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How blind people see race
Osagie K. Obasogie set out to find out what ‘race’ means to people who’ve never been able to see skin color
By Francie Latour
January 19, 2014
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/01/19/how-blind-people-see-race/0pdBKGzv9y2P53BXWke0oO/story.html
In Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, he yearned for a time when Americans would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King’s language drew on a metaphor
for fairness as old as the image of blindfolded Lady Justice, one that has long held a seductive appeal in America’s conversation on race: that of blindness. If we could just stop seeing color, the logic goes—if we could truly be race blind—we might at last
move beyond the sins of slavery and prejudice, and reach a kind of utopia in which racial differences are emptied of meaning.
But what happens when the metaphor of colorblindness is tested literally? For lifelong blind people, who have no ability to sort people by skin color, does race become as meaningless as we might hope? Or do they in
fact “see” race? And if they do—if they are no less race conscious than the rest of us—what might that tell us about an ideal that anchors our most basic sense of racial equality?
Those questions lie at the heart of “Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind,” by legal scholar and sociology professor Osagie K. Obasogie. In a study eight years in the making, Obasogie, who teaches
at the University of California Hastings, set out to document how blind people experience race. He found that even without visual cues, they experience the same divisions and prejudices as anyone else.
In all, Obasogie interviewed 106 subjects who had been blind since birth—white, black, male, female, young and old, urban, suburban and rural. Their stories ranged from the commonplace to the surreal: We meet a blind
black man named Keith, for whom romantic interests rise and then abruptly fall the moment a blind white woman discovers the texture of his hair. We meet Laura, who recalls the morning as a young girl she asked her mother why she was cleaning the kitchen counter.
“‘Well, because black people smell, and your baby sitter was here last night,’” Laura recalled. “And I said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and filed that away.”
Indeed, Obasogie argues, it is that continual filing away of information, and not any visually obvious reality, that trains us to see race and attach meaning to it. “We are all socialized to see race. But it’s only
by talking to blind people that we really get a true understanding of how strong that socialization practice is,” Obasogie said. “What this study highlights is how the things that we think are obvious are often things that society works very hard to teach us.”
Ideas spoke to Obasogie by phone from his office in California.
Read full article:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/01/19/how-blind-people-see-race/0pdBKGzv9y2P53BXWke0oO/story.html
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