Helen KellER, A Racist??
Posted on Feb 10th, 2007
by 
Jes
Jes
Thought Experiment:
Is it possible that Helen Kellar could have been a racist? My mind quickly alludes to an episode of the Chappel Show in which Dave plays a black KKK member who is blind and doesn't realize he is actually black. Friggin hilarious. But what is the deeper point behind the shenanigan?
For Helen Kellar to be a racist, she would have to discriminate based on one of her other three available senses. Taste? No. Smell? Maybe. Hippies smell. What about touch? Ok, maybe. She could start feeling people's heads and discriminate based on hair. But, would she discriminate for or against hair? Obviously the notion is ridiculous, and I'm left thinking, discriminating based on hair is so arbitrary and meaningless; does our sense of touch tell us anything about the nature of a person?
Let's copy and paste that sentence leaving fill-in-the-blanks:
discriminating based on _____________ is so arbitrary and meaningless; does our sense of ________ tell us anything about the nature of a person?
Turns out we have more to learn from HK than we realized.
Is it possible that Helen Kellar could have been a racist? My mind quickly alludes to an episode of the Chappel Show in which Dave plays a black KKK member who is blind and doesn't realize he is actually black. Friggin hilarious. But what is the deeper point behind the shenanigan?
For Helen Kellar to be a racist, she would have to discriminate based on one of her other three available senses. Taste? No. Smell? Maybe. Hippies smell. What about touch? Ok, maybe. She could start feeling people's heads and discriminate based on hair. But, would she discriminate for or against hair? Obviously the notion is ridiculous, and I'm left thinking, discriminating based on hair is so arbitrary and meaningless; does our sense of touch tell us anything about the nature of a person?
Let's copy and paste that sentence leaving fill-in-the-blanks:
discriminating based on _____________ is so arbitrary and meaningless; does our sense of ________ tell us anything about the nature of a person?
Turns out we have more to learn from HK than we realized.
Access: Public
discrimination
July 2008 
I think you nailed it right on the head. It comes back to the question of how does one determine, or better what acttually constiitutes the nature of an individual. We, for the purpose of easy understanding, like to classify things in groups based on common destinctions. Aristotle, by defintition was the orginal racists, he did more classifying by natural, sensible categories than any human being before him. If Heller Keller could be a racist then Aristotle definitly was. Obviously there is some line here, some tangible point, classifying things by there natural caracter is good, to an extent. So where does classification lose its usefulness? Hair definitly falls on the side of futility. It has something to do with the interaction between the classifier and the classifyee. But, whatev. Let me ask you this…could one make the argument that all hate of fellow humans is a type of discrimination. It is me saying i do not favor you for one reason or another. For instance, I discriminante against child molestors. I hate them. Is that wrongs, and if not why not. Is it because we place blame on them for their actions. Word