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If you’re Stevie Wonder, you’ve probably heard jokes for much of your life related to your blindness. You’ve probably made some of them yourself and maybe even made some people slightly uncomfortable in the process. (“[H]e makes so many jokes about being blind,” singer and actor Audra Day told the New York Post in 2015. “At the end of a session, he’ll say, ‘OK, see you guys later, so I’m just gonna get in my car and drive home.’ You don’t know whether to laugh or not!”) But it seems that a time comes, every so often, where you must set the record straight and remind people that it’s not a joke or some elaborate prank on the public played out over decades.
Wonder did just that at a recent concert appearance in Cardiff, Wales. “I must say to all of you, something that I was thinking, ‘When did I want to let the world know this?’ But I wanted to say it right now,” Wonder told the audience in Wales, per Billboard. “You know there have been rumors about me seeing and all that? But seriously, you know the truth. 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. See people in the spirit of them, not how they look. Not what color they are, but what color is their spirit?”
Though Billboard lists some of the rumors that Wonder might have been responding to in their coverage (such as Anthony Anderson’s joking assertion to Stephen Colbert in 2016 that Wonder can actually see) the sentiment about what color our spirits are is pure Wonder. Both in his lyrics and his public statements, Wonder is more likely to contextualize what he sees as either hate or love. “I do see color, but I don’t see it like that,” he said in a 2021 conversation with Oprah Winfrey. “I see color in the spirit of the person, and your spirit is either good, or bad.” His most recent single, 2024’s “Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart,” has Wonder singing lyrics like “All my brothers and sisters, we don’t have to lose humanity/We’re family, so can we please fix our nation’s broken heart?” Wonder can joke, but he’s always going to bring it around to a genuine point.
