Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T04:36:51.875Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Blinded by Sight: The Racial Body and the Origins of the Social Construction of Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Michael Omi  and
Howard Winant
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Osagie K. Obasogie's Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (2014) makes important contributions to both to the sociology of law and to critical race studies. The book challenges “colorblind” racial ideology by showing empirically that people who are blind from birth nevertheless “see” race, grasping it as a nearly omnipresent feature of social interaction and social organization. These insights, however, do not diminish the importance of the racial body. Beyond refuting colorblindness, Obasogie's book points to a neverending tension, embedded in what we call racial formation, between the social construction of race and the corporeality of race. This tension has been present since the dawn of empire and African slavery. Obasogie's achievement of falsifying colorblindness should not lead us to neglect the importance of the racial body.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Fall 2016 , pp. 1062 - 1068
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Cottrol, Robert J. 2013. The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Duster, Troy. 2003. Backdoor to Eugenics, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gross, Ariela. 2008. What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hadden, Sally E. 2001. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Klein, Herbert S., and Luna, Francisco Vidal. 2009. Slavery in Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., and Rogers, Nicholas, eds. 1994. Unfree Labour in the Development of the Atlantic World. Ilford, UK: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, Paul E., and Trotman, David Vincent. 2003. Trans‐Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1967. Capital Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. 1972. On Colonialism; Articles from the New York Tribune and Other Writings. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph C. 1996 [1988]. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Moran, Rachel F., and Carbado, Devon W. 2008. Race Law Stories. New York: Foundation Press/Thomson‐West.Google Scholar
Mullin, Michael. 1995. Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Omi, Michael, and Winant, Howard. 2015. Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Solomon, Andrew. 2013. Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. New York: Scribners.Google Scholar
Thornton, John. 1998. Africa and Africans in the Formation of the Modern World, 1400–1680. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tsvetan. 1984. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Weinstein, Barbara. 2015. The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Zuberi, Tukufu. 2003. Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar