Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind. By Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 288 pp. $24.95, paper.

Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind.By Osagie K. Obasogie. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 288 pp. $24.95, paper.I first saw The Blind Boys of Alabama perform at the House of Blues in Chicago, and-a year later-in a public performance with Mavis Staples at the University of California, Los Angeles. Both times, watching the gospel and blues singers walk on stage-eight elderly black gentleman dressed in spiffy matching suits and dark wrap-around shades-approaching their places on the stage in single file, walking with a hand on each other's shoulders, I had a thought that slightly shamed me. "Do they," I wondered, "know that they are Black?" Of course, I knew these men did know their own racial identity, and that their racial identities had consequences for them. I knew that the school where they had met, as children, "Alabama Institute for the Blind," had originally been a segregated school, with the oldest members of the band attending Alabama's "Institute for the Negro Blind." Still I found myself, through much of their set, wondering about these men's experiences of and with race, as well as their experiences of and with blindness-and how those identities intersected. I did not articulate it well at all, but I wondered, "How do blind people experience race?" It turns out, 20 years later, that Professor Osagie K. Obasogie has written a text that provides an interesting and complex answer to that question.Obasogie delves into the question of how blind people perceive race and racial difference using a comparative qualitative research design that consists of semi-structured interviews with 106 respondents who had been blind since birth and 25 sighted respondents. Blinded by Sight draws on more than 80 hours of interview data, with questions that focus, for both groups, on how individuals understand and experience race.His findings regarding how sighted people understand race are rather unsurprising-"each sighted person who was interviewed defined race primarily by what they perceived to be obvious visual cues" (p. 54), and the visual salience of race was supported by "other types of collateral information" like national origin and ethnicity, and accent or use of language (pp. 55-56). Obasogie's sighted research subjects make clear that the "common sense" of race, as originally articulated by Ian Haney Lo^pez (2003), indeed resides in the clear visual cues associated with it. His sighted research subjects also make clear that Whites experience "transparency" in racial construction, as Barbara Flagg (1993) has previously argued: Whites experience their race as "transparent" or nonexistent; "race is something that people of color have - not themselves" (p. 57).Interestingly, blind respondents also expressed visual cues as the most salient markers of race. This requires amplification: blind respondents-who cannot see-and who from birth have been blind-still reflect upon race and understand race as a visual distinction. Obasogie writes, "put simply, race is understood and experienced by blind people as it is by those who are sighted: visually" (p. 60), with secondary features of race also salient as significant ways of determining the racial identity of persons with whom they were interacting.The first half of the book offers compelling data and analysis that unpack these research findings. …