Study: Blind People Can Be Racist

There’s no escaping a charge of racism, even if you are blind and literally cannot see someone’s skin color.

CNN reports on a new study that claims some blind people “make judgments about others based on their race.”

The findings come from interviews conducted in person and over the phone with 25 people who were either born blind or severely visually impaired, or who lost their sight as children or adults. A researcher asked the participants, most of whom lived in the northeast United States, about whether they thought about race and also how it affected their feelings about a person.

Twenty-five people? This is more like a large focus group than any sort of quantitative endeavor. It makes a good headline but this is hardly scientific.

The “study” finds that blind people can be racist but it takes them longer to figure out what race they will inevitably discriminate against. “In all cases it takes them longer to categorize people by race and there is more ambiguity,” said Asia M. Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at University of Delaware, who conducted the study.

“I think blind people are inculturated into ideas about class and race,” just like anybody else, Friedman said, and the ideas can come from a whole range of places, including news, family, teachers and peer groups.

CNN writes, “Research on how blind people understand racism could lead to better insights into how blind people make judgments about other aspects of life that usually involve visual cues, such as eating a meal or shopping for clothes. Respondents in Friedman’s study described being very aware of sounds and voices when they meet people, and sounds could influence how blind people choose a restaurant or clothing store, Friedman said, along with sensory inputs such as textures and smells.”

I don’t think they are studying blind people to figure out anything other than blind people are racist, too. The cultural elites are the most race-obsessed people in the world.

Another professor who studies blind people and racism says: “Blind people understand race the same way as sighted people.” Osagie K. Obasogie, a professor of law at University of Hastings, has written a book called “Blinded by Sight.”

“I would push back against the idea that blind people somehow enter every social interaction with a blank slate,” he said.

Obasogie conducted a study of around 100 people (better than 25 but still…more qualitative than not)  and some said they might ask another person about someone’s race.  “And even if they don’t know a person’s race beforehand, they might try to figure it out during the interaction, rather than keeping an open mind.”

“If race is such a strong and deep part of our social order that blind people who have never seen anything can see and pay attention to race … it shows how deep the problem is,” he said.

Said Obasogie, “Race is a disease of society and the idea that the disease will go away by ignoring it is not the most sophisticated and proper way to deal with the problem.”

I’ll bet this garbage is funded with tax dollars.

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