Noli Irritare Leones

One of my basic biases is that any power relationship is more clearly seen from the bottom up. Another is that everyone’s view is skewed; all people are self-centered in their way of looking at things; all people distort things to suit their needs. And I hold these two biases in tension.

This post sort of relates to the post I made yesterday about gay expectations, but also to other stuff: discussions of race relations on various blogs, threads on various feminist blogs about men and women, etc.

Why I think things are more clearly seen from the bottom up:

First, because the person with less power has to pay more attention to the other than the person with more power does. If you’re in group X, which is in the minority, you’ll have a lot more occasion to learn things about group Y, which is in the majority, than group Y has to bother to learn things about you, unless X is a particularly powerful minority which runs everything (rare, but then there was, for example, South Africa in the days of apartheid). If X and Y are groups of the same size, but Y has more power, then they have equal opportunity to learn stuff about each other, but X is probably paying closer attention.

Second, if you are, you think, a well-meaning sort of person in group Y, there’s a good chance that a lot of the crap that people in group X have to put up with every day is happening out of your eyesight and out of your earshot. You see, maybe, a little of it, but not nearly as much as is actually happening. But if you’re in group X, you see all the crap you’re going through. I’ve been in enough threads where stuff that women go through that’s not rare at all, such as street harrassment, really surprises some of the men in the thread, that when I’m on the other side of that line, and I’m hearing about, say, crap that black people still get from white people, I assume I’m similarly hearing about stuff that, even if I haven’t seen so much of it personally, is probably more common than I’d like to think.

And the third point has to do with just how people – everyone, rich, poor, male, female, of whatever race or religion or sexual orientation – distort their perceptions. Because being among the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on, being in the relatively powerless group for whatever reason, doesn’t, of course, mean you’re brighter, or more virtuous, or more right, or less naturally self-centered, or less inclined to distort your perceptions of things to your advantage. It just means you’re under different pressures.

We naturally like to see the world in a way that lets us cut a good figure. We want to see things that favor us as natural, and things that don’t favor us as terribly unjust. We want to notice all the times when things are stacked against us, and ignore all the times when things are stacked in our favor. We want to come up with reasons why the game was rigged, if we’re losing it, and reasons why it’s absolutely and thoroughly fair, if we’re winning it. And at the same time, most of us, most of the time, have a bias toward going along and not making waves.

If you’re on the powerful side (or any of us, for whichever relations we have where we happen to be on the side with more power and privilege), then all of those biases pull in the same way. The world is basically fair. Most unfairness is in the past, or is quickly being dealt with. We’ve succeeded because we’re bright and hardworking, and you, too, can succeed, if you just do the same stuff we did.

If you’re on the less powerful side, then the biases pull in different directions. Sometimes, you have a chip on your shoulder like you wouldn’t believe, and so you might see bias against you even where it isn’t there. Sometimes, you may be way to fatalistic, way too willing to blame every problem in your life on the fact that you’re in group X (against which the world is just stacked). Sometimes, you make up for the disadvantages you suffer by being X by making X a huge part of your identity, and making your membership in X a noble cause.

But, in addition to the normal human desire to make yourself look good, you also may have the normal human desire not to make waves. And so sometimes, even though you’re in group X, and group X is at all kinds of disadvantages, you may, like people in group Y, want to minimize those disadvantages, and try to pretend they aren’t there. Sometimes, people in group X may even defend the unreasonable privileges of group Y, for whatever satisfaction comes from going along, not making waves, or being favored by group Y as an unusually bright and reasonable member of group X.

The result is, though people in group X, like people in group Y, will distort their view of the world to suit their own advantage, the ways in which they distort their view of the world may, on average, wind up being a little more diverse than the ways in which people in group Y distort their view of the world.

So, my theory is, any individual person, whether in group X or group Y, is going to be wrong a lot of the time, but if you listen to a lot of different people from group X, you probably get a fuller and fairer picture of relations between X and Y, most of the time, than if you listen to a lot of different people in group Y.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under News and Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.