Monday, November 29, 1998
Favorite columnist falls off his pedestal
BY DEBORAH KENDRICK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
William Raspberry, you blew it.
Come to think of it, my favorite writers are all people who basically agree with me. I may see them as wiser, more insightful, zeroing in on a clear concept I wish I'd seen first. But generally, my prose heroes look at life with similar lenses to my own.
So it was with William Raspberry.
For years, I've been reading his words, cheering him on, thanking God for one more guy who gets it.
On Nov. 2, for instance, he wrote in the Washington Post a wonderful piece about intolerance (''What are Gay-Bashers Afraid Of?'') in which he poignantly posed the question: ''Can they (our children) have been listening to the tolerance we preach and ignoring the bigotry we try to mask?''
He was talking about a Georgia high school where kids opted not to get too riled up over one classmate who dressed and acted like a girl. The kids protested when the student was disciplined.
Then, last week, this prose hero of mine took a dive. He said he was just being mean for a day, but what he revealed was just one more bigot in tolerant clothing.
''Get a grip,'' Mr. Raspberry tells readers with disabilities in his Nov. 16 column (''Complaints Against Common Sense''). He berates a blind man in California who wants equal access to the Web site of his local transit authority. The man should ''Get a grip,'' Mr. Raspberry says, and be satisfied with calling for information.
Never mind that Mr. Raspberry doesn't understand that making a Web site accessible to blind people doesn't mean taking away the graphic design enjoyed by the sighted. Never mind that he doesn't understand that scheduling information on the phone is not available 24 hours a day. He wants this man to settle for what he can get and shut up about it.
Kind of reminds me of those folks in Alabama, back in 1955 - you know, those whiny blacks who wanted to actually sit on the bus, not stand, and to sit in the seats the whites used. Would Mr. Raspberry have told Rosa Parks to ''get a grip?'' He ridicules the deaf man (and doesn't get the terminology quite right), who called another columnist using a telephone relay service. (A relay service is a human operator who conveys to the hearing person words the deaf person has typed, and to the deaf person those words the hearing person has spoken.) He, too, Raspberry says, should ''get a grip.''
Would he, I wonder, have told an elderly black man, voting for the first time after the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery and needing a bit of instruction to ''get a grip?''
Well, here we go again, Mr. Raspberry. Would you have told those students who resented specified seats at the lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., to ''get a grip'' and sit where they were told?
What is it about people with disabilities, that even those who embrace tolerance in every other quarter want to relegate us to the one-down pity brigade and pat us on the head?
You're probably too young to have marched to Washington with Martin Luther King, but I know you know what discrimination is.
How can you write of one minority, ''What are we afraid of?,'' and of another, ''Get a grip?''
Blindness, you wrote, ''must be a terrible handicap.''
Well, I have that characteristic called blindness. I know what it is to be told where to sit on the bus and to be talked to in loud monosyllables because I am judged by a characteristic I cannot change.
I can tell you that you are wrong: Blindness is not nearly so terrible a handicap as are those paralyzing demons for which it serves as metaphor: ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice.
I thought you already knew that.
Deborah Kendrick, a Cincinnati free-lance writer, is a nationally recognized advocate for people with disabilities. Write: Deborah Kendrick, Cincinnati Enquirer, 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202; e-mail: 71340.473@compuserve.com.
KENDRICK ARCHIVE
