If you’re able to actually find restaurants that still treat your blind friend as an equal even when accompanied by a sighted person, then maybe waiters must have an easier time adjusting to blind customers than deaf customers.

The real kicker? His credit card has his picture on it, and the waitress handed it to me.

He’s blind, not stupid, not incompetent, and not deaf. Sheesh. And not needing someone else to do his talking for him.

There are a few other restaurants we’ve been to together where he’s treated like a competent adult who just happens to need someone to read the menu to him, and we go back to those.

What makes it worse, above and beyond treating this visitor as if he were a child:

1. They did not account for the fact that this guy apparently NEEDED to hold on to something. If there honestly was a good reason for him to avoid touching certain things or putting too much weight on them, and not just them trying to cling to power (which is what this sounded like), they could have offered him a seat or explained the problem. (Eg, “oh, that counter isn’t as strong as it looks, it might not take your weight for long” or whatever) they shouldn’t have prohibited him from one approach to meeting his needs (to lean on something) without some alternative.

2. This was Amanda’s home, so she’s the only person with a right to say who can and cannot touch or lean on her things. It wasn’t the staff’s place to decide or lecture, and abominable that they overrode her clear wishes. So they weren’t only treating the visitor as a child but also Amanda.

Interesting thing is, my friend is usually the one with the money. ; )

I’d say she and I have about equal “assertiveness” vibes; and, in fact, I’d probably say that she comes off as more in control than I do. But she’s black. And that’s the *only* factor she and I can determine is at play when the waiter freezes her out. And it’s funny; bleeding heart that I am, I always feel bad that we don’t leave the guy a decent tip. But he still hasn’t figured it out — *she’s* the one paying!

Similar situations occurred in the past with a friend who uses a wheelchair; I for some reason quite regularly got the bill placed under *my* nose — and that friend is male, so that particularly enraged me — and, again, it sure as hell wasn’t understandable for the waiter to do that either. But I’m trying to show contrast with the situation with my female friend — in her case I’m quite certain the presumption has nothing to do with body language or assertiveness or anything besides just “looking” a certain way. We can only conclude that that waiter just doesn’t like black folks. The notion that certain folks aren’t worth acknowledging *at all* doesn’t lie too far away from outright hate.

My theory is that people automatically look for the one who looks like the group leader. When total strangers are seen in a group, often the most extroverted one seems to get tagged as “the leader”, whether they are or not. Others often get ignored, the ignorance being to the proportion of power that appears to exist.

Since extroversion is conveyed through social confidence, certain items of body language and a few other things I can’t get my head around, this would go a long way towards explaining your experiences. Especially when you are with staff and you are used to staff holding power. NTs seem to be quite good at detecting power imbalances, and less good at balancing them once they are seen (to put it politely).

I remember a guy coming into my apartment and leaning on something of mine, and the staff (there were two) told him not to do that, and I told him “It’s fine, you can touch anything you want,” and the staff got really mad and tried to insist on what he could and could not do in my house. (He clearly needed to grab things for stability to avoid falling over, this wasn’t a “random touching for no reason” thing.)

Beyond that, I think it’s the same prejudice as people have about obvious disabilities. I’ve had people assume complete strangers were my caretaker, because I was standing near them (for instance, next to them in line), and I use crutches (and being able to speak without full use of my legs is apparently a rare and exotic skill in some people’s eyes). It may be more of an NT thing, because NTs are more likely to unconsciously read body language, and arrive at a conclusion of “different” or “weird” without thinking why they concluded that.