Osagie Obasogie

Osagie Kingsley Obasogie (born August 21, 1977) is the Haas Distinguished Chair 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
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions

Education and academic positions

Obasogie 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 2010 to 2016, Obasogie was a professor of behavioral and social sciences at The University of California, San Francisco.[1] From 2008 to 2016, he was a law professor at The University of California, Hastings College of the Law.[1] In 2016 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he became Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics in the School of Public Health.[1]

Academic work

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]

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
  1. "Osagie K. Obasogie Professor of Biothetics". University of California, Berkeley. 2014. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  2. Chow, Kat (2013-09-29). "Studying How The Blind Perceive Race". NPR.org. Retrieved 2017-08-30.
  3. 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.
  4. Obasogie, Osagie (January 10, 2014). "Can a Blind Person Be a Racist?". Scientific American. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  5. Ikemoto, Lisa C. (January 1, 2016). "Review Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind". Tulsa Law Review. 51 (2): 531.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Obasogie, Osagie K. (June 7, 2016). "The Supreme Court Is Afraid of Racial Justice". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  9. Obasogie, Osagie K. (June 5, 2020). "Police killing black people is a pandemic, too". The Washington Post. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
  10. "Articles by Osagie K. Obasogie". The Atlantic. Retrieved 27 October 2020.
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