Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

by Osagie K. Obasogie

Colorblindness has become an integral part of the national conversation on race in America. Given the assumptions behind this influential metaphor―that being blind to race will lead to racial equality―it's curious that, until now, we have not considered if or how the blind "see" race. Most sighted people assume that the answer is they don't, and are therefore incapable of racial bias―an example that the sighted community should presumably follow. In Blinded by Sight ,Osagie K. Obasogie shares a startling observation made during discussions with people from all walks of life who have been blind since even the blind aren't colorblind―blind people understand race visually, just like everyone else. Ask a blind person what race is, and they will more than likely refer to visual cues such as skin color. Obasogie finds that, because blind people think about race visually, they orient their lives around these understandings in terms of who they are friends with, who they date, and much more. In Blinded by Sight , Obasogie argues that rather than being visually obvious, both blind and sighted people are socialized to see race in particular ways, even to a point where blind people "see" race. So what does this mean for how we live and the laws that govern our society? Obasogie delves into these questions and uncovers how color blindness in law, public policy, and culture will not lead us to any imagined racial utopia.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, Sociology, Law

287 pages, Hardcover

First published November 27, 2013

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concept of this book and the author's empirical research fascinate me; the strongest parts were those where he let his interview subjects who are blind speak for themselves about their experiences coming of age and learning to understand race. Unfortunate, the book suffers from being too obviously a PhD dissertation. The transitions between the chapters are choppy, the novel ideas are weighted down by pages and pages of literature review, and academic jargon obscures points that could have been more clearly presented. I understand why the author wrote it that way, but I wish he'd had a better editor working with him to turn this academic treatise into more than an exercise in preaching to the choir, because I think he has important points to make that deserve a wider audience.

I also wish, while he was doing his literature review, the author had taken the time to dig a little deeper into disability studies. While his legal perspective is an interesting one, he misses (to me) some obvious questions, such as whether the tendency of people who are blind to speak and think of race in primarily visual terms is unique to race, or simply an artifact of growing up in a sighted society that affects people who are blind's perception of everything. (My lay observation is that it's the latter.)

I was also a little dubious about his process for finding interview subjects--and unconvinced by his argument that phone, rather than written, interviews were the best means for collecting the data he sought. (Contradictorily, he claims he had to conduct spoken interviews because otherwise he would have had to work in braille, but also notes that he located most of his subjects via Internet mailing lists and other online forums. The fact that this method of selecting subjects means he gathered an interview pool of people perfectly capable of using assistive technology to interact via electronic text seems to have escaped him.) For one thing, it means people who are deaf-blind were entirely left out of his subject pool.

[Somatosphere]

Review by Eram Alam

"Osagie Obasogie’s Blinded by Sight is driven by a seemingly straightforward question: how do blind people understand race? To answer this, he divides his analysis into two parts. In the first half of the book, Obasogie interrogates how blindness and race operate on sociological and interpersonal levels. In the second, he traces the ways these understandings are subsequently translated into legal and institutional practices. Using over 100 interviews with individuals who have been blind since birth, Obasogie shows that their racial frameworks rely on “physical characteristics such as skin color, facial features, and other visual characteristics” (3). To understand this counterintuitive finding and analyze its implications for a larger project of racial justice, Obasogie combines qualitative research with insight from Critical Race Theory and historical-legal analysis to posit a constitutive theory of race. He goes beyond a conventional understanding of “social construction,” which suggests that “the social” is overlaid over a preexisting, or objective “visual”. Instead, Obasogie argues that using blind people’s perspective on race demonstrates that the act of seeing is inherently racialized. There is no two-step process – the visual and the social are mutually and simultaneously constructed."

Read the rest:
http://somatosphere.net/2014/04/osagi...

[Alana Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was not entirely about how the blind perceive race but more about how race is perceived visually in the past and present and how that relates to society as a whole, as race is a social construct, and how this idea is implemented in the legal system. Large parts of this book read like a sociology journal article and were a little dry to swallow. The most engrossing part was the section where blind respondents recount their first experiences with race which were unassuming, positive perceptions of humanity until outside influences, mostly their families, tainted them negative. Interesting read definitely but not the easiest.

[Kony · Rating 2 out of 5]

Basically a book form of the author's dissertation, so this is ideal for people who like to read academic research studies for fun.

Intriguing premise, and seems well researched and intelligently conceived. But after 2 hours of wading through theoretical/historical background, I still hadn't gotten to the meat of it and felt unmotivated to continue. This may be a reflection of my own strong preference for non-academic forms of writing, rather than any fault of the writer. May return to this later if such an impulse strikes.

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the central premise of the book is fascinating, the book is repetitive and ponderously written, whole chapters fail to integrate the research into the analysis, and ultimately, I left feeling that this would have been a better law review article than a whole book.

[Mills College Library]

305.80097 O122 2014