Visualizing Race at the Perkins School for the Blind

The article considers the construction of racialized citizenship in the Perkins School for the Blind in the nineteenth century through centering two cases of Black children that appear in Perkins’s archives. There is little scholarship on the history of Black students at Perkins, and materials on their experiences are scarce. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation,” the article speculates on how Black children were admitted to the institution not for training in economic futures but to serve as object lessons for their white classmates, who were taught to apprehend race through Black children’s presence. Black children helped produce white citizenship; the school’s ostensible policy of colorblind admission segregated blind Black children from futures preserved for blind white children. Illuminating presences and absences of race in the archives shows us how race, disability, and racialized disability co-constituted one another in the service of state-sanctioned efforts to manage who could and could not participate in the social, political, and economic orders.