Insights from Blind Race Attribution

• In Event: 564 - Regular Session. Sociology of the Body. Meaning Making and the Social Body

Abstract

Geneticists, biologists, social scientists, and humanist scholars have all presented powerful critiques of “race” as a stable set of biological categories. Despite these critiques, in everyday life, race is consistently assumed to primarily derive from self-evident and visually available physical features. Racial categories also continue to be used in both scientific and social scientific research as if they were self-evident and real. In this study I examine the role of visual perception in the construction of racial categories and the resiliency of these categories in our thinking. In other words, I ask whether racial categories endure in the face of what should be devastating critiques in part because of an assumption that one can “see race” in the materiality of the body. If this is the case, in order to deepen our understanding of the social construction of race, it is necessary to deepen our understanding of the visual construction of race. Toward this end, I have conducted interviews with 25 blind people, which highlight the unique features of their non-visual, non-appearance-based experiences of race, particularly the non-immediacy of race attribution and a consistent grappling with uncertainty. I use the blind perspective to help visually deessentialize race, bounding sighted conceptions of race as one possible set of meanings, and highlighting the perceptual processes underlying their typical character of visual self-evidence.

Author

• Asia Friedman, University of Delaware