The short answer? No.
Law professor Osagie K. Obasogie interviewed a series of people who had been blind since birth about their understanding of the concept of race. Counter-intuitively, he found that race was as meaningful to them as it was to sighted people and that their descriptions and biases were largely in line with cultural norms. The article includes really striking quotations from the interviewees and what Obasogie describes as an “empirical assessment of the metaphor of colorblindness.” He’s also published a book based on the research: Blinded By Sight.
In this three minute interview, he explains some of his findings:
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 8
Japaniard — August 16, 2013
My immediate response upon reading the title was "Of course not. Blind people are perfectly capable of having functional rods that can distinguish between red and green light even if their brains can't interpret the signal. The pathology of blindness and colorblindness are completely unrelated".
Would it be possible to change the title to "racially colorblind" to better distinguish it from red/green colorblindness and similar conditions? While it would be an odd topic for Sociological Images, I'd imagine that when people see "blind" and "colorblind" together, they assume that both words are referring too eye conditions.
Michelle — August 16, 2013
I gotta say "Of course not" too. Race is way beyond skin colour: it's an entire cultural ideology and system that works against an entire groups of people through subtle nuances (overt ones are outed by the law).
fss — August 16, 2013
Dave Chappelle's insight on this issue:
http://www.snotr.com/video/3726/Dave_Chappelle
Hannah — August 19, 2013
I feel like I'm missing something here, because I can't imagine that anyone would go into this study honestly expecting to find that blind people are immune to internalizing the vast social ideology that is race. Blind people--and other disabled people--aren't magic.
In fact, it seems to me that this study used blind people as rhetorical tool to debunk the idea of racial colorblindess--trying to say that colorblindness isn't figuratively true because, look! it's not literally true.
In light of the fact that there are so little studies in journals or in blogs like this one that make disability the focal point, this seems a particularly insensitive and manipulative move. Blindness isn't just a metaphor we should use to make points. Why not study the intersection of race and disability? Why should it be news that blind people internalize or at least perceive the same ideas as the rest of the population?
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