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Stevie Wonder is blind. We know this. Everyone knows this. Wonder, arguably the greatest living maker of popular music, has always been blind. He was born with a condition that caused him to go blind as a baby, which means he has been blind for 75 years. But there’s a persistent, mostly-unserious conspiracy theory that Wonder isn’t really blind, and NBA great Carmelo Anthony is merely the latest celebrity to propagate it. Well, Wonder does not think those rumors are funny, and he addressed them at a recent concert.
Stevie Wonder is currently on a UK tour, and he played at Blackwater Fields in Cardiff last week. During his set, Wonder told the crowd, “You know, there have been rumors about me seeing and all that.” The crowd laughed, but Wonder wasn’t joking. He continued: “But seriously, you know the truth. The truth is, shortly after my birth I became blind. Now, that was a blessing because it’s allowed me to see the world in the vision of truth, of sight, to see people in the spirit of them — not they look, not what color they are. What color is their spirit?”
That video of Wonder went viral, and Dr. Kavita Patel, an NBC News medical contributor, recently commented about it on-air, saying, “There’s been these stereotypes of what a blind person is, and what we know is that none of that is true. We know that people who are blind have many different levels of navigating every aspect of what we take for granted if we have sight, and that includes the ability to recognize people. So it is very plausible that you can walk into a room with a blind person and they immediately know who you are by voice, by smell, by the sense of your presence and characteristics.” So there you have it. Stop joking about how Stevie Wonder isn’t really blind.