[nabs-l] Blindness and Race
marissa
pianogirlforlife7 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 24 13:52:28 UTC 2014
Jane Elliot? We watched a little film about that in English last
week, on Thursday I think? It was very good. Then we talked
about, "What if the class had been black and white? They were all
white." and I understood it all because Jane explained it really
well.
----- Original Message -----
From: Beth Taurasi <denverqueen1107 at comcast.net
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 06:38:16 -0700
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Blindness and Race
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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