By voice, almost entirely. I frequently catch myself treating people differently because of the accent they have. Sexism can happen the same way, of course.

The trouble is, because racism is always talked about to children as entirely about skin colour, I find some blind people I know don't really internalize that they, to, can be racist. We don't judge people by skin colour, so we're fine, right? Wrong!

The problem is, it really is quite easy to convince yourself that judging people by voice is a perfectly OK thing to do. For example, a Chinese baby who was adopted by white Canadian parents, and entirely raised by them, will sound completely "white". Someone raised in inner-city detroit will probably "sound black", even if they're white, or Korean, or anything else. So we're not actually racist, the argument goes, because we're judging people by culture. Apparently, and I've heard this said, "someone who sounds black will act black, so it doesn't matter." So yes, unfortunately, blind people can and will judge you to be whatever race you sound most like. And unfortunately, a few of us have decided that we're totally justified, and not racist at all.

I feel like I shouldn't even need to add this. But: accents and culture, and how they relate, are complicated. Stereotyping people by accent, or by culture, is no more OK than stereotyping them by skin colour. I hope these views aren't wide spread in the blind community, and I don't think they are. But I've heard the argument above twice so far this year, and I really don't want to hear it again. It could just be because I'm talking to more and different blind folks, or it could just be Coincidence that I'm hearing that crap more often. I hope so.

Also remember that many people lose their vision later in life, I've met plenty of elderly people with vision loss who use a lot of... colourful words to refer to other races and groups.

Are you asking how blind people perceive racism, or how blind people perceive race? These are two totally different questions. Blind people perceive racism exactly how sighted people do; hopefully most blind people perceive racism as a bad thing, but there will be variations of course.

If your asking how we perceive race, yes we mainly perceive it by vocal characteristics and speech patterns, as well as people's names etc. It is true that elements such as speech patterns reflect culture, but let me point out that, for the most p[art, race is a social construct. Blind people can be as racist as sighted people and we can also be as fare minded as sighted people. Now, when it comes to ableism, the situation is more complex.

I only use voice as an identifier as to what race someone might be. To me, it doesn't give a good enough perspective on how the person might behave in daily life.

It's stupid. we're all human, yes person 1 may have done something to someone but that does not mean person 1 is representing all of the people now does it?

[deleted]

[removed]