FORT BELVOIR, Va. -- Visually impaired comedian Alex Valdez entertained and spoke about the difficulties he’s overcome in his career during the National Disability Employment Awareness Month observance, Oct. 20, at the McNamara Headquarters Complex.
“People are always amazed at how I can look so humorously at being given a complication in my life such as blindness,” he said.
Valdez, visually impaired since childhood, said he has never seen himself on his many television appearances, but he was able to help the audience see how attitudes shape perceptions of employees with disabilities.
The Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Defense Contract Audit Agency and Defense Technical Information Center Equal Employment Opportunity offices collaborated on the event, which highlighted the 2011 theme, “Profit by Investing in Workers with Disabilities.”
Valdez captured the audience’s attention with punch lines like “nice-looking crowd” and responded to a question about his lack of sunglasses with, “I don’t see deaf people wearing ear muffs.” Valdez said laughter is one of the ultimate tools for keeping life’s difficulties in proper perspective and that his blindness isn’t the greatest obstacle in his life.
“I find that people have a wide range of reactions to my blindness,” he said. “Some are obviously uncomfortable being around me, while others are almost morbidly interested in the fact that I can’t see, and [that’s] all they want to talk about.”
Although such attitudes toward Valdez’s outward disability suggest he is different from other people, he said people are very much the same inside.
“Everybody in this world has one kind of a disability or another,” he said. “The disabilities that have presented the greatest challenge of my life are not the impairments of the body, but the disabilities of attitude. In this way, we are all challenged.”
To illustrate his point about attitudes toward people with disabilities and the disabilities themselves, Valdez conducted an exercise. Everyone selected one of four disabilities they would choose to have – blindness, cerebral palsy, quadriplegia and developmental disability – and then chose one of those they absolutely would not want to have. Then he had them explain their answers.
“The disability that you choose, you will wake up with tomorrow morning and you will have the rest of your life,” Valdez said. “One to have, one not to have; no right, no wrong answers.”
By allowing the audience to listen to each other’s responses, Valdez revealed audience perceptions and misperceptions about disabilities and their relation to cognitive and physical abilities and quality of life.
“Here’s the bottom line: They’re all the same disability,” Valdez said after the exercise was over. “Because what we have here … are not people with disabilities, they’re reactions [and perceptions] to disabilities.”
Valdez explained that reactions are not wrong, but they often affect decisions.
“Our reactions will affect our decisions when we’re working with people with disabilities, when we’re interviewing people with disabilities, and when we are hiring people with disabilities,” he said. “Within every disability is a range of ability.”
Every employee should be viewed in the same way and given the opportunity to succeed and fail, Valdez said.
“The key to success is to hold no higher standard for burden of proof for a person with a disability than you would for anyone,” he said.
In a final demonstration, Valdez asked the audience to indicate by applause if they would be able to perform their current jobs if they had the disability they chose. Many of the attendees applauded.
“[To] those of you that applauded, how many of you honestly believe that you would have your job today if you were born with that disability? Applaud,” he said.
Only two people clapped.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the difference between opportunity and ability,” he said. “This is the gap [that the Americans with Disabilities Act] is trying to bridge.”
Philip Hepperle, DLA EEO operations staff director, cited Valdez’s experiment as proof that DLA needs to increase education in the hiring of employees with disabilities.
“Perceptions … cause the barriers to employment, and that was really the point of [Valdez] asking people to clap,” he said. “That’s the point of this program, … to try to overcome the fact that people should focus on what people with disabilities can do … not what they cannot do.”
DLA EEO Director Stephanie Credle agreed with Hepperle and said the moment following Valdez’s final questions was very poignant.
“Even after we talked about everything, … there was a perception that if we had a particular disability that we would not have progressed to the point where most of us are in our careers,” Credle said.
“My concern is that if the perception is still there, then perhaps it will be used when [managers and supervisors] think of hiring someone who has a disabling condition, and that’s the challenge that we have in federal agencies. … That is the barrier that we most have to overcome.”