Blind Black Guy

Granddad: You ran into our car! Are you blind?!
Stinkmeaner: YES... I... am! So?
Granddad: Wait, you're blind?
Stinkmeaner: Yes! Blind! You got a problem with that, nyuggah?

— The Boondocks, "Granddad's Fight"

A very common form of Twofer Token Minority is the blind black guy. He's blind, and he's black. He may wear Cool Shades as is common in real life. He frequently overlaps with Magical Negro in a Blind Seer insight kind of way and/or Handicapped Badass. The characters are more often than not based on Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, and thus tend to be a Blind Musician as well.

The real-life source of this is that, in 19th and 20th centuries, many blue-collar Americans lost their sight due to poor working conditions, methanol poisoning from bad moonshine, and insufficient medical care, especially for black people, and since most workers in such positions were men, the end result was a disproportionate number of blind black men. Many who were born blind or lost their sight early were deliberately pushed towards musical training, as one of the few careers available to them that didn't require sight.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Subverted and played straight in this Levi's commercial. A woman, finding a ladies' room out of service, runs into the men's bathroom instead. She sees a black man there with sunglasses and a cane. She changes her clothes and her wig (BTW, she seems to be carrying a bag full of cash) and washes up in front of the man, even zipping her Levi's in front of his face. When another man comes starts to come out of a stall, she rushes out. Turns out the man was holding the cane for his friend from the stall, who actually is blind.

Anime & Manga

• Tousen from Bleach. Unusually for this trope, he turns out to be a villain. He reconciles with his friends just before he dies, however.
• Another villainous example from Heat Guy J. One of the Mafia Elite is this. (Complete with playing the piano while laughing maniacally at the thought of having Clair's left eye in a jar.)
• N'Doul from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which is a henchman from Dio and controls, with his stand Geb, water. However, he's not a parody of Ray Charles nor Stevie Wonder... but the abridged series makes him a parody of Ray Charles!

Comic Books

• Ragman: Teddy, an orphan boy Rory saved as Ragman, is blind and black. Rory and his girlfriend were talking about adopting him before the book was cancelled.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Rovo, one of the three members of the twelve member UN delegation in "Strangers in Paradise" to get any characterization, is a blind black boy.

Films — Animation

• Vitruvius in The LEGO Movie, as he was blinded by Lord Business in the opening prologue.
• Gender-inverted in The Princess and the Frog with Mama Odie, a blind black old lady.

Films — Live-Action

• There is a blind black singer in All of Me.
• The Blind Seer in O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
• The "Three Blind Mice" in the opening sequence of Dr. No. Unfortunately for the local British Secret Service agent, they were just faking blindness so they could shoot him in the back.
• Richard Pryor's character in See No Evil, Hear No Evil.
• In Get Crazy we meet a B.B. King expy at a fellow blues man's funeral — all the other blues men in attendance are blind, throwing flowers, well, blindly...one of them walks into an open grave.
• Morgan Freeman's character in Danny the Dog. Notably it was Freeman's idea on reading the script for him to be blind.
  • Freeman played another blind character in The LEGO Movie, the wizard Vitruvius.
• The man with the black eyepatch in Blindness (but of course, pretty much everyone else is blind, too).
• The owner of "The Beast" in The Sandlot.
• The news stand owner Jeb in Maniac Cop 2, who's unable to see his customer's death, but can feel the killer's corpse-cold hand as he touches it.
• Ray in The Blues Brothers, true to his nature as a Danza of Ray Charles, is implied to be blind.
• The unnamed preacher from They Live! who first tries to convince Nada of the alien conspiracy. He's later beaten, possibly to death, by the police when they raid his church.
• Jerome from My Soul to Take is a blind, black high school student.
• The titular hero of The Book of Eli, played by Denzel Washington. The blindness part of his character is the big twist at the end.
• A rare One-Scene Wonder example appears in Philadelphia, unless he just wears shades.
• Red Heat. Abdul Elijah, the Dark Messiah leader of The Cleanheads.
  Ivan Danko: We are not like American police. You ship drugs to my country, and one morning you will wake up and find your testicles floating in jars of water next to your bed.
  Abdul Elijah: I'm a holy man. I got no need for testicles.
  Ivan Danko: Then I settle for your eyes.
  Abdul Elijah: (removes sunglasses to reveal he's blind) You can't threaten me, white boy.
• Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy) pretends to be a blind, legless Vietnam veteran in his first scene in Trading Places.
• Uncle Rob in The Learning Tree, who was blinded in some sort of explosion. He isn't a musician, but he is the wise sage of the family, dispensing advice about human nature to his troubled nephew Newt.
• The Last Witch Hunter has Max, a black and blind warlock dealing in supernatural insects. He seems to have little trouble functioning in society, though.
• The Great Gilly Hopkins: Mr. Randolph, Trotter's next-door neighbor, is both blind and black. The white preteen protagonist Gilly, whose job it is to help him to and from his house, is surprised by this as she's never interacted with one of "those people".
• Big Paul from The Greasy Strangler. The eponymous strangler takes advantage of this by washing up at Big Paul's carwash after every murder, though he eventually kills Big Paul as well, mutilating the body afterward in order to engage in some Severed Head Sports.

Live-Action TV

• Jake from Becker was blinded in a car accident years before the time of the show.
• Geordi on Star Trek: The Next Generation, though not really a straight example as his VISOR allows him to see. Much better than a normal person could, in fact.
• The Rutles had retired New Orleans bluesman Blind Lemon Pie, who claimed to have invented The Rutles' music, although his wife retorted that he only made this and similar claims for the benefit of TV documentary crews.
• One episode of Jonathan Creek had Hughie Harper who had been blind, but surgery restored his vision perfectly. He kept that secret because being a blind, black jazz musician was a good image and he didn't want to ruin it. He got his comeuppance firstly, when a fat, elderly lady undressed in front of him and he couldn't admit being squicked by her appearance and secondly, when she found out about it and slapped him in front of his audience for being a 'pervert'.
• In one episode of 7 Days (1998), Frank becomes a "ghost" due to a time-traveling accident, and a Blind Black Guy is the only one who can hear him speak.
• One Chappelle's Show sketch featured the eponymous comedian playing Clayton Bigsby, a blind black man who, unaware of his own race, became a white supremacist.
• Parodied in The Sarah Silverman Program where in one episode Sarah sits in a rocking chair surrounded by black musicians as she speaks in ebonics after going temporarily blind in a tanning salon.
• Parodied on The Mighty Boosh — Lester Corncrake is a blind white guy who fully believes himself to be black. Everyone's just too polite to tell him otherwise as he seems quite invested in the idea.
• Female version on Early Edition with Marissa, who at times also acts as voice of reason to other castmates.
• In Signs And Wonders, Diamond the "deprogrammer" (James Earl Jones) briefly disguises himself as a blind beggar.
• Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation had Master Splinter befriend a blind black man named Andre.
• Seemingly played straight on an episode of Reno 911! where they have to arrest one who doesn't believe Jones is Black because of how well he speaks until he gives away that he can see and was just being a troll.
• In the Disney Channel special "There's No Going Home," "Weird Al" Yankovic's grandfather is said to be Blind Lemon Yankovic, the writer of the shortest blues song ever. However, he is unsurprisingly not actually related to Weird Al, a possible reference to the fact that "Polka King" Frankie Yankovic is not related to Al either.
• Blind Butchie from The Wire lost his sight to a gunshot wound and was once a feared enforcer who got (mostly) out of the drug game after losing his sight. He acts as a mentor figure to Omar and his crew.
• Josafá in the Brazilian soap opera Deus Salve O Rei is a blind blacksmith who takes Afonso as his pupil after he saved him from being robbed by a jerkass client.
• Alex from the Decoy eposode "Queen of Diamonds" is a pianist who was blinded for asking too many questions about the criminals who frequented the nightclub where he worked.
• Mario in season 2 of The Glee Project was born with Morning Glory syndrome, which eventually led to him going blind at age 9.
• The Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction story "Blind Man's Dog" was about a blind black man and his guide dog, Buff, who would always let out a long howl exactly one hour before someone close to them would die.
• Mom: One of the long-term tenants of the apartment complex where Bonnie works is a black man who got blinded in Vietnam (from syphilis).
• See has Paris (Alfre Woodard), who's kind of a Blind Seer. Race doesn't seem to be an issue anymore in the series' world since (almost) everyone is blind. There's also Jerlamarel, who got his eyes poked beyond repair by Baba Voss.
• The Magicians (2016): Dean Fogg temporarily becomes this when he's blinded by Martin Chatwin in the second episode, though his magic lets him get around it...until the whole world loses access to magic in the second season, turning him into a normal blind man. Fogg eventually gets his sight and his magic back in the fourth season, however.
• In When Calls the Heart, Angela Canfield is a teenage girl whose family moves to Hope Valley in Season 8. Angela's mother Minnie later reveals that her daughter lost her sight as a toddler, when she contracted the measles and the white doctor refused to treat her.
• Frasier meets one (played by James Earl Jones) while helping out at a retirement home. Frasier accidentally breaks a plaster mask of the man's late wife and desperately tries to fix it before he finds out. It turns out the man has broken it himself many times.

Music

• Amadou & Mariam, musicians from Mali.
• The Blind Boys of Alabama.
• Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and any Blues Man with "Blind" in his name.
• Jazz virtuoso Art Tatum, perhaps the most influential pianist of the swing-era.
• There was an obscure blues singer who went by the name Blind Ben Covington, but acquired the nickname Bogus Ben Covington when word got out that he wasn't actually blind. He is therefore an aversion of the trope.
• Blessing Offor is from Nigeria and was born with glaucoma. He was a competitor on The Voice.
• Blues harmonica player Sonny Terry.
• Soul singer Clarence Carter ("Slip Away", "Patches"), notable for being a guitarist rather than a keyboardist.

Video Games

• Jada of Battle High 2 is a black blind gal. She blinded herself by showing off with her electrical powers when she was younger, and became humbled by the incident, which caused her to develop into an empath and sort of one of the wiser students.
• In Silver Falls Gaiden: Deathly Delusion Destroyers and Ruby River, one of the characters you can randomly meet in the diner is a blind black guy accompanied by his service dog, Echo.
• The Demoman's parents from Team Fortress 2 are black-Scottish and blind, having lost their eyes in demolition accidents. This is apparently a tradition for their family, as they're disappointed in their son for merely missing one eye.

Webcomics

• Reggie from PVP.
• The Order of the Stick has Blind Pete in Greysky City (previously Eagle Eyed Pete, before betraying his boss at the local Thieves' Guild).
• The Search For Henry Jekyll has a female example with Delilah "Daisy" Bonnay, the star of the opera house.
• Principal Phibes from Erma is blind and modeled after Morgan Freeman. At first it seems like a gag, since he let an obvious monster girl into the school while talking about how they welcomed everyone and denies the school having a rat problem, but it later turns out he's far more observant than he lets on.

Web Original

• Jericho in the Whateley Universe. Sort of.^note His version of 'radar sense' is kept a secret, though a few on campus have guessed that he has it. In any case, he has a cyber-jack which he can connect to cameras with, so... He's also a Mad Scientist and a Combat Medic, which isn't too shoddy for someone with no 'normal' vision.

Western Animation

• The blind black Jazz player neighbor who lives in a swamp shows up in a Cow and Chicken episode. In truth his vision is only mildly bad, but blind sounded better for a jazz player.
  • The master of Blues is set up to be one in another episode, but to nobody's big surprise, it turned out to be the Red Guy. But THEN it turned out that he was an impostor, and the real master of Blues IS an actual Ray Charles lookalike.
• Subverted on The Simpsons with Bleeding Gums Murphy (Lisa's saxophone mentor who died). Even though Bleeding Gums Murphy wore sunglasses (even at night), he (ostensibly) had perfect vision. He was based on Blind Willie Witherspoon, who was blind, and Murphy learned his craft from Witherspoon.
  BG: I learned at the feet of Blind Willie Witherspoon.
  (flashback to younger BG in a bar)
  Willie: I've been playing jazz for 30 years and I just can't make a go of it. I want you to have my saxophone.
  BG: This isn't a saxophone; it's an umbrella!
  Willie: So I've been playing an umbrella for 30 years? Why didn't anybody tell me?
  BG: Heh, we all thought it was funny. (chuckles)
  Willie: That's not funny.
• Col. Stinkmeaner from The Boondocks. He became blind due to cancer in his adolescence, but he didn't consider it a big loss, because he never appreciated looking at beautiful sights such as sunsets and rainbows.
• On Gargoyles, Hudson befriends a blind black veteran-turned-novelist named Jeffrey Robbins, who lost his sight from shrapnel while serving in Vietnam. In the comic continuation, Robbins eventually figures out, by picking up on several subtle clues, that Hudson isn't human, but doesn't care in the slightest.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends had one episode focusing around a "seeing-eye friend" trying to find his kid, who was blind and black- and, of course, named Stevie.
• The "Toby Danger" cartoon in Freakazoid! had a brief gag where a dead ringer for Ray Charles continued performing oblivious to the power being cut.
• Toots, Joan of Arc's foster father in Clone High, is a massive parody of this, as well as a host of related tropes (Magical Negro, Blind Seer, Inspirationally Disadvantaged). He's not especially insightful, but he thinks he is.
  Now I may be blind, but I can still see that...
• An episode of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters is about Ickis moving in with a blind black jazz singer.
• An episode of Davey and Goliath about racism involves Davey making friends with Jonathan's cousin who was racist towards white people, but temporarily blind after an operation.
• In the Hey Arnold! episode "Das Subway", one of the subway passengers is an old and blind black man (complete with Kevin Michael Richardson providing his voice) with his seeing eye dog. He also claims that his other senses (especially smell) got stronger after he went blind, and could tell Harold was climbing on one of the poles in the subway cars and that he hasn't bathed in quite a while.
• Gargoyles: "A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time" introduces Jeffrey Robbins, a blind African-American author and Vietnam War veteran who befriends Hudson.

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