Are you a public speaker? How often do you present yourself to an audience of people with vision impairments?
No one is forcing you to do this in daily life. Kamala did it as a show of empathy and to better connect with people who are visually impaired. It doesn’t harm anyone and provides additional context to those who need it.
I’m not saying she’s wrong for doing it. Allow me to quote my reply to someone else:
I’m just skeptical of a lot of ways people change their language and speaking habits to supposedly be more inclusive, because a lot of it seems like either empty virtue signaling (the real kind, not the right-wing bastardization of the term), or just an eagerness to be accommodating that precludes thinking critically about whether a proposed accommodation is actually helpful. On one hand, I know I’m biased against unfamiliar norms, so the fact that I find a lot of them distasteful doesn’t mean they’re bad. On the other hand, I know some progressive language choices are not well accepted by the very people they’re supposed to benefit. For example, I’ve read a majority of Latinx people don’t like the word Latinx, a lot of homeless people find “unhoused” to be patronizing, and a lot of Black Americans prefer Black over African American. If political correctness is just a fancy way of saying treating people with respect, I think what I’m talking about could be called political hypercorrectness (by analogy with hypercorrection, i.e. trying so hard to be respectful that you end up being less respectful.
I’m currently on the fence about the trend of people describing their appearance as part of an introduction. I haven’t heard anything one way or the other about it from blind people, but I have a really hard time seeing how a person describing themselves visually would be useful to someone whose experience of the world doesn’t include vision.
I’m not sure I buy it either, but consider mandate to return to work, or even mandates to have cameras on for a conference call. Some of us may be fine with an unconnected voice or text but clearly a lot of people believe it’s helpful to be more face to face or interactive.
To me, this makes the same sense. If it’s helpful to interact with my colleagues more directly or more present, how is it any different here?
Then again I mostly interact with disembodied voices and texts, and am not aware of any sight impaired
Are you a public speaker? How often do you present yourself to an audience of people with vision impairments?
No one is forcing you to do this in daily life. Kamala did it as a show of empathy and to better connect with people who are visually impaired. It doesn’t harm anyone and provides additional context to those who need it.
I’m not saying she’s wrong for doing it. Allow me to quote my reply to someone else:
I’m not sure I buy it either, but consider mandate to return to work, or even mandates to have cameras on for a conference call. Some of us may be fine with an unconnected voice or text but clearly a lot of people believe it’s helpful to be more face to face or interactive.
To me, this makes the same sense. If it’s helpful to interact with my colleagues more directly or more present, how is it any different here?
Then again I mostly interact with disembodied voices and texts, and am not aware of any sight impaired