[nabs-l] Blindness and Race

[Arielle Silverman]

Hi all,

Since I'm blind and also a social psychologist, I think this is a
fascinating topic. I am curious how other congenitally blind folks
learned about race and in what context. The stories relayed in the
article are tragic and show us just how far we still have to go as a
society.
I will never forget the day in second grade when we watched a movie in
school about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. They
were talking about a time when a group called white people was treated
better than a group called black people in certain parts of the
country. I had never heard of white people or black people before. My
parents never discussed race at home, partly because they were
progressive and didn't think race was relevant, and partly because we
lived in a very un-diverse neighborhood where practically everybody
was white. I'd met a few black people by then, apparently, but didn't
know the difference. Of course the movie never said anything about
white and black people having different skin colors, since that was
supposed to be obvious for sighted people. So I went through the
lesson thinking the whole conflict and status difference between white
and black people was completely arbitrary and very strange.
When I got home I told my family about the movie and asked them if I
was a white person or a black person. I still remember my mother's
hesitation and the surprised tone in her voice when she informed me
that I was white. I also remember asking why the black people in the
1950's didn't just dress up like white people if they wanted to be
treated better, to which my sister (who was ten, and sighted)
responded with characteristic sarcasm, "Um, it would be a little hard
for them to do that". I didn't understand why it would be hard for
blacks to dress up like whites, but it was apparently obvious to
everyone else in the world, so I didn't ask.
In the days and years thereafter, I would often overhear my mom
telling this story to her friends and asserting that my blindness gave
me a special gift of not being able to judge people by their
appearance. I at first thought her hesitation in answering my question
was because I had asked a stupid question. I eventually realized it
was a kind of pride of my naivete. For many years I truly thought that
my blindness protected me from  being racist. I held on to that
because it made me feel like it made up for all the other ways in
which people thought my blindness made me inferior.
Eventually, my view was challenged at an NFB convention, when I  told
some of my scholarship committee mentors that I thought blind people
must be less racist than sighted people. They argued that in their
experience this wasn't the case, and that blind people can often
differentiate race by listening. Today, I believe that blind people
are just as capable of developing racist attitudes as sighted people
are. Although being blind allowed me to stay naive longer, and
although I can sometimes, but not always, guess the race of folks I
meet, the main reason for my lack of racial prejudice was from my
background rather than my blindness. My sister obviously figured out
what race meant before I did, even though we grew up in the same
environment. She might have figured it out visually, but she, too,
grew up without having significant racial prejudices.
In some ways I am glad that my first exposure to race came from a
lesson about MLK and civil rights. I am not sure how I would have
discovered it otherwise. Perhaps a few years later, when I became best
friends with a girl who lived in south Phoenix and complained about
her black classmates calling her "white bread". Although, again, I
would have just found the comment and the situation peculiar. Anyway,
if I had been sighted, my first introduction to race might have been
different, but probably not worse.

Arielle