Blinded By Sight Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind
In Western culture as a whole, sight or visual eyewitness proof or testimony is taken to be the ultimate proof of veracity, including of the construct of race. But what if sight were actually an impediment to true racial understanding? This is underlined in Osagie Obasogie’s book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind which challenges the notion that racial identity exists outside of social constructs and that race can be identified visually. The book encourages a reevaluation of the concept of colorblindness just as much as race, and instead suggest a new way of understanding freedom of oppression, namely a focus upon equal outcomes and addressing historical injustices, rather than upon attempting to not see race. “It is precisely blind people’s lack of vision that can enable the rest of society to see the folly of their ways and the damaging effects of these redemptive efforts” writes the author, highlighting how the concrete reality of blindness highlights the absurdity of what can appear concrete due to racial prejudices and constructions (Obasogie 176).
One example of both the pervasiveness and the ridiculousness of racism cited by Obasogie is that which was fostered against Japanese-Americans during World War II. Before the attacks on Pearl Harbor, prejudice against Asian Americans was common. However, the war crystalized specifically anti-Japanese sentiments and created a constellation of prejudices specifically inflicted against Japanese Americans. “This singular act radically deepened Americans’ pejorative sentiments toward Japanese people, leading to them being perceived as a distinct group with intrinsic tendencies toward treachery and duplicity” (Obasogie 12). Once such prejudices take root, they are very difficult to eradicate, and these prejudices still linger to this very day. During World War II, prejudice against Japanese Americans resulted in individuals of Japanese ancestry, including children, being detained in internment camps, one of the darkest chapters of recent American history.
According to anthropologists, the physical differences between races are actually quite minimal. There is just as much similarity as there is difference in the biology of individuals of Japanese, Chinese, German, and English ancestry. But the obsession with racial typology, or the idea that it is possible to classify humanity according to types and categories, is resilient to biological knowledge. Race is a pervasive cultural myth that has served a number of national agendas. For example, because the Chinese were American allies during World War I, the popular magazine Life devoted a series of articles to differentiating between the so-called Japanese and Chinese races physically. This was an effective and insidious part of wartime propaganda, as the Chinese were portrayed as a superior race because of their more attractive physical characteristics.
Although these types of articles may seem patently absurd today, Obasogie notes that race can very literally make people see things differently. Obasogie is an African American and vividly remembers how an African American was shot by an officer who claimed to accidentally mistake his pistol for his Taser gun. The officer was acquitted by an all-white jury. Even though there were videos and eyewitnesses, the perceptions of individuals who witnessed the crime were completely different. Racial biases, in other words, colors judgement to the point of quite literally affecting vision. What one sees is not to be equated with reality. Racial ideology can be blinding.
Obasogie notes that many ideological solutions have been proposed to the deep, entrenched acknowledged problem of racism in American society. One is that of colorblindness, perhaps best embodied in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which portrays the daughter of a liberal-minded couple who wishes to marry an African American man. The girl Joanna is portrayed as truly colorblind, thanks to her upbringing, although her parents, despite their liberalism, are struggling with the issue and the consequences of raising their daughter not to focus on race. But Obasogie notes that this metaphor of colorblindness is still highly problematic. It still assumes the existence of race. Also, the metaphor of being colorblind suggests willful blindness of the truth (which is what Joanna’s parents accuse their daughter of, when they talk to her about the social difficulties they fear she will face as part of an interracial couple). In other words, there is still the presumption of the existence of race.
In contrast to the so-called colorblindness of the film, the reality experienced of
Leonard Rhinelander, a wealthy, prominent New York man who married Alice Jones, a woman of a similar class background was very different. When Rhinelander discovered that Alice’s birth certificate stated that she was Black, he demanded the marriage be dissolved on the grounds of fraud, saying she had wed him under false pretenses. Visually, Alice appeared, based upon the standards of the culture and also upon Rhinelander’s own assumptions, to be white. But her father was Black. At the time, rather than seeming to prove the absurdities of racial constructions, this merely contributed to the cultural anxieties many felt about people possibly passing for white, despite having African American ancestry.
Attorneys for Rhinelander relied upon the common belief at the time that blood would out, in other words, that blood would determine behavior, even if it could not be physically apparent. In the subsequent Rhinelander trial, it was alleged that Leonard was cognitively limited and that Jones used her sensual wiles to hoodwink him. This played upon stereotypes of Black womanhood as well as Blackness embedded within the culture. The jury eventually found in favor of Jones, but not after she was forced to engage in a humiliating display, displaying her nakedness before the jury to demonstrate that Rhinelander could not have been deceived to her actual appearance. But the finding in favor of Jones, although it was a technical victory for the woman, also played upon racial stereotypes that her race was so visually obvious her husband could not have been deceived upon the wedding night, given that her color was visible throughout her body, not, as Rhinelander alleged in court, merely on her arms and face, which he had attributed to being tanned by the sun.
This false construct of race was assumed to be true even by the U.S. Supreme Court. For example, in the case of Ozawa v. United States, the Japanese American Takao Ozawa claimed to be white, because of the color of his skin, but the court denied his appeal to be a naturalized citizen, stating that white racial identity was not solely about physical appearance. Even racists (in other words, people who believed in the construct of race and supported prejudices related to this construct) thus had to admit that physical characteristics visible to the eye could deceive, based upon people’s prejudices. Later protections, even in the form of what might seem like positive developments, were still based upon the concept of race as a visually validated idea. “Equal Protection’s race jurisprudence, as a whole, is driven by a particular theory of race: that its salience and therefore its significance in law and society comes from its visual obviousness” (Obasogie 145).
Obasogie sees the Equal Protection concept as problematic. First of all, as noted before, it reifies classifications on race as visual categories, which is erroneous and problematic from a biological standpoint. Additionally, individuals who may not present as of a particular racial category yet have still experienced discrimination such as Alice Jones are not necessarily taken into full consideration in this narrow definition of race. Finally, the experience of discrimination is itself complex and nuanced.
Women of color may experience different types of oppression than men. Socio-economically disadvantaged individuals, or members of sexual minorities, may likewise experience discrimination and be categorized unfairly into particular cultural categories in a different way than those who are simply from one historically marginalized group. The need for intersectionality in the interpretation of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity is betrayed by an obsession and fixation upon the solely visual.
Social practices and outcomes, including being a victim of discrimination, in other words, should matter more than race. “By focusing on the social practices that produce individuals’ ability to see the world in particular ways, this disruption draws attention to the need for alternative conceptions of society and human relationships that reflect reality” (Obasogie 160). The idea is not that some people are able to see race and some are not, or some are forcing themselves to see what is not there (i.e., the colorblind, who allegedly just see the person, not the color). Rather, certain types of practices and outcomes that have been generated by a history which has classified people according to their racial appearance, and which has, in the past, very clearly seen color, require remedies.
Colorblindness is particularly problematic because it is so seductive for Americans. The idea that everyone can be treated the same, and this will erase all historical differences, and enable Americans to start anew, as if race never was a problem in the country’s history is suggested by the concept. But, Obasogie notes, colorblindness “is an affirmative nonrecognition of how racial meanings, constructed as they may be, still impact social and legal decision making in a manner that fundamentally shapes everyday life” (Obasogie 116). It reduces color to the superficial—often people who claim to be colorblind say they do not care if someone is pink or purple, which trivializes and negates the impact that race can have upon people’s lives.
First of all, people do not come in the color of pink and purple; secondly, because of the ways in which racial discrimination has functioned in American history, people often have great pride in their ability to survive such oppression, hence the rallying cry of “Black is Beautiful” in the 1960s and 1970s to counteract negative portrayals of African Americans in the media. Finally, colorblindness “asserts that individuals should not be punished or disadvantaged because of previous generations’ sins, creating a disassociation with racial history and the inertia of social structure” (Obasogie 116). This again acts as an impediment for remedies such as affirmative action, much less reparations, to be introduced to remedy historical injustices.
Obasogie’s scholarly work acts as a profound challenge to the notion that to simply not see race is a solution to centuries old racial injustice in America. Rather than ignoring what we see, it is important to focus on what has been experienced. Instead of focusing on the visual as a remedy, it is important to instead focus upon concrete measurable injustices that have existed in the past and will exist in the future unless they are not challenged. Looking critically and seeing race differently is essential, otherwise even well-meaning people will not be able to move forward from the current, socially disadvantaged present.
Works Cited
Obasogie, Osagie. Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.