I Don’t Care What You Look Like

A journalist contacted me a few months ago. “I’m working on a story about restaurants and accessibility,” she said. “Would you be willing to meet me for an interview?”

Of course I said yes.

We met at our local, Half Sour, and after introducing herself she asked, ““Do you want me to tell you what I look like?”

I’m getting that a lot lately. People asking me if I want to know what they look like. More and more people giving panel discussions on Zoom, leading presentations at libraries, introducing themselves at lectures are describing their looks out loud after introducing themselves.

I’m Beth. This is my back. I have a red coat.

I answered the reporter’s question with a question of my own: Why would I?

” I don’t know,” she said with a nervous chuckle. “I just read on the internet that I should describe my physical appearance when I introduce myself to someone who can’t see.” I hated hearing this. I have no idea where this declaration started, but it sure has sprouted up on a lot of “disability etiquette” lists lately.

Maybe it has something to do with all the Zoom meetings people have been on the past couple of years? Did some disability advocacy organization decide this is a way to “equalize” the experience for people who are blind? The one thing I do know is this: they didn’t ask me for my opinion on the matter!

In the past year or so I’ve attended more and more events (live and virtual) where the speakers or participants are told to “self-describe” themselves before starting their presentations. You know, for the “benefit of people in the audience who have a visual impairment.”

For me? I’d rather not know. Asking people to describe what they look like is awkward. And let’s be real. Can I trust anyone’s self-assessment, anyway?

In Mike’s “Mondays with Mike” post earlier this week he wrote about the passing of our dear friend Janet Smith. Janet’s husband Jim Loellbach worked with University of Illinois Chicago staff and graduate students all last week to set up and present a virtual celebration of Janet’s life this past Sunday. More than 300 Colleagues, students, family and friends zoomed in, and being virtual and all, people living everywhere from Beirut to Hamburg, Miami to Walla Walla Washington could celebrate Janet with us, too.

I felt honored to be one of the dozen attendees asked to give a short presentation at the event. Knowing Janet’s co-workers and grad students were responsible for the technology assured me it’d all be accessible – I’d be able to “mute” and “unmute” using my screen software.

And I was right. It was.

When I sent an email their way the next day to thank them for their technology prowess, one of them responded with an apology. “I am glad you felt the event was accessible,” they wrote. “I was a little concerned about that, wondered if we should have had all the speakers describe themselves first.”

Argh! I’m sorry they felt this way. Self-describing takes time , and I was much more interested in hearing what people at the celebration had to say about Janet than hearing what the people telling the stories think they look like.

During my short presentation about Janet, I mentioned that one advantage of being blind is that you get to walk arm-in-arm with friends a lot. Janet and I walked arm-in-arm everywhere – to the Chicago River, the Chicago Lakefront, Printers Row Park, Millennium Park, nearby restaurants, bars, and the wine shop. Walking arm-in-arm makes it easier to hear each other, and the conversations we had –especially in these past two years – are a gift from Janet to me.

Another advantage of being blind? not knowing what people look like. In the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., I live in a sensory world where “people cannot be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I’m left to judge others by what they say. And what they do.

Something about this new emphasis on having people self-describe themselves seems counter-intuitive to efforts to become more diverse. Do I need to know what people look like to judge what it is they are saying? I’d rather have them introduce themselves by saying their name and what it is about them that prompted the event to invite them as a presenter.

Which is exactly what happened at Janet’s celebration Sunday. Tears were shed, yes. We laughed some, too. Friends and colleagues spoke with Italian accents, English accents, Scandinavian accents and in all sorts of American dialects. I suppose we all looked pretty different from each other, but who cares? The one thing we have in common is far more important: our love of — and gratitude for — our friendships with Janet.