scientificamerican | Do blind people understand race? Given the vast and sprawling writings
on race over the past several decades, it is surprising that scholars
have not explored this question in any real depth. Race has played a
profound and central role to human relationships. Yet how is it possible
that this basic question has escaped deeper contemplation?
This gap in the scholarly literature and public discourse points to a
fundamental assumption that we almost all make about race, its
significance, and its salience. Race has been central to human
relationships. Yet, there seems to be at least one thing that most
people can agree upon: that race is, to a large extent, simply what is
seen. There are surely many variables that inform individuals’ racial
consciousness, such as religion, language, food, and culture. But race
is primarily thought to be self-evidently known, in terms of reflecting
the wide variation in humans’ outward appearance tied to ancestry and
geographic origin such as skin color, hair texture, facial shapes, and
other observable physical features. Thus, race is thought to be visually
obvious; it is what you see, in terms of slotting visual engagements
with human bodies into predefined categories of human difference, such
as Black, White, and Asian. Given the dominant role these visual cues
play in giving coherence to social categories of race, it is widely
thought that race can be no more salient or significant to someone who
has never been able to see than the musical genius of Mozart or Jay-Z
can be salient to someone who has never been able to hear. Therefore,
one plausible explanation for why questions concerning blind people’s
understanding of race have not been explored is that, from a sighted
person’s perspective, the answer seems painfully obvious: blind people
simply cannot appreciate racial distinctions and therefore do not have
any real racial consciousness.
This pervasive yet rarely articulated idea that race is visually
obvious—a notion that I call “race” ipsa loquitur, or that race “speaks
for itself”—has at least three components: (1) race is largely known by
physical cues that inhere in bodies such as skin color or facial
features, (2) these cues are thought to be self-evident, meaning that
their perceptibility and salience exist apart from any mediating social
or political influence, and (3) individuals without the ability to see
are thought, at a fundamental level, to be unable to participate in or
fully understand what is assumed to be a quintessentially ocular
experience. Through this “race” ipsa loquitur trope, talking about race
outside of visual references to bodily differences seems absurd, lest we
all become “colorblind” in the most literal sense. Much of the
ideological value in the emerging colorblindness discourse works from
the idea that race and racism are problems of visual recognition, not
social or political practices.
But, how much does the salience of race—in terms of it being experienced
as a prominent and striking human characteristic that affects a
remarkable range of human outcomes—depend upon what is visually
perceived? To play upon the biblical reference to 2 Corinthians 5:7, do
we simply “walk by sight” in that the racial differences are
self-evident boundaries that are impressionable on their own terms? Or,
is there a secular “faith” about race that produces the ability to “see”
the very racial distinctions experienced as visually obvious? And if we
take this idea seriously, that the visual salience of race is produced
rather than merely observed, precisely what is at stake—socially,
politically, and legally—when we misunderstand the process of “seeing
race” as a distinctly visual rather than sociological phenomenon?
In my work, I have pushed the boundaries of the “race” ipsa loquitur
trope by investigating the significance of race outside of vision. I
critique the notion that race is visually obvious and suggest that the
salience of race, in terms of its visually striking nature and attendant
social significance, functions more by social rather than ocular
mechanisms. Though perhaps counterintuitive, I begin with the hypothesis
that our ability to perceive race and subsequently attach social
meanings to different types of human bodies depends little on what we
see; taking vision as a medium of racial truth may very well obscure a
deeper understanding of precisely how race is both apprehended and
comprehended, and thus how it informs our collective imaginations and
personal behaviors as well as how it plays out in everyday life.
