Yesterday, I pointed to a very bipartisan problem: the under-representation of women candidates slated to run for Indianapolis City-County Council (not helped by the “dumping” by each party of an incumbent female). Several commenters–all, I should note, men–protested via twitter that gender had nothing to do with the slating decisions.
As I responded to one of them, I’m sure that’s true–consciously. Neither party deliberately slighted women candidates, or intentionally applied different standards to male and female incumbents.
The key word is “intentional.”
In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay about White Privilege, in which she observed that whites in the U.S. are taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on any particular group.
A few of the 45 items on that checklist are particularly relevant here:
If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.
Chances are my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more likely this is to be true.
I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.
My post yesterday was about those “invisible systems conferring dominance” and the systemic (albeit largely unconscious) attitudes those systems foster. Most of the women who commented “got it.” A number of the men, didn’t.
After collecting data for 20 years, Adams concluded that a student’s grandmother was far more likely to die before midterms than at any other time of the year. More specifically, his research showed that grandmothers are 10 times more likely to die before a midterm, and 19 times more likely to die before a final exam. Grannies of students who weren’t doing well in their classes were at even higher risk of meeting their maker: Students who were failing a class were 50 times as likely as others to lose a grandmother.
Like many professors, I’ve encountered this phenomenon, and I can tell you that it’s really difficult to address. No one wants to demand that a genuinely grieving grandchild produce a death certificate, but no one wants to be “played,” either. It calls for finesse.
Recently, this coincidence of grandparental death and exam times was the subject of an article that included a survey of several instructors, who were asked how they coped with this particular dilemma. Here is my favorite–one I fully intend to adopt.
Dear Student: I’m very sorry to hear of the loss in your family. Please know you are all in my thoughts in this difficult time. I understand the importance of family in times of grief, and I hope you can be a source of support for your parents in what is one of the most difficult life transitions we all must face as we get older.
I would very much like to send your [Mom or Dad] a card and a short note to let them know they are in my thoughts and to single you out for praise in being so proactive and forthright in speaking to me. Would you be kind enough to send along [his or her] snail mail address so I can get this in the mail in the next day or so?
[H/T to Jim Brown, who posted this article on Facebook!]
Motor vehicle accidents used to be the leading cause of death in this country. But not in Missouri —
Firearms proved more deadly, and by a wide margin — 880 to 781 — according to the most recent federal data available. And Missouri appears to be a harbinger of things to come.
Some experts predict that for the first time in decades, firearms will kill more people nationwide this year than motor vehicles.
And the reason why traffic deaths have decreased dramatically?
Advocates credit seat belts, padded dashboards, airbags, highway median guard cables and road-edge rumble strips, among other things.
But God forbid that we talk about putting better safety mechanisms on guns! Because FREEDOM!
Reading this, I couldn’t help recalling a memorable interview with the late, irrepressible Molly Ivins, during which she noted that the Texas legislature had successfully addressed a similar problem. Gun deaths in Texas had exceeded fatalities from automobile accidents. “But our lawmakers took care of that problem.” Molly reported.
During Bill Clinton’s campaign for President, James Carville famously insisted “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” and it is certainly true that economic conditions have a huge effect on political attitudes. What that catchy slogan misses, however, is the extent to which the economy, in turn, depends upon a country’s infrastructure.
Societies require systems—both physical and social. Those systems provide us with important, albeit largely taken-for-granted webs of support. When those systems don’t work—or when they have been corrupted or neglected so that they only work for some groups and individuals—a society fails to function as it should.
A colleague of mine once made an observation that has stayed with me: in poor, third-world countries, people are no less entrepreneurial or hard working than those who live in the developed West. The relative lack of economic activity—especially more sophisticated enterprises– can be traced to the lack of basic infrastructure.
Businesses need multiple kinds of infrastructure in order to have a chance of succeeding (beginning with enough people with the wherewithal to buy their goods—i.e. markets). Undeveloped countries lack roads, trucks and railroads to transport necessary raw materials and to ship finished goods. They often lack reliable electricity and potable water. Even more importantly, many countries can’t even provide entrepreneurs with the security and social stability businesses require, the sort of social order we take for granted.
Infrastructure is much more than roads and sewers, important as those are. Infrastructure—in its most expansive sense—includes important social supports like the rule of law. In most western democratic countries (although not in the U.S.), health care is considered part of a country’s essential social infrastructure.
Needless to say, equal access to a robust social and physical infrastructure plays a huge role in mitigating economic inequality.
Elizabeth Warren is one of the few elected officials who seems to understand the essential role played by infrastructure. As she recently reiterated,
“people who built great businesses worked hard. Most successful entrepreneurs worked their tails off. But those businesses needed good soil to grow – and that meant they need roads and bridges to get their goods to market, dependable and affordable power grids, access to clean water and safe sewers, up-to-date communications – the kind of basic infrastructure that we build together.
Coming out of the Great Depression, we built those roads and bridges and power grids that helped businesses grow right here in America. We plowed money into our future, and as those businesses grew, they created great jobs here at home.
But by the 1980s, our country sharply cut back on making those investments in our future, and now we’re getting left behind. Today China spends 9% of its GDP on infrastructure. Europe spends about 5% of its GDP on infrastructure. They are building a future for their businesses – and better jobs for their people. But the United States is investing only 2.4% and looking for more ways to make cuts. Today, the American Society of Civil Engineers says we have about $3.6 trillion worth of deferred maintenance, repairs and upgrading – and every day we’re falling behind.
Disinvestment is worst, of course, in the poorer precincts of our nation—in areas where it is most needed.
America’s failure to attend to our basic infrastructure is one of the most serious policy issues we face. It is maddening to watch members of Congress in both parties posture for interest groups and play petty politics while our bridges and sewers crumble, our power grid degrades, and other countries’ wireless service exceeds ours in reliability and speed.
I think it was Eric Hoffer–the longshoreman/philosopher–who said we cannot judge the greatness of a civilization by the roads and buildings it constructs, but by how well it maintains what it builds.
On the one hand, there is high regard and wide support for investments in scientific research: Fully 79% of adults say that science has made life easier for most people, and a majority is positive about science’s impact on the quality of health care, food and the environment. More than half of adults (54%) consider U.S. scientific achievements to be either the best in the world or above average compared with other industrial countries; 92% of AAAS scientists hold similarly praiseworthy views.
When the questions got down into “the weeds,” however, the results were much like surveys about the Constitution (in the words of one report, “Americans Revere Constitution, Have No Idea What’s In It.”)
So we find stark differences between what scientists believe, based upon careful empirical research and the scientific method, and what Americans think scientists believe.
The differences in beliefs about the nature of reality are wide. For example, 88% of scientists think GMO foods are safe; 37% of Americans think they are safe. There are less dramatic, but still substantial, gaps between scientists and the public about the Big Bang, evolution, and climate change.
What is even more interesting, however, is Pew’s finding that Americans who hold beliefs at odds with settled science believe that scientists are “split” on these issues. So Americans who reject the science of climate change tell survey researchers that scientific opinion is divided on the matter. As Pew delicately puts it, “Perceptions of where the scientific community stands on both climate change and evolution tend to be associated with individual views on the issue.”
More evidence–as if we needed it–that we humans see the reality we choose to see.
