[nabs-l] Blindness and Race

[Elif Emir]

I love reading your story. Thanks for sharing it.
Elif

2014/1/22, Arielle Silverman <arielle71 at gmail.com>:
> 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
>
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