Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T23:38:03.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Osagie K. Obasogie
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?

I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 44 , Issue 3-4 , December 2010 , pp. 585 - 616
Copyright
© 2010 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Lauren Edelman, Kristin Luker, Neil Fligstein, Sarah Song, and Ian Haney López for their thoughts and comments throughout this project. A special thank you is also in order to Samuel Lucas, Ann Morning, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, and Aliya Saperstein for reviewing previous drafts of this article.

References

References

Ahmed, Patricia, et al. (2007) “Internal and External Ethnic Assessments in Eastern Europe,” 86 Social Forces 231–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Theodore W. (1994) The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Allen, Theodore W. (1997) The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Banks, Taunya L. (1999) “Colorism: A Darker Shade of Pale,” 47 UCLA Law Rev. 1705–46.Google Scholar
Bell, Derrick (1993) Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Berger, Martin A. (2005) Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2006) Racism Without Racist: Color Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Bothwell, Robert K., et al. (1989) “Cross Racial Identification,” 15 Personality and Social Psychology 19–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braman, Donald (1998) “On Race and Immutability,” 46 UCLA Law Rev. 375–1463.Google Scholar
Brown, Michael, et al. (2003) Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Caldwell, Paulette (1991) “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender,” 1991 Duke Law J. 365–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Connolly, Andrew C., et al. (2007) “Effect of Congenital Blindness on the Semantic Representation of Some Everyday Concepts,” 104 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 8241–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Crary, Jonathan (1994) Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Crary, Jonathan (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberle (1991) “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” 43 Stanford Law Rev. 1241–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al. (1995) “Introduction,” in Crenshaw, K. et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Davis, Darren W. (1997) “The Direction of Race of Interviewer Effects Among African Americans: Donning the Black Mask,” 41 American J. of Political Science 309–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eberhardt, Jennifer L., et al. (2004) “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing,” 87 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 876–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faugier, Jean (1997) “Sampling Hard to Reach Populations,” 26 J. of Advanced Nursing 790–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Flagg, Barbara J. (1993) “‘Was Blind, But Now I See’: White Race Consciousness and the Requirement of Discriminatory Intent,” 91 Michigan. Law Rev. 953–1017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geyer-Ryan, Helga (1996) “Imaginary Identity: Space, Gender, Nation,” in Jay, M. & Brennan, T., eds., Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gómez, Laura (2004) “A Tale of Two Genres: On the Real and Ideal Link Between Law and Society and Critical Race Theory,” in Sarat, A., ed., Blackwell Companion to Law and Society. Malden, MA: Wiley.Google Scholar
Gould, Stephen J. (1996) Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Gossett, Thomas (1997) Race: The History of an Idea in America. London: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Gray, David E. (2004) Doing Research in the Real World. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Groves, Robert M., et al. (2004) Survey Methodology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Hammersley, Martyn, & Gomm, Roger (1997) “Bias in Social Research,” Sociological Research Online, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/2/1/2.html (accessed 24 June 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haney López, Ian (1994) “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” 29 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Rev. 1–62.Google Scholar
Haney López, Ian (1996) White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Haney López, Ian (2004) Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.Google Scholar
Harris, Angela P. (1990) “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” 42 Stanford Law Rev. 581–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Cheryl (1992) “Whiteness as Property,” 106 Harvard Law Rev. 1707–91.Google Scholar
Hirschfeld, Lawrence (1996) Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin, & Brennan, Teresa (1996) Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnston, Patricia (2006) Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Trina (1999) “Shades of Brown: The Law of Skin Color,” 49 Duke Law J. 1487–557.Google Scholar
Jordan, Winthrop (1968) White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kang, Jerry (2005) “Trojan Horses of Race,” 118 Harvard Law Rev. 1489–593.Google Scholar
Krieger, Linda (1995) “The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach to Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity,” 47 Stanford Law Rev. 1161–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kwon, Peter (1997) “Jeffrey Dahmer and the Cosynthesis of Categories,” 48 Hastings Law J. 1257–92.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George (2003) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997) English With an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Loveman, Mara, & Muniz, Jeronimo O. (2007) “How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification,” 72 American Sociological Rev. 915–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Madeline, Milian, & Erin, Jane N., eds. (2001) Diversity and Visual Impairment: The Influence of Race, Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity on the Individual. New York: AFB Press.Google Scholar
Marmor, Gloria Strauss (1978) “Age of Blindness and the Development of the Semantics of Color Names,” 25 J. of Experimental Child Psychology 267–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Martin, John Levi, & Yeung, King-To (2003) “The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race in American Sociology,” 18 Sociological Forum 521–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCann, Michael (1996) “Causal versus Constitutive Explanations (or, On the Difficulty of Being So Positive …),” 21 Law and Social Inquiry 457–82.Google Scholar
Meissner, Christian A., & Brigham, John C. (2001) “Thirty Years of Investigating the Own-Race Bias in Memory for Faces: A Meta-Analytic Review,” 7 Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 3–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nash, Renea D. (1997) Coping With Interracial Dating. New York: Rosen Publishing Group.Google Scholar
Niemonen, Jack (1997) “The Race Relations Problematic in American Sociology,” 28 American Sociologist 15–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Obasogie, Osagie (2006a) “Race in Law and Society: A Critique,” in Haney López, I., ed., Race, Law, and Society. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing.Google Scholar
Obasogie, Osagie (2006b) “Anything But a Hypocrite: Interactional Musings on Race, Colorblindness, and the Redemption of Strom Thurmond,” 18 Yale J. of Law & Feminism 451–95.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, & Winant, Howard (1994) Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Penner, Andrew, & Saperstein, Aliya (2008) “How Social Status Shapes Race,” 105 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 19628–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinder, Kymberly N. (2002) Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Richardon, Stephen, et al. (1965) Interviewing: Its Forms and Functions. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Sampson, Edward E. (1999) Dealing With Differences: An Introduction to the Social Psychology of Prejudice. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.Google Scholar
Siegel, Reva (2000) “Discrimination in the Eyes of the Law: How Colorblindness Discourse Disrupts and Rationalizes Social Stratification,” 88 California Law Rev. 77–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stienstra, Deborah (2002) “The Intersection of Disability and Race/Ethnicity/Official Language/Religion.” Unpublished paper, Canadian Centre on Disability Studies, University of Winnipeg, 8 March.Google Scholar
Telles, Edward E. (2002) “Racial Ambiguity Among the Brazilian Population,” 25 Ethnic and Racial Studies 415–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waters, Mary (1990) Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Robert S. (1994) Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Patricia J. (1987) “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights,” 22 Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Rev. 401–34.Google Scholar
Wing, Adrienne Katherine (1997) “Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism: Ain't I a Woman?,” in Wing, A. K., ed., Critical Race Feminism: A Reader. New York: New York Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Yoshino, Kenji (1999) “Assimilationist Bias in Equal Protection: The Visibility Presumption and the Case of ‘Don't Ask, Don't Tell,’ 108 Yale Law J. 485–571.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zerubavel, Eviatar (1997) Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Zimler, Jerome, & Keenan, Janice (1983) “Imagery in the Congenitally Blind: How Visual Are Visual Images?,” 9 J. of Experimental Psychology 269–82.Google ScholarPubMed

Cases Cited

Bowen v. Gilliard, 483 U.S. 587, 602 (1987).Google Scholar
Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007).Google Scholar