Watch:Our documentary 'Blind Gunslinger'Last week, research presented at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Chicago concluded that people who can't see the color of one's skin still judge them by it—it turns out that even blind people can be racist shitheads.The study, conducted by Asia Friedman, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware, included both people who have been blind or severely visually impaired since birth and individuals who lost their sight later on in life.According to CNN, five out of nine people surveyed who had been blind their entire lives blind claimed to not think of one's appearance, and some reported being unable to make snap judgements about race.Still, Friedman found her visually impaired sample still sorted people into racial categories over time, judging by non-visual cues like the sound of one's voice or name."The visual process of assigning race is instantaneous, and it's an example of automatic thinking—it happens below the level of awareness," Friedman wrote in a press release. "With blind people, the process is much slower as they piece together information about a person over time. Their thinking is deliberative rather than automatic."
