Blind people CAN be racist too: Study finds the visually impaired use clues in voices and names to stereotype others

  • The small study by University of Delaware professor Asia Friedman found the blind are not 'absolved from being a racist'

A study that asked visually impaired people about their experiences with race has concluded that even the blind are capable of racism.

Asia M. Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at University of Delaware, asked 25 blind people how they perceived race and how that perception affected how they felt about an individual.

Friedman found that, even in those participants who'd been blind since birth, the visually impaired can and do still harbor racist stereotypes. 

Color blind? A study that asked visually impaired people about their experiences with race has concluded that even the blind are capable of racism

Color blind? A study that asked visually impaired people about their experiences with race has concluded that even the blind are capable of racism

'In all cases it takes them longer to categorize people by race and there is more ambiguity,' Friedman clarified to CNN.

According to her findings, the blind use mental calculations based on non-visual clues about race including voices and names.

And those calculations sometimes lead the blind to conclusions about an individual's socioeconomic status or race.

'I think blind people are inculturated into ideas about class and race,' said Friedman, who presented her findings on Tuesday at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. 

Friedman's isn't the first study to come to such a conclusion.

In 2013, California law professor Osagie Obasogie was inspired to undertake a larger study after seeing the Ray Charles biopic.

That study became the book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind, in which Obasogie argues the blind and sighted are socialized to view race in a particular way that may be separate from the actual color of one's skin.

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