Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind - Softcover

Obasogie, Osagie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804772797 ISBN 13: 9780804772792

Verlag: Stanford Law Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Colorblindness has become an integral part of the national conversation on race in America. Given the assumptions behind this influential metaphor-that being blind to race will lead to racial equality-it's curious that, until now, we have not considered if or how the blind "see" race. Most sighted people assume that the answer is obvious: they don't, and are therefore incapable of racial bias-an example that the sighted community should presumably follow. In Blinded by Sight,Osagie K. Obasogie shares a startling observation made during discussions with people from all walks of life who have been blind since birth: even the blind aren't colorblind-blind people understand race visually, just like everyone else. Ask a blind person what race is, and they will more than likely refer to visual cues such as skin color. Obasogie finds that, because blind people think about race visually, they orient their lives around these understandings in terms of who they are friends with, who they date, and much more. In Blinded by Sight, Obasogie argues that rather than being visually obvious, both blind and sighted people are socialized to see race in particular ways, even to a point where blind people "see" race. So what does this mean for how we live and the laws that govern our society? Obasogie delves into these questions and uncovers how color blindness in law, public policy, and culture will not lead us to any imagined racial utopia.

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Osagie K. Obasogie is Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law with a joint appointment at UCSF Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society. Named one of 12 Emerging Scholars in Academia under 40 by Diverse Issues in Higher Education, his research and writing spans Constitutional law, bioethics, sociology of law, and reproductive and genetic technologies. He has written forSlate, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and New Scientist.

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BLINDED BY SIGHT

Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind

By Osagie K. Obasogie

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2014 Osagie K. Obasogie
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-7279-2

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
ix
Preface....................................................................
xiii
Introduction...............................................................
1
PART I: "For We Walk by Faith, Not by Sight"...............................
1 Critiquing the Critique: Beyond Social Constructionism...................
11
2 Theory, Methods, and Initial Findings....................................
39
3 Visualizing Race, Racializing Vision.....................................
72
PART II: "'Twas Blind But Now I See": Social and Legal Implications........
4 Revisiting Colorblindness................................................
109
5 Race, Vision, and Equal Protection.......................................
138
6 On Post-racialism........................................................
163
Epilogue: Rebooting Race...................................................
177
Appendix A: Critical Race Theory—Background and Critiques..................
183
Appendix B: Further Considerations on Methods and Research Design..........
205
Notes......................................................................
215
Index......................................................................
261

CHAPTER 1

Critiquing the Critique

Beyond Social Constructionism

In the midst of the great depression and World War I'saftermath, 1930s American foreign policy could best be described asisolationist; neither politicians nor the American public had much of a stomachfor getting involved in then-emerging global conflicts across Europe andthe Pacific. While the United States offered various forms of aid to countrieslike England to assist in fending off German aggressions, America remainedformally neutral as the world entered the Second World War. That is, untilDecember 7, 1941, when Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor led to over two thousandcasualties. Isolationism, as a foreign policy, was no longer a viable ordesirable option.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor changed the United States' approachto international politics, it also had a distinct impact on the country's racialpolitics. Surely anti-Asian and specifically anti-Japanese sentiments existedprior to 1941, but Pearl Harbor changed and intensified the underlying socialmeaning of what it meant to be Japanese. Susan Moeller notes,

The whole cartoon aspect of the Jap changed overnight. Before that suddenSunday the Jap was an oily little man, amiable but untrustworthy, more funnythan dangerous. After December 7, the Japanese were depicted by stereotype.The Japanese, noted eminent columnist Ernie Pyle, "were looked upon assomething subhuman and repulsive; the way some people felt about cockroachesor mice." The Japanese were routinely referred to and pictured asliteral or figurative animals, something less than human—at best creditedwith "child minds." The Japanese were compared to rats and ants, and, mostconsistently, considered ape-like, "almost simian." Liberty Bond Drive postersdepicted the Japanese as leering monkeys raping and pillaging Westernwomen and civilization. [Internal citations omitted]

In many ways, Pearl Harbor demonstrates the instability of racial meaningsand how they are always in flux in relation to broader social and politicaldynamics. This singular act radically deepened Americans' pejorative sentimentstoward Japanese people, leading to them being perceived as a distinctgroup with intrinsic tendencies toward treachery and duplicity. Vestiges ofPearl Harbor as an example of the social construction of race and ethnicitypersist to this very day. For example, in 2004, Bill Parcels—then head coach ofthe Dallas Cowboys—characterized the secret plays developed by his competingoffensive and defensive coordinators during practice as "Jap plays ... surprisethings." But while the attack on Pearl Harbor shifted and intensifiedthe social meaning of being Japanese among Americans, there remained onebroader issue: if Japanese people ostensibly constitute an inherently duplicitoussubgroup, how does one distinguish them from other Asian populations?

Much like reported incidents of post-9 /11 attacks on Sikhs who were mistakenfor Muslims, the bombing of Pearl Harbor also led many Americans toengage in acts of vigilantism against persons thought to look Japanese. TheDecember 22, 1941, edition of Life magazine that shortly followed the PearlHarbor attacks took this to be a serious problem; the editors saw it as theirpatriotic duty to help the American public direct its hostilities to the rightethnic group. In an article titled "How to Tell Japs from the Chinese," Life lentits photojournalistic credibility and reach into millions of American homes toteach the public how to visually differentiate Japanese from Chinese, the latterbeing our ally during the war. The Life article is fascinating in many regards.But what perhaps stands out the most is how it acknowledged the problematicmyths surrounding various notions of racial purity and inferiority that droveNazism and eugenics, yet ultimately saw its journalistic project of "seeingracial difference" as distinct from and innocent of this form of racism. Thismove—stigmatizing Japanese people as a group while self-consciously distinguishingsuch racial and ethnic stigmatization from that which was used byNazis—was not uncommon during this period. A prime example occurredin Korematsu v. United States, the 1944 Supreme Court decision upholding theExecutive Order excluding Japanese Americans from parts of the West Coastand permitting their internment during the war. In the decision, Justice Blacktook great pains to distinguish the United States' internment camps fromGerman concentration camps. Similarly, the Life article noted, "To physicalanthropologists, devoted debunkers of race myths, the difference between Chineseand Japs is measurable in millimeters.... Physical anthropology, in consequence,finds Japs and Chinese as closely related as Germans and English.It can, however, set apart the special types of each national group" (emphasisadded).

From this perspective, race myths are a presumably illegitimate productof subjective racial prejudice, which is wholly distinct from the ability touse visual cues to objectively appreciate scientific and measurable differencesbetween Japanese and other Asian groups. What remains resilient in this formulationis the notion of racial typologies—that humans can be divided intobasic racial groups that are biologically distinct—which itself promotes racialhierarchy by substantiating the idea that social categories of race reflect natural"types" of human groups with inherent abilities and disabilities. The Life articleconstructs racial and ethnic differences as being quantifiable down to thesmallest units of measurement, suggesting not only that racial and ethnic differenceare an objective reality but also that the lay eye can detect such visuallyobvious differences—that is, if it knows what to look for. Life happily assumedthe responsibility of training Americans' visual sensibilities through a series ofimages that attempted to mark out the obvious visual distinctions one shouldlook for to properly differentiate friend from foe. Life described "the typicalNorthern Chinese ... [as being] relatively tall and slender built"; "his complexionis parchment yellow, his face long and delicately boned, his nose morefinely bridged." The first set of images focused primarily on facial distinctions,where in contrast to Chinese traits, Life described Japanese people ashaving "a broader, more massively boned head and face, flat, often pug, nose,yellow-ocher skin and heavier beard." But, as shown in Figures 1 and 2, thesephysiological descriptors were not enough; the images themselves were markedby Life editors to specifically point out the visual cues that distinguish eachgroup, whether a "more frequent epicanthic fold" or a "broader, shorter face."

A second set of images focused on physical differences in Chinese and Japanesebodies. The text of the Life article noted that the Chinese brothers picturedin Figure 3 represent a typical "lanky, lithe build," while Japanese people,as shown in Figure 4, "exhibit squat, solid, long torso and short stocky legs."The Life article even went so far as to claim that when Chinese become "middleaged and fat, they look more like Japs." But Life cautioned its readers to payattention not only to visual cues of a physiological nature, but also to thosethat manifest themselves through cultural differences: "an often sounder clue[to distinguishing between Chinese and Japanese] is facial expression, shapedby cultural, not anthropological, factors. Chinese wear rational calm of tolerantrealists. Japs ... show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics."

These images and descriptions link the politically driven stereotype oftreachery and duplicity to a visually distinguishable body that ultimately producedan understanding of the Japanese as a subhuman group. The visualityof group difference emphasized by the Life images played an important rolein the construction of racial difference by reasserting the centrality of racialtypologies or the idea that distinct, biologically different racial groups exist.Part of emphasizing Japanese difference from both ourselves as Americansand Chinese as Allies is to suggest that their inherently duplicitous naturemanifested itself in or correlated with physical differences that are visuallyobvious if you know what you're looking for. That was the point of the Lifemagazine photo spread: to teach Americans how to visually distinguishhuman bodies to ascertain these typologies and tendencies.

Such efforts impacted Americans' view of the Japanese and JapaneseAmericans. In many ways, Americans despised the Japanese more than othernationalities we were at war with; the idea of racial difference played a distinctiverole both in how the Japanese were understood on their own terms and,in a comparative sense, in relation to Germans and Italians. Not only wereJapanese dehumanized by cartoonists, journalists, and others as being apes,monkeys, and rodents—whereby their seeming physical distinctions blurredseamlessly with the bestial form to which they were being compared—but thecomparative political rhetoric surrounding discursive references to America'senemies during World War II treated the Japanese as a separate and monolithicgroup. Germans and Italians, on the other hand, continued to enjoythe perception of being diverse in temperament. This shaped policy choicesduring the war, such as the widespread exclusion and interment of JapaneseAmericans without any similar treatment to German or Italian Americans.

This slice of World War II history introduces a key concept at the heartof almost all modern race scholarship: the social construction of race. Therapidly shifting meanings and ideas surrounding race and ethnicity in thewake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor shows how racial meanings are neitherstatic nor timeless. Rather, they are constructed by social, economic,and political developments that can rapidly attach new meanings to racializedbodies with a power and force that can make these newly constructedmeanings seem like an essential aspect of group membership. This, in short,is the social constructionist thesis: social forces—not nature or anythingintrinsic to racial groups—produce the meanings that come to be associatedwith racial difference. The constructionist project largely involves fleshing outthe social processes—such as the politics of war—leading to the creation ofsocial meanings, their attachment to bodies deemed racially different, and thesubtle dynamics leading these meanings and attachments to be rearticulatedas a natural, inherent, and timeless group traits.

But the Life magazine images bring another dimension of racialization tothe forefront: the extent to which constructed meanings are assumed to beboth essential to racial difference and visually obvious at the very same timethat these ostensibly self-evident traits require meticulous policing, training,and visual instruction in order for differences to become publicly visible ina presumptively consistent and coherent manner. Thus, not only are racialmeanings such as Japanese duplicity constructed, but social forces (such asphotojournalism) also produce the very ability for individuals to clearly seeracial differences in a manner that is experienced as being self-evident.

This other dimension regarding the productive forces behind racial differencebecoming visible (rather than simply being visually obvious on itsown terms) has not been a significant part of the social constructionist project.These productive forces leading up to race becoming visible yet experiencedas self-evident is what I identify as the constitutive theory of race. Animportant though usually ignored tension within the social constructionistperspective is that it assumes that the visual salience of race is largely obvious;race is thought to speak for itself. The visibility of racial difference—haircolor, facial features, and other visual cues thought to definitively markgroup membership—is largely conceptualized as existing anterior to anysocial process; both lay persons and race scholars tend to treat race as somethingthat is coherent and "known" through mere observation. The socialconstructionist literature has paid exhaustive attention to situations such ashow the politics of war lead pejorative social meanings to attach to Japanesephysiological distinctions such as the flat nose and broad face marked outby the photos in Life. But less attention has been paid to how social forcessuch as the Life magazine photo spread produce the very ability to see race inparticular ways that come to be experienced as visually obvious yet requireremarkable amounts of work to create salient and coherent boundaries ofvisual (and visible) difference.

By drawing attention to the constitutive social practices that give rise toindividuals' ability to see race in certain ways, this book intervenes into theexisting theoretical and conceptual gaps in race scholarship that largely frameracial difference as being self-evident and visually coherent on their ownterms. In addition to exploring the contributions and limitations of the socialconstructionist literature, this chapter puts the existing literature in conversationwith other perspectives not typically part of the race canon that aremore sensitive to the ways in which social practices produce the ability to seehuman difference. This provides the theoretical orientation for the empiricalproject—teasing out blind people's understanding of race—that is at the coreof this book that, in itself, generates a new standpoint from which to bothcritique and expand social constructionism in order to understand the socialpractices behind visual experiences.

The theoretical project of destabilizing the presumption that raceis visually obvious and the empirical project of assessing blind people'sunderstanding of race are tightly connected. Qualitative research on blindpeople's understanding of and experiences with race permits an empiricalbasis from which to rethink the obviousness that envelops the process of "seeingrace" so as to better understand the social forces that influence our visualengagements. An empirical assessment of blind people's visual understandingof race can challenge the intuition that the visual salience of race—whyit is conspicuous, why it seems to visually stand out as a coherent markerof human difference—stems not from it being visually obvious but ratherfrom constitutive social practices that produce our ability to see the world inracial terms. This works from and extends existing claims regarding the socialconstruction of race to the extent that "seeing race" is not merely a neutralobservation concerning the way social meanings attach to racialized bodies.Rather, this book highlights the extent to which our eyes are trained to seerace in particular ways—so much so, that even blind people see race. This hasimportant social and legal implications; the empirical data belie the assumptionthat race is visually obvious—an assumption that ultimately framesimportant legal and policy choices in a manner that inhibits racial justice.But before moving to this empirical work and its ramifications, it is useful tosituate the empirical project in the existing literature on the social constructionof race that anchors almost all race scholarship while also putting thisdominant approach in conversation with literatures on the social processesbehind seeing difference. This allows for a better conceptual basis from whichto understand this book's empirical component and broader implications.

Rarely do we dissect with any precision what social constructionismmeans, from what previous concepts of race the constructionist thesisemerged, and the "work" that the constructionist thesis does in moderntimes. In order to fully articulate the claims being made in this book, thischapter discusses the significance of the social constructionist thesis in termsof the social, political, and ideological contexts giving rise to its prominencein postwar race scholarship and public policy. Once this backdrop is established,the core contribution of the constructionist approach is brought to theforefront: to expose how social meanings attach to various bodies. I then discusshow the constructionist thesis is operationalized in current race scholarshipin law and the social sciences to highlight a glaring tension: the extentto which race, as both a theoretical and an empirical matter, is assumed tobe a visually stable, self-evident, and obvious variable that freely exists in thesocial world with a visual salience that is separate from any social process.

In other words, the constructionist approach provides a theoretically richaccount of how meaning attaches to bodies and offers robust mechanisms todecouple these assumed connections to rethink the possibilities for humaninteraction and the social order. Yet it has not offered an empirically nuancedaccount of how bodies become visually salient in the first place. The gap inthe literature exposed in this chapter gives rise to the constitutive theory ofrace proposed by this book. But first, let us spend a few moments exploringsocial constructionism.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford Law Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804772797
• ISBN 13: 9780804772792
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar