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I am returning to higher education in the coming weeks. I have been futzing about with a longer and
more navel gazing blog on the topic, mostly having to do with how I decided to
try, the hoops I jumped thru, and what I hope to accomplish… That is for
another day.
Today I am going to briefly talk
about a book I am reading for my return to Graduate School that I have been
listening to on Audible. This is part of
the University’s summer reading and… kind of a mission statement for the
University.
The
School
I am going to be attending
George Washington University in the Foggy Bottom area of Washington DC. I will be seeking my Doctorate and I hope to
study voting systems, my ultimate goal would be to get a popular referendum passed…
Somewhere… that would allow for ranked choice voting, a system I was surprised
to learn is gaining traction in the United States and I think is the key to
saving the Republic. Or at least hitting
the snooze button on our inevitable collapse for another couple decades.
The Book
George Washington has decided to
emphasize learning about hidden biases.
To do this they have put out for summer reading, “Blindspot”
by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald.
Not the TV show, “Blindspot” starring the intensely hot, Jaimie
Alexander… I like athletic women with tattoos.
The book
is about biases and mental categorization with the key analogy being the
literal blind spot all human eyes have but we are not aware off without doing
some deliberate effort to “show” it to ourselves.
What has
surprised me most so far reading the book is how much of it I already knew or
anticipated. Studying politics you begin
to understand how people have a mental image of certain jobs, certain
ethnicities, and misconceptions about every other possible way to categorize
people.
Stereotypes
In “Blindspot”
one of the chapters deals with stereotyping, and it begins with this old…
Riddle I guess would be the best term.
The riddle helps frame the rest of the chapter. Here
it is,
------
A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer
practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them
head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the
boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured
boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken
immediately into surgery.
However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room
and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on
this boy. He's my son!"
The question: Who is the surgeon?
------
If you are
unfamiliar with the riddle take your time to think about it.
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| This is from an article about Daylight Savings time. I hate Daylights Savings as a concept. It is cosmically stupid. |
The
answer is that the Surgeon, a role that is typically MALE, is actually the boy’s
MOTHER. Gasp! Twist!
Not
really. I had heard it before all the
way back in middle school along with other problem solvers… I figured out the
answer then too. Something in retrospect
I now attribute to having watched a lot of diverse media growing up (you
can read a little about that here).
I mean, Doctor Crusher was a woman and a doctor on “Star Trek: The Next
Generation”. The idea of a woman doctor
is not all that world flipping.
But I
also get the point. People do often
default to certain mental images that shape what they expect and how they react
to the world around them. The book goes
on to talk about one of the first studies on the topic of stereotypes that has
been replicated in recent history to show the evolving nature of stereotypes. FYI: Germans, for the last hundred years,
have been consistently thought of as industrious and scientifically minded.
The
topic then moves into what would more often be called intersectional identities, or intersectionality. That by layering different categories you can
picture in your minds eye a distinct individual. Their example was to first picture a
professor, which they said, “white male, tweed jacket, pipe, etc…” they then
started talking about how you could build a person by stacking certain
ideas. For instance, “Professor, French,
Black, Muslim, Lesbian”. To show how
your mind can construct an image.
Their idea
is that stereotypes help humans to construct individuals based on these categories
layering on top of one another until a unique person is constructed. This allows you to see people as individuals,
but also as the sum of their “parts” for lack of a better word.
Again, this chapter was nearly
an hour long on the audiobook, I am not giving you all the material. I do have a reason for explaining all of
this. To set up for an insight I WAS
EXPECTING, but NEVER SHOWED UP.
The Un-Twist
See, the
chapter starts with the Surgeon riddle, and at several points during the
chapter sexual orientation is mentioned.
The Muslim, French, Lesbian being the one I relayed to you. So I was EXPECTING, that the chapter would
end with a subversion of the Surgeon Riddle.
------
A young boy and his father are on their way home from soccer
practice when a distracted driver crosses the center line and hits them
head-on. The father dies at the scene of this horrible car accident, but the
boy is still alive when the emergency medical technicians arrive. The injured
boy is transported in an ambulance to the hospital, where's he taken
immediately into surgery.
However, the awaiting surgeon steps out of the operating room
and says, "Call Dr. Baker stat to the operating room. I can't operate on
this boy. He's my son!"
The question: Who is the surgeon?
------
I was
expecting the new answer to be, “The surgeon is also the boy’s father. His parents are a gay couple.” Apparently, I am either ahead of the curve on
subverting expectations in the world by acknowledging that gay surgeons exist
in the context of a riddle… Or maybe I should just get around to writing a
novel because I am apparently pretty good at writing twists that book end a quasi-narrative.
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| This is not a well composed photo. There is so much dead space to the left. |
Other Book Elements
The
final thing I want to mention is that the narrator, Eric Jason Martin, has a cadence
almost exactly like the opening narration of “The Outer Limits”. It is not distracting, I kind of like it.
To School
I am
very close to the last day of my current job, less than two weeks. It is in many ways somewhat scary-exciting. A life roller coaster for which I am in an
interminably long line waiting to take off down the track.
I am so eager;
it is kind of exhausting. If for no
other reason that I will get to read books and have people ask me my thoughts
on them. I had no idea I would miss that
so much.
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