Obasogie is known for his 2013 book Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race In The Eyes Of The Blind, which describes his research on how blind people perceive race.[2] In Blinded by Sight, Obasogie established through interview research that the perception of race does not depend on the ability to see individuals' skin colors; rather, people who are not able to see are nevertheless able to assemble contextual cues to determine others' races, and this can affect how they behave towards others.[3] Obasogie argues that this sociological phenomenon has immediate implications for jurisprudence, for example in considerations about the Equal Protection Clause, where the legal consensus rests on the idea that a person's racial identity is visually obvious and immediately knowable.[4] The book was noted for employing a successful research design to recover original insights which challenge the seemingly obvious assumption that race is communicated visually, contributing to sociological, legal, and ethical theories about race.[5][6]
Obasogie has been credited, together with a few other faculty members, with causing the University of California, Berkeley to shut down a eugenics research fund that it had used to fund research by faculty members in its School of Public Health.[7]
^Ikemoto, Lisa C. (January 1, 2016). "Review Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind". Tulsa Law Review. 51 (2): 531.
^Morning, Ann (November 2014). "Review Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind". American Journal of Sociology. 120 (3). doi:10.1086/680462.