Reading through Lupyan’s
article about the canonical triangle reminded me of a thought-provoking passage
I came across maybe a year ago. Its author, a blogger named Julian Abagond,
wrote, “If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white
man. Because to them that is the Default
Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long
hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes*; for black, I add kinky hair or
brown skin. The Other has to be marked.
If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed” (emphasis
mine).
According to Abagond, a white man is the human equivalent of a perfect prototypical
triangle. One explanation for this is the inundation of white men in basically
every social sphere from media and entertainment to politics to academia. Here
are some statistics: in 2012, the members of the Academy of Motion Pictures
Arts and Sciences (which give out the Oscars awards for film) were 75% male and
94% white; in 2015, the members of the 114th Congress were 80% male
and more than 80% white; in 2015, the faculty at Stanford University was 73%
male and 73% white (Kirk; Manning; Faculty Profile). When you grow up seeing white
men in positions of power and influence, it is not unnatural to begin
associating them with the norm. Putting the “default” label on the white man
prototype dismisses everyone else as inferior triangles.
This issue of ethnic representation is brought up in the
Rickford reading, which considers the lack of contributions from
sociolinguistics to the African American speech community. Rickford argues that
there is a need for more African American linguists, since the current field of
linguistics may be too insensitive or impatient to African American students. Geneva
Smitherman-Donaldson wrote that the examples that linguists choose to study “…[convey]
the impression that black speech [is] the lingo of criminals, dope pushers,
teenage hoodlums, and various and sundry hustlers.” This, she points out,
results in “a slice of black folk character…presented as the whole” (Rickford
171). When there is a lack of ethnic representation, there is a lack of ethnic
stories. Having a few members of a minority represent all members is like
having only one word and trying to make it fit many different definitions, which
in turn is like trying to squeeze your big feet into small shoes and then, with
half of your feet sticking out, sauntering out of the house, showing it off to
everyone, and saying, “They fit well.”
*Besides “slanted eyes,”
another perennial favorite is “almond eyes.” You know it’s lazy writing when
you see “almond eyes” describing the Asian character, who is probably destined
to be the white man’s sidekick, adversary, takeout deliveryman, one-dimensional
romantic interest, guru (you know, when he goes to mystical southeast Asia to
find enlightenment), or all five, which would actually be kind of funny.
Sources
Kirk: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/oscars/12120671/Oscars-2016-race-row-How-representative-is-the-Academy-Awards.html
Faculty Profile: http://facts.stanford.edu/academics/faculty-profile
Your discussion on a default human being abstracted as "white male" draws a very interesting and concrete connection between the two readings that I definitely did not see at first. I think if the initial conception most people have after seeing a regular stick figure is "white male", then the solution to this problem is increasing the diversity within various media such as movies, books, research papers, etc. However, such a change would be incredibly difficult because identifiers, such as "slanted eyes", are already built-in to various symbolic representations we have. For example, the skirt on a female symbol when differentiating between male and female restrooms.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I agree that if I were to draw what is to me the default human being, I would draw a white man. However, I don't think that setting white male as the default necessarily renders all instances which deviate from this standard as inferior -- there are many defaults which pale in comparison to their deviants -- but I agree that it is often the case where what you say it true.
ReplyDeleteYour bolded statement is a strong suggestion as to what significance marking the other, or at least marking te subclass which inherits from the default, could have in linguistics, and I would be curious as to what experimental data has been taken to support plausible answers.
I totally agree with you that deviations from the standard "white man" are by no means inferior! In that sentence, I was extending the metaphor of the white man as the triangle by referencing how, in the triangle study, people said deviations from the standard triangle were less good triangles.
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ReplyDeleteI think I got the same impression as you from the Rickford paper, because I also enjoyed his almost accusatory response to those who classify AAVE as a lesser dialect of English, why do we consider AAVE to have more negative connotations than other European dialects or accents? Because the biases that have unfortunately formed in society paint a picture of the default dialect, the default accent, as one that is predominantly spoken by white men, just like the stick figure and the equilateral triangle. I think that this is Rickford's other important point, that these biases are ridiculous, and just like the poor representation of African Americans in linguistic societies, we should work towards fixing it.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting connection between the two articles! I hadn’t considered how the way we learn and store categories would affect our ideas about humans or dialects. Unfortunately this can result in a feedback loop similar to what we see with triangles. When people are forming their internal concept of triangles, they are taking in examples that are biased towards one specific triangle, the upwards-pointing equilateral triangle. There is no real reason for that specific triangle to be more prevalent than others – it’s not like equilateral triangles are somehow better at being triangles. But when people use triangles in everyday life, they automatically reach for the most common triangle they’ve seen, increasing its frequency of use and strengthening our society-wide bias towards that particular triangle. It seems like a similar effect might explain why stereotypes can be so hard to change – for example, the stereotype that doctors are male persists despite large numbers of female doctor, in part because this stereotype influences the way doctors are portrayed, and those portrayals in turn reinforce our internal concept of ‘doctor’ as male.
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