Osagie Kingsley Obasogie (born August 21, 1977) is a law professor and bioethicist at UC Berkeley. He is the Haas Distinguished Chair, Professor of Law at Berkeley Law, and Professor of Bioethics in the UC Berkeley – UCSF Joint Medical Program and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. He studies bioethics, sociology, and law, in particular race in law and medicine.
Osagie Kingsley Obasogie | |
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| Born | August 21, 1977 Ohio, USA |
| Nationality | American |
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Education and academic positions
editObasogie studied sociology and political science at Yale University, where he received his B.A. in 1999.[1] In 2002 he graduated with a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.[1] He then studied sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining his PhD there in 2008.[1] From 2008 to 2016, Obasogie was a law professor at The University of California, Hastings College of the Law.[1]
Academic work
editObasogie 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]
Obasogie has been a frequent media commentator and analyst on topics like racial justice and medical ethics, publishing opinion articles in outlets such as The New York Times,[8] The Washington Post,[9] and The Atlantic.[10]
References
edit- ^ a b c d "Osagie K. Obasogie Professor of Biothetics". University of California, Berkeley. 2014. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ Chow, Kat (2013-09-29). "Studying How The Blind Perceive Race". NPR.org. Retrieved 2017-08-30.
- ^ Stafford, Zach (January 26, 2015). "When you say you 'don't see race', you're ignoring racism, not helping to solve it". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ Obasogie, Osagie (January 10, 2014). "Can a Blind Person Be a Racist?". Scientific American. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Watanabe, Teresa (October 26, 2020). "UC Berkeley is disavowing its eugenic research fund after bioethicist and other faculty call it out". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ Obasogie, Osagie K. (June 7, 2016). "The Supreme Court Is Afraid of Racial Justice". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ Obasogie, Osagie K. (June 5, 2020). "Police killing black people is a pandemic, too". The Washington Post. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
- ^ "Articles by Osagie K. Obasogie". The Atlantic. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
External links
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