[nabs-l] Blindness and Race

Fri Jan 24 13:38:16 UTC 2014

Oh, I forgot she was a teacher.  I actually liked that movie, Blue Eyed, 
because it discussed a good lesson on discrimination, and she brings the 
question of discrimination at the end of her exercise.
Beth
\
On 1/24/2014 5:44 AM, Jedi Moerke wrote:
> That was Jane Elliot. She wasn't a social worker. She was a teacher. She started these experiments and her third-grade classroom way back in the 60s shortly after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Now, she does these experiments and workshops aimed at discussing racism. One of the best films cataloging her work is Blue I'd. It was a film done in the 1990s, but the topic of discussion is still quite relevant.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On Jan 23, 2014, at 7:39 PM, Beth Taurasi <denverqueen1107 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> Wow.  I agree with Ryan.  WE pay too much attention to the outside.  We judge too much by the person's hair, eye color, and so on.  I remember listening to a documentary in which a social worker purposefully judged the person by his eye color.  She separated a group of people by eye cfolor, and made the blue eyed people feel so bad it turned into a nightmare.  Her exercise, she said, taught the people about how discrimination works.
>> Beth
>>
>>> On 1/23/2014 7:37 AM, Ryan Silveira wrote:
>>> This is a great story, Arielle.  Like you, I used to think that blind
>>> people are "less" racist than sighted people.  I don't necessarily
>>> think this is true.  I think that blind people may be less apt to
>>> understand why people are judged by their skin color.  I think the
>>> racism that blind people develop is more based on a cultural prejudice
>>> than one solely based on skin color.  For example, a lot of black
>>> people have a certain way of speaking.  That accent and speech pattern
>>> is due to their cultural and educational background, not to their skin
>>> color.  A blind person can often tell when a person is black and
>>> develop a prejudice, but again, that is a cultural prejudice, not one
>>> based on skin color.  I remember when I first learned about the races
>>> in the first grade, I could not for the life of me understand why
>>> people judged others based on their skin color.  I still have a hard
>>> time grasping that fact.  I think we, as a society, pay too much
>>> attention to what is on the outside and not enough attention to what
>>> is inside of a person--what makes you Arielle or me Ryan.  I think
>>> that, because we cannot see skin color, we are more apt to judge a
>>> person based on their personality which is, in a way, somewhat less
>>> judgemental than someone who simply looks at a person and judges them
>>> by their skin color.  That is not to say that we don't have our
>>> prejudices, but we are somewhat less judgemental because we can't see
>>> skin color or other physical traits.  Thanks for sharing your story;
>>> it makes for a great discussion.
>>>
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>>> On 1/22/14, Elif Emir <filerime at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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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