[nabs-l] Blindness and Race

Fri Jan 24 15:01:16 UTC 2014

Sounds like a great experiment. Fun to watch.

-----Original Message-----
From: nabs-l [mailto:nabs-l-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Jedi Moerke
Sent: Friday, January 24, 2014 7:44 AM
To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Blindness and Race

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
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>>> for
>>>> nabs-l:
>>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/filerime%40gmai
>>>> l.com
>>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info 
>>> for
>>> nabs-l:
>>> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/ryan.l.silveira%
>>> 40gmail.com
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/loneblindjedi%40sa
> mobile.net
> 

_______________________________________________
nabs-l mailing list
nabs-l at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
nabs-l:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/justin.williams2%40gmail
.com