DEI, Intersectionality, Accessibility, and Ham Sandwiches

Warning: this post uses "blindness" in several senses. If this is going to be a problem, the internet is a vast reservoir of other content options. 

Also, the shopping cart full of clean laundry is a visual motif that goes with an extremely on point #DEI related quote "It's okay to make mistakes. It's how we learn."

RantWoman heard a wonderful quote this weekend from an African American man. He had been talking to a white person who said they thought of themselves as color blind, not seeing color. The African American man asked "if your Muslim or Jewish neighbor were hungry, would you offer them a ham sandwich?" RantWoman does not expect to run out of reasons to want to borrow the quote.

On the other hand, RantWoman had a conversation recently with an Asian man (ethnicity may or may not be important here) about a totally blind neighbor. The Asian guy was wondering how the totally blind woman knows a third person whom she has known for a long time is black. The blind neighbor can of course literally not see color  RantWoman tried not to roll her eyes too loudly suggesting good reasons to rely on the blind woman's information.

Actual genetic color blindness is much more common among men than women, though RantWoman has no information about an variation based on heritage. One of RantWoman's first thoughts if a white man says he is genetically color blind and therefore knows something about #a11y / #accessibility is something along the lines of  "Whether or not this content / portal works for you may or may not tell me anything about how the product works with a screen reader or other accessibility tools."

RantWoman knows someone whose neurological experience sometimes is to see something very large out of one eye and very small out of the other, kind of like in Alice in Wonderland.

RantWoman's own visual experience: between eyes, glasses, bifocals, RantWoman can see between zero and 5 of a given object or topic.

So let us keep having conversations, keep learning, keep listening, seeing through each other's eyes.