Blinded by Sight: Race, Vision, and Social Construction

Introduction: Sight, Race, and Social Construction

In Western culture, sight — 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 question is central to 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 both colorblindness and race as concepts, and instead suggests a new way of understanding freedom from oppression — namely, a focus upon equal outcomes and addressing historical injustices rather than upon attempting not to 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 Obasogie, highlighting how the concrete reality of blindness exposes the absurdity of what can appear concrete due to racial prejudices and constructions (Obasogie 176).

Historical Prejudice and Racial Typology

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 already common. However, the war crystallized specifically anti-Japanese sentiments and created a constellation of prejudices inflicted against Japanese Americans in particular. "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 linger to this 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. Yet the obsession with racial typology — the idea that it is possible to classify humanity according to fixed types and categories — proves resilient to biological knowledge. Race is a pervasive cultural myth that has served a number of national agendas. Because the Chinese were American allies during World War II, for instance, the popular magazine Life devoted a series of articles to physically differentiating between the so-called Japanese and Chinese races. This was an effective and insidious part of wartime propaganda, in which the Chinese were portrayed as a superior race on the basis of supposedly more attractive physical characteristics.

Colorblindness as Ideology: Film and Legal Cases

Although these types of articles may seem patently absurd today, Obasogie notes that race can quite literally make people see things differently. Obasogie recalls how an African American man was shot by an officer who claimed to have accidentally mistaken his pistol for his Taser gun. The officer was acquitted by an all-white jury. Even though video footage and eyewitnesses were available, the perceptions of individuals who witnessed the event were completely different from one another. Racial biases, in other words, color judgment 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 problem of racism in American society. One is colorblindness, perhaps best embodied in the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which portrays the daughter of a liberal-minded couple who wishes to marry an African American man. The character Joanna is portrayed as truly colorblind, thanks to her upbringing, although her parents — despite their liberalism — struggle with the issue and with 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. Moreover, the metaphor of being colorblind suggests willful blindness to the truth — which is precisely what Joanna's parents accuse her of when they discuss the social difficulties they fear she will face as part of an interracial couple. In other words, the presumption of the existence of race remains intact.

In contrast to the so-called colorblindness depicted in the film, the real-life experience of Leonard Rhinelander was very different. Rhinelander was a wealthy, prominent New York man who married Alice Jones, a woman of a similar class background. When Rhinelander discovered that Alice's birth certificate identified her as Black, he demanded the marriage be dissolved on the grounds of fraud, claiming she had wed him under false pretenses. Visually, Alice appeared — by the standards of the culture and by Rhinelander's own assumptions — to be white. But her father was Black. At the time, rather than seeming to prove the absurdities of racial construction, this case merely contributed to the cultural anxieties many felt about people "passing" for white despite having African American ancestry.

Attorneys for Rhinelander relied upon the common belief that "blood would out" — that is, that ancestry would determine behavior, even when it could not be physically apparent. In the subsequent Rhinelander trial, it was alleged that Leonard was cognitively limited and that Jones had used her sensual wiles to deceive him. This argument played upon stereotypes of Black womanhood embedded within the culture. The jury eventually found in favor of Jones, but not before she was forced to undress before the jury in a humiliating display intended to demonstrate that Rhinelander could not have been deceived about her appearance. The finding in Jones's favor, though a technical victory, also played upon racial stereotypes: the jury's reasoning implied that her race was so visually obvious that her husband could not have been deceived on their wedding night, given that her skin color was visible throughout her body — not, as Rhinelander alleged, merely on her arms and face, which he had attributed to a sun tan.

Conclusion: Toward Outcome-Based Racial Justice

Obasogie's scholarly work serves as a profound challenge to the notion that simply not seeing 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 treating vision as a remedy, it is essential to focus upon concrete, measurable injustices that have existed in the past and will persist into the future unless they are directly challenged. Looking critically and seeing race differently is essential; otherwise, even well-meaning people will be unable to move forward from the socially disadvantaged present.

Works Cited

Obasogie, Osagie. Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.