potoooooooo ✅️Are blind people less racist, on average?
dandelion (she/her)Another way this question might be phrased is: is race only the color of skin?
And we know the answer: no! The concept of race (developed by racists) is more cultural than biological (in fact, there is no such thing as a biologically real race, it’s a bit of a myth).
Blind people are just as capable of holding bigoted and biased attitudes against people they hear as non-white, or smell as non-white, etc. Visual cues are not the only way someone identifies another’s class, race, ethnicity, etc. Racist attitudes are perpetuated against job applicants on the basis of whether a name sounds white or not, without ever seeing the candidate in person. A blind person is just as capable of that racism as a sighted person.
I knew someone who wasn’t even blind who was obsessed about the smell of Indian people and who would forbid her family from eating Indian food in her home to avoid the smell, etc.
AA5BCould they have had an aversion to some spice? Indian foods are usually spiced more intensively and some can linger. Even the smell of Indian people starts with a truth: garlic and other spices can linger on the skin and even be excreted from pores. My ex-father-in-law (not Indian) really had this problem with fpgarlic. We all do to some extent, but he’d smell strongly of it for days
She wasn’t bothered by the smell of these spices until she became a house cleaner and she had to clean an Indian household, and I guess there might have been some resentment about this or inferiority issues? She generalized an aversion to the smells and associations of Indian people from there (but to the extent that I personally felt was racist and probably related to self-esteem issues).