more likely found in night-time darkness, which has in fact been bad and dangerous for much of history, and to some extent dark clouds, and that most of the time it is not a reference back to people with dark skin. But it's tricky, and he's surely right that at least some uses of those metaphors can be hurtful to POC.
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I would say that while, as you say, they certainly did not originate as racist metaphors, they have certainly been used that way for hundreds of years; the connection was made early on, and heavily played on. I don't know about most of the time, but definitely a lot of the time. I mean, I immediately thought of the Blake:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but oh my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.
--which is, in intention anyway, an antiracist poem! And I have the impression that there's tons of things like that, pleas for tolerance where the main point is that just because somebody's literally dark on the outside doesn't mean they're metaphorically dark on the inside. Which, um. And then there's Africa as the Dark Continent.
Anyway, I don't think most modern, nonracist use of darkness/light metaphors are a problem, and it would be utterly impossible to sweep them out of common use, even if desirable, but they do have an awful lot of baggage.
I am probably extra twitchy because the Hobbit Movie was on TV last night and GANDALF THE WHITE was being white all over the place. Yes, he is white like anything OKAY.
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Yeah, that's certainly true, and it'd definitely a type of metaphor that needs careful monitoring, especially when it's being applied to individuals, and/or when it's used in visual coding. The WHITE = GOOD coding is certainly problematically omnipresent.
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