I Am Blind but Not a Beggar

One afternoon in 2023, my wife — who was heavily pregnant at the time — and I were eating at a Padang food stall. Suddenly someone slipped a banknote under my plate. As we were leaving, another customer chased after us and offered some money. Politely, we declined. We had come to eat and transact as equal consumers, not to ask for pity.

At home, when I told my family about the incident, they reacted unexpectedly: ‘Why did you refuse? Their intention was good; they were sincere in giving charity.’ This story leaves one fundamental sociological question: why is a disabled person’s body so vulnerable to being positioned as an object of pity? Why is society so awkward when it sees an independent disabled person that it feels compelled to smother them with compassion?

In today’s public narrative, disability issues are almost always trapped in two extreme poles that are equally problematic. On one side, disabled people are exploited as pitiful figures deserving of sympathy through the discourse of poverty porn. On the other side, when a disabled person does an ordinary activity in their life, the media and public rush to elevate them as superheroes in an inspiration porn narrative. In fact, with adequate systems and resources, disabled people can certainly live ordinary, equal, and meaningful lives.

Structurally, a disabled person’s position and achievements are determined by the intersectionality of social identities: economic class, physical condition, geographic location, ethnicity, and sex and gender. All these variables differentiate the level of support systems available to a person.

As a man who has experienced total blindness since 2003, I certainly went through a difficult adaptation phase, accompanied by pain, disappointment, and sadness. After all, I am an ordinary human being with limits to my capacity to overcome difficulties. In reality, what saved me was not a ‘biological miracle’ or personal resilience that deserves to be labelled ‘inspirational’, but rather the support of structural foundations.

I was raised by a family that placed education as the top priority. I had the opportunity to access education from a special school, a private junior high school, a state senior high school, to earning an LPDP scholarship at the higher education level. All of this took place within an inclusive organisational and social environment.

However, let us pose a critical hypothetical question: what if I had been born a woman, a member of a minority group, or from a family without adequate financial support?

The scenario could very likely be drastically reversed. For disabled women, family protection often takes the form of shackles that weaken social mobility. Concerns about physical and sexual safety in public spaces mean they are often confined at home in the name of affection.

Our society is still nurtured in patriarchal prejudice: ‘Do disabled women need to go to school to a high level? If they are too highly educated, which man would want to marry them? Conversely, which man would be willing to marry a blind woman? Can they manage a household and serve a husband?’

This is where intersectionality operates. The experiences of disabled men and women are never uniform. Disabled men may still be seen as having economically productive potential. In contrast, disabled women are squeezed by layered discrimination: considered physically helpless, positioned as a domestic burden, and vulnerable to hidden gender-based violence.

This issue of intersectionality is not merely academic theory, but a reality in society. I have a blind married couple as friends in Makassar. The husband is an accomplished athlete and LPDP scholarship recipient. Meanwhile, his wife has proven her capacity as an expert team member in the city government. They run a household, manage domestic life, and pursue professional careers like any ordinary couple.

Of course, their lives are full of challenges. However, the heaviest burden lies in the social role as husband and wife in a society that applies gender norms unequally. The wife must struggle twice as hard to prove her professionalism in the public sphere while also meeting the expectations of a household manager — a burden that men do not bear. This couple’s success is due to positive affirmation, equal treatment, and adequate support systems from the family to the state.

The majority of society’s view of disability is still trapped in two outdated models: the charity model and the medical model. Through the charity model, disabled people are viewed solely as objects of pity — the main producers of the poverty porn narrative. Through the medical model, disabled people are considered individuals with ‘broken’ bodies who must be cured or ‘normalised’. Both models place the problem entirely on the individual disabled person’s body, not on the environment. This discriminatory paradigm is known as ableism.

It is time for us to radically abandon that paradigm and move towards the social model and the human rights-based model. In the social model, the main barriers for disabled people are not physical or sensory conditions, but rather the existence of physical environments, social attitudes, and public policies that are not inclusive.

A blind person’s mobility would be much better if society viewed them not as a ‘defective’ person, but as an individual with different abilities. This is not merely a euphemism, but a recognition of diversity whose needs must be met. The provision of guiding blocks on pavements and inclusive public transport is a concrete example of such fulfilment.

In line with this, the human rights-based model affirms disabled people as full legal subjects. They have fundamental rights to education, employment, legal protection, and other rights.