I first saw The Blind Boys of Alabama perform at the House of Blues in Chicago, and—a year later—in a public performance with Mavis Staples at the University of California, Los Angeles. Both times, watching the gospel and blues singers walk on stage—eight elderly black gentleman dressed in spiffy matching suits and dark wrap-around shades—approaching their places on the stage in single file, walking with a hand on each other's shoulders, I had a thought that slightly shamed me. “Do they,” I wondered, “know that they are Black?” Of course, I knew these men did know their own racial identity, and that their racial identities had consequences for them. I knew that the school where they had met, as children, “Alabama Institute for the Blind,” had originally been a segregated school, with the oldest members of the band attending Alabama's “Institute for the Negro Blind.” Still I found myself, through much of their set, wondering about these men's experiences of and with race, as well as their experiences of and with blindness—and how those identities intersected. I did not articulate it well at all, but I wondered, “How do blind people experience race?” It turns out, 20 years later, that Professor Osagie K. Obasogie has written a text that provides an interesting and complex answer to that question.
Obasogie delves into the question of how blind people perceive race and racial difference using a comparative qualitative research design that consists of semi-structured interviews with 106 respondents who had been blind since birth and 25 sighted respondents. Blinded by Sight draws on more than 80 hours of interview data, with questions that focus, for both groups, on how individuals understand and experience race.
His findings regarding how sighted people understand race are rather unsurprising—“each sighted person who was interviewed defined race primarily by what they perceived to be obvious visual cues” (p. 54), and the visual salience of race was supported by “other types of collateral information” like national origin and ethnicity, and accent or use of language (pp. 55–56). Obasogie's sighted research subjects make clear that the “common sense” of race, as originally articulated by Reference LópezIan Haney López (2003), indeed resides in the clear visual cues associated with it. His sighted research subjects also make clear that Whites experience “transparency” in racial construction, as Reference FlaggBarbara Flagg (1993) has previously argued: Whites experience their race as “transparent” or nonexistent; “race is something that people of color have – not themselves” (p. 57).
Interestingly, blind respondents also expressed visual cues as the most salient markers of race. This requires amplification: blind respondents—who cannot see—and who from birth have been blind—still reflect upon race and understand race as a visual distinction. Obasogie writes, “put simply, race is understood and experienced by blind people as it is by those who are sighted: visually” (p. 60), with secondary features of race also salient as significant ways of determining the racial identity of persons with whom they were interacting.
The first half of the book offers compelling data and analysis that unpack these research findings. The voices of his respondents come through clearly, and of particular interest is the section where Obasogie unpacks the quotes from those with intersectional identities: those members of the respondent population who are both Black, and blind. In this section Obasogie's work begins to unpack the relationship between privilege, marginalization, race, and disability; though it would be too much to pursue in depth in this text, and I certainly hope he returns to it.
Obasogie's empirical data “demonstrates that the capacity to understand race – and to have a visual understanding of it – does not depend upon the ability to see” (p. 71). This finding makes the book interesting and important, in and of itself. However, for me—both as a sociolegal scholar, as well as someone who teaches critical race theory, and Equal Protection jurisprudence—the deeper value of the text comes in the second portion of it. Here, Obasogie crafts chapters that interrogate the metaphor of colorblindness and trace how it has achieved jurisprudential prominence in American law, examine the notion of visibility and race in Equal Protection jurisprudence, and argue that normative exhortations to colorblindness and laudatory predictions of a post-Obama “post-racial America” have negative consequences for justice in the law.
With these chapters, Obasogie moves beyond the constructionist approach to race that he introduces in the first part of the book, to develop, as he argues, a constitutive account both of racial formation, and of the jurisprudence surrounding racial discrimination. The book offers a striking and powerful contribution to work within the Law and Society tradition, and Critical Race Theory (and Appendix A offers a terrific genealogy of both). It also takes a beautifully normative—justice-seeking view. Put simply, if blind people can see race, then, paradoxically perhaps, race is much more than what we can see. If race is more than what we can see, a jurisprudence that depends upon colorblindness (and thus implies that race is only what we can see), will never achieve justice.
A book on race in the United States with laudatory back matter quotes from Dorothy Roberts, Patricia J. Williams, and Howard Winant, comes to the reader with high expectations. I am delighted that Obasogie's work meets—and exceeds—the expectations I had for it. In Blinded by Sight, he has given us not only rich empirical data regarding how blind and sighted people understand the visual salience of race; he has also provided a grounded and deep critique of the common sense American understanding that “colorblindness” will lead to justice. Reading Obasogie, one becomes increasingly certain that a commitment to racial justice means that we all—sighted or not—must endeavor to see race.
