Story highlights Research has found that blind people, just like sighted people, judge others based on race

Researcher: "In all cases it takes them longer to categorize people by race"

(CNN) A person may not have to "see color" to be racist. Some blind people, just like sighted people, make judgments about others based on their race, according to a new study.

The findings come from interviews conducted in person and over the phone with 25 people who were either born blind or severely visually impaired, or who lost their sight as children or adults. A researcher asked the participants, most of whom lived in the northeast United States, about whether they thought about race and also how it affected their feelings about a person.

The study found that blind people can still have racial stereotypes, but "in all cases it takes them longer to categorize people by race and there is more ambiguity," said Asia M. Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at University of Delaware, who conducted the study.

The study was presented Tuesday at the American Sociological Association annual meeting, but has not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Friedman found that five of the nine respondents who were blind since birth or early childhood reported that they did not think at all about a person's appearance. And according to some respondents, the inability to know a person's race kept them from making snap judgments about them, which is a "good thing," Friedman said. One person she interviewed explained that being blind makes it harder to "judge someone visually right off the top of your head."

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