[nabs-l] Do Blind People SEE Color-Race???

[Robin]

How blind people see race Osagie K. Obasogie set out to find out what 
'race' means to people who've never been able to see skin color. By 
Francie Latour January 19, 2014

In Martin Luther King Jr. s historic "I Have a Dream" speech, he 
yearned for a time when Americans would "not be judged by the color 
of their skin but by the content of their character. King's language 
drew on a metaphor for fairness as old as the image of blindfolded 
Lady Justice, one that has long held a seductive appeal in America's 
conversation on race: that of blindness. If we could just stop seeing 
color, the logic goes-if we could truly be race blind-we might at 
last move beyond the sins of slavery and prejudice, and reach a kind 
of utopia in which racial differences are emptied of meaning.

But what happens when the metaphor of colorblindness is tested 
literally? For lifelong blind people, who have no ability to sort 
people by skin color, does race become as meaningless as we might 
hope? Or do they in fact "see" race? And if they do-if they are no 
less race conscious than the rest of us-what might that tell us about 
an ideal that anchors our most basic sense of racial equality?

Those questions lie at the heart of "Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race 
Through the Eyes of the Blind," by legal scholar and sociology 
professor Osagie K. Obasogie. In a study eight years in the making, 
Obasogie, who teaches at the University of California Hastings, set 
out to document how blind people experience race. He found that even 
without visual cues, they experience the same divisions and 
prejudices as anyone else.

In all, Obasogie interviewed 106 subjects who had been blind since 
birth-white, black, male, female, young and old, urban, suburban and 
rural. Their stories ranged from the commonplace to the surreal: We 
meet a blind black man named Keith, for whom romantic interests rise 
and then abruptly fall the moment a blind white woman discovers the 
texture of his hair. We meet Laura, who recalls the morning as a 
young girl she asked her mother why she was cleaning the kitchen 
counter. "'Well, because black people smell, and your baby sitter was 
here last night,'" Laura recalled. "And I said, 'That's interesting,' 
and filed that away.

Indeed, Obasogie argues, it is that continual filing away of 
information, and not any visually obvious reality, that trains us to 
see race and attach meaning to it. "We are all socialized to see 
race. But it's only by talking to blind people that we really get a 
true understanding of how strong that socialization practice is," 
Obasogie said. "What this study highlights is how the things that we 
think are obvious are often things that society works very hard to teach us.

'If blind people are seeing race and organizing their lives around 
race, you can be damn sure that race is still an important part of 
other people's lives.' -- Osagie K. Obasogie

Ideas spoke to Obasogie by phone from his office in California.

IDEAS: You started your research after seeing the 2004 film "Ray" 
[about the life of blind soul music legend Ray Charles]. What about 
the movie led you to these questions?

OBASOGIE: I guess what initially struck me about the movie was how 
Ray Charles had this really interesting and deep understanding of 
race ever since he was a little boy....After a few weeks of research, 
I found that no one had really asked the question to blind people, 
what is race? How do you understand race and what does it mean to you?

IDEAS: What was the most surprising finding in the study?

OBASOGIE: What these interviews really highlight is the fact that 
being able to see actually has very little to do with understanding 
what race is....Blind people have a very visual understanding of 
race. And blind people use these visual understandings of race to 
guide them through life, just like everyone else does, in terms of 
where they live, who they date, and so on.

IDEAS: What do you mean when you say they understand race visually?

OBASOGIE: Oftentimes, sighted people think that blind people either 
have no understanding of racial difference, or that their 
understanding can only be limited to some secondary sensory 
evaluation, such as hearing accents. What my research shows is that 
those kinds of secondary experiences do not come to define what race 
is for blind people. Rather it's this knowledge that what's important 
about race and what defines race is the fact that people look 
different. It's about a visual difference that they can't appreciate 
directly, but yet they are socialized to appreciate and react to.

IDEAS: Some of your subjects described startling introductions to 
race bias from a young age; one boy's father drove him from their 
suburban home to an urban area and instructed him to "smell the smell 
of [n-word] town. How much of this can be attributed to subjects 
recalling memories from an earlier time?

OBASOGIE: There were certainly some stories that come from a 
particular time. So when people talk about going to segregated 
schools for the blind, we're talking about people who went to certain 
schools before the 1950s. However, a number of experiences-such as 
blind people saying they met somebody, they thought the person was 
really cool, and then they found out the person was black and they 
couldn't date that person anymore-those were from respondents who 
were in their 20s and 30s.

IDEAS: Often, sighted people have an instinctive reaction to protect 
a blind person-making sure they cross the street safely, for example. 
How did that instinct play out in terms of race?

OBASOGIE: One of the things that struck me the most about these 
interviews was the way that racial boundaries get patrolled, 
primarily in the realm of dating. So you have parents making sure 
their children know that it's not appropriate for them to date 
outside their race. And then secondly you have these strangers, for 
example, coming up to a woman [shopping with a black male friend in a 
store] and saying, "Do you know your husband is black? which is an 
unbelievable statement on so many levels. You had another situation 
where a landlord saw a black person walk into a white [blind] woman's 
house, he goes and rings the doorbell and asks, "Is everything OK? I 
saw a black person walk in your house. It comes from the same 
sentiment of seeing a blind person and thinking they may be taken 
advantage of-and for some people, that involves making sure that 
quote-unquote vulnerable white blind people are aware that there are 
black people out there [who] pose a certain threat to white people.

IDEAS: What, if any, are the broader societal implications flowing 
from the findings that blind people are not colorblind or racially oblivious?

OBASOGIE: We kind of live in this world now where people think that 
everything is now postracial. With the election of Barack Obama, we 
assume that well, we have a black president, racism is over, the end. 
And I'm really trying to challenge that notion....If blind people are 
seeing race and organizing their lives around race, you can be damn 
sure that race is still an important part of other people's lives.

IDEAS: One focus of your book is the powerful metaphor of 
colorblindness in the law. How does studying race among the blind 
relate to that?

OBASOGIE: In short, colorblindness is simply this idea that 
government should not be in the business of using race or racial 
classifications in any way, that the role of government is to be 
blind to race, and that by being blind to race, justice and fairness 
will follow....On the one hand, that's in general a good idea. Part 
of the reason we've had so many problems with race, from the founding 
of our country up until recent times, was that government was using 
racial classifications to discriminate against certain groups of people.

But the other end of colorblindness is that it's been used as an 
ideology to prevent the state from engaging in forms of affirmative 
action or other forms of government-based assistance programs that 
would help make up for past forms of discrimination. So at the crux 
of this notion of colorblindness is this metaphor, that being blind 
to race necessarily leads to fairness. And the way this study 
interacts with that claim is by asking, well, does blindness 
necessarily lead to fairness? Does it prevent people from being able 
to act in a discriminatory manner?... By looking at how blind people 
actually think about race, it can provide an empirical basis for us 
to rethink some of the policies we've developed on the back of that metaphor.

Francie Latour writes about race and culture for The Boston Globe, 
Essence, and The Root. She can be reached at franciewrites @gmail .com. .