Redefinition of Color Vision Minority
Experience of color vision deficiency in these social history of standardization of vision and discursive exploitation of voice can be characterized by the difficulty to talk.
Sociologically speaking, color vision minorities are not those people who cannot find the right answer in Ishihara test, but those who are deprived of language, that is, symbolically speaking, of the voice to describe experience and express opinion.
Like many other cases in various disabilities, it has been specialists who speak. Daltonians who claim something have been labeled as disobedient deviants who dare to impose expense and risk on society. Daltonians who demand the abolishment of screening test has been labeled as reckless, and as inflicting loss to other Daltonians.
Silence, on the other hand, have been regarded as a confession of the lack of awareness, or an intended concealment, of the deficiency.
In any case, they were interpreted as lacking readiness to look for a way of “better adaptation” to the status quo of the technology and social arrangement.
It should be noticed that the difficulty to talk does not mean a coerced silence. Rahter, it is a difficulty to liberate oneself from induced inference, or from a moral obligation to talk in a given set of vocabularies. In fact, a lot of minorities have took the self control as natural and necessary. It is not so surprising, however, if few could stand against the test conducted in their childhood and against the advice offered by their elementary school teachers.
With this lack of voiced claim, protesters are often isolated and even easily countered as depicting themselves as victims.
Alienation of the Self and the Othering of others
The problem in wider point of view lies in the public attitude to listen.
In general, under the conventional dichotomy of health and disease, normal and abnormal, people tend to believe in the boundary of the two as natural, distinct and fixed. In this belief, the mission of medical science and the social entrustment to medicine should be cure and remedy.
This belief must be rational in case of curable infectious diseases and light injuries to which the model of temporary hospitalization, i.e., the presupposition of recovery and comeback is applicable. The same belief, however, is not valid in case of chronic or incurable diseases, disabilities, congenital abnormalities, and so on, because it logically implies and in effect justifies permanent exclusion.
In this frame of reference, people tend to listen to the voice of these suffering from social exclusion as an expression of a tragedy of an individual with an impairment of body.
But the lesson of the history of color blindness, along with a lot of insight in disability studies, is that the boundary is a social construct. It means that we are all subject of this relative and arbitrary categorization of man. In a word, our technology, information,education, and social arrangement in general are, at least now, not so open to accept the human diversity.
The commonplace inference and everyday practice which cuts off “those poor individuals” and leaves the social conditions as they are, then, contains a serious alienation of the self and the Othering of others. It is surely the other side of the difficulty to talk.
Responsive Interaction of Voice and Ear
In this difficulty, it is not wise to appeal to the logic of the spontaneity of voice any more. Voice, if it is to exist, first, one must learn. Second, one must be listened for.
No one is free from suffering, but no one can talk on it without learning. But the significance of the narrative of the suffering is endowed by being listened by someone else who takes it as a stimulus to respond.
The responsive ear to listen for others’ voices will in turn evoke an attitude to listen for the untold voice of his/her own suffering.
With this identification, a positive circle will arise, in which responsibility to listen or response-ability stimulates the voice to speak out, and in turn the voice stimulates the ear to listen. Stories will be told and retold, reframed and reedited in this virtuous circle.
A Proposal
In order to channelize conversation in this direction, it would be needed, first, to change the definition of health and normal. According to a suggestion from recent discussion, the absolute concept of soundness in the conventional dichotomy has caused a drive toward both extremes of over-medicalization on one hand and the short of care on the other hand. This is true in the case of color vision.
Second, if diversity is the normal condition of man and the accidentality is inevitable in the individual existence, then the role of professions would be required to shift from cure and remedy to care, counseling, and support. Particularly, readiness to listen for the voice of Daltonians must be an essential requirement for specialists, because suggestions of skills of support and principles of universal design must be searched and found in the experience of those minority who had some trouble in the present condition of society, or who has managed or coped with their own color vision peculiarity and got alternative way of seeing.
Third, this is not a discussion on personal traits or attitude of individual specialist, but a proposal of a re-organization of faculties and/or of a new interdisciplinary project on a new mission.
