[nfb-talk] To Be or Not to Be, Irritated

[Jim Marks]

Changing minds can be tough.  I recently had a negative experience that
still shakes me up today.

I am a director of a university disability service office.  This summer, our
receptionist resigned, and our first search to replace the receptionist
failed.  I then hired a temporary employee, a woman who also happened to be
blind.  She was fully qualified for the job and had just returned home from
one of our NFB training centers.

An office manager from another campus department that shares the reception
desk with my office immediately took issue with the idea of a blind
receptionist for a high-traffic university service area.  My mouth dropped
open in surprise when the office manager said that no blind person could do
the job.  She had not met the person I hired, and the manager seemed
stupidly ignorant of the fact that she was airing her prejudices before
another blind person.  I remember thinking, how dare she judge this without
any foundation other than ignorance!  I told the manager to give me time to
see whether it would work or not.  I figured I could bully the prejudice
into submission, but I wanted to win her over by showing her how it would
work.

First thing the blind receptionist and I did was to create a working
environment that could be handled with non-visual techniques.  The big
hurdle was having the receptionist respond to walk-in visitors since the
visitors often did not announce themselves.  To make it work, we needed the
collaboration of the co-workers.  Unfortunately, instead of getting
cooperation, we got the opposite.

The prejudiced office manager set out to do everything she could to sabotage
the confidence and reputation of the blind receptionist.  The manager would
leap up every time someone walked in and dramatically intervene with her
superior powers of vision.  She would reprimand the blind receptionist with
constant tiny and pointless corrections.  And she encouraged others to join
her in her hostility towards blindness.  It was clear that the manager saw
blind people in extremes, either as fools or super heroes.  She never even
considered the possibility that a blind person could be her peer.  

The blind receptionist held up well, but it was tough beyond belief.  It
helped that the president of the NFB of Montana works in our office.  Others
joined in support of the blind receptionist, too.  Another office manager, a
sighted person, actually took time to sit beside the blind receptionist when
the going was painfully and obviously difficult.  At one point, I lost my
temper and told the prejudiced office manager, a person I do not supervise,
that she was to back off and stay out of it.  I knew there was zero chance
for her support, and adjusted my expectations from winning her over to
simply getting her to stop her outrageous behaviors.  unfortunately, she did
not stop, and the situation continued on.  Then, the blind receptionist
asked for a reasonable accommodation.  She asked that the interventions
cease through a formal request for reasonable accommodation.  The manager
sort of complied, and the drama lessened.  When it went to the level of
civil rights, the situation became marginally better.  But it was still a
hostile and ugly situation, and it was occurring in my shop under my watch.
Attitudes were the problem, and, for the life of me, I knew no way to deal
with them in any effective way.  I still do not, except that it's important
to be relentless.  We can never give up, never.

The story ends badly.  When we re-opened the position, the blind
receptionist did not get the permanent job.  The pool contained applicants
who were more qualified than she was.  Had the blind receptionist been in
the pool during the first search, she would have had the job.  But this pool
was too strong.  The blind receptionist handled herself very, very well all
throughout the weeks she worked in my office.  She's now going to school,
and is doing great.  I will likely hire her for work as a student employee
in my office.  I decided to sever my relationship with the prejudiced office
manager.  We no longer supervise people together because I will not work
with someone who is so bigoted.  I am polite, for I will not stoop to the
same level of bigotry, but damage was done, and it's irreversible insofar as
I can tell.  So, maybe in many ways the story ends better than I thought,
but it's hard to see the good of it.  Thing is, I am still shaking my head
over what happened.  

Those who think our battles are over are out of touch.  I am in it for the
long haul, and the NFB really does give us a vehicle for change that we
could not possibly accomplish on our own as lone wolves.  We hunt in packs,
and that's the way nature intended it.



-------
Jim Marks
blind.grizzly at gmail.com