I Agree With You, But You're Completely Wrong

Imagine this: a brochure for a local, middle-of-the-road college (let’s call it Somewhere State) shows a group of students, smiling and laughing. “Hanging on the quad.” Maybe one is holding a frisbee or something. The group consists of one white student, one black student, one Asian student, and one student in a wheelchair; two male, two female.

And yet, everyone knows that Somewhere State is an overwhelmingly white school.

I’m assuming that’s not too hard to imagine. We all probably know of a school - or a business or a nonprofit organization of some kind - that has done this exact thing: tried to mask its homogeneity with a superficial display of diversity. And I think most people are united in the way we react to it. We see the Somewhere State brochure and we laugh, we mock, we criticize them for being so careful to include exactly one person of each race on the cover. And, of course, a person in a wheelchair, presumably to represent all disabilities.

Third best player in the game, easily. After GOAT Pablo Sanchez and
that fast-running goofball Pete Wheeler.

This image of “diversity” is a cliché, yes, but it is one that still exists.

My point is that having a generally negative response to such an image transcends politics. But also that it doesn’t. Because the way that different people would describe the Somewhere State brochure, and the narratives and ideas that they would invoke in doing so - this reveals how sometimes, even when we agree, we don’t really agree.

One way to respond to it is to call it an example of “political correctness.” Man, that’s such a loaded term. To the extent that I once started to plan out a whole blog post about it and then got overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of it and abandoned it. (It’s still on my to-do list, but then so are some movies and bands people told me to check out back in, like, 2010, so who knows what will happen.) But let’s just say here that anyone who rails against “political correctness” is most likely on the conservative side of the political spectrum, and would rather see a Somewhere State brochure that showed four able-bodied white students hanging out on the quad.

This is the worst take on political correctness I was able to find. And that
is a HIGH bar.

Another way to respond is to call it “tokenism” or “a facade of diversity” or something along those lines. The person who says that is, for one thing, much more likely to be posting it on the Internet rather than saying it out loud - on Tumblr or Twitter (or, yeah, I guess maybe even Facebook). He or she also probably falls on the liberal side of the political spectrum, and would prefer to see the college expand its efforts to attract non-white students and become truly multicultural. The problem is that the school is using people of color as props to portray a certain image (a charge that has been leveled at Betsy Devos and others as well) while not actually embracing them.

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Addition, 8/26/17:

Originally, this post went on to talk about how the Somewhere State brochure could be considered an example of a compromise where both sides end up miserable. (And there was a nice Simpsons quote in there and a dig at the Affordable Care Act.) And of course that's still possible and valid, but that's not really what I wanted to discuss when I set out to write this.

I'll leave this here in tribute.

What really interests me is that one group believes that their reaction to the brochure is a conservative one, while the other group simultaneously believes that their distaste marks them as progressive. And they're both right. Their feelings about the brochure are a natural extension of their respective ideologies. Our perception is like an iceberg; most of what makes it significant lies under the surface. If the conversation remains at a superficial level - the level of "I dislike x" and "Yeah, so do I" - you never really know where the other person is coming from.

I used to have conversations like this all the time, particularly when I worked at Subway. (Subway is like a perfect storm for awkward conversations with coworkers. You are usually only working with one other person, most stores go through long spells of being very slow, and it seems like a lot of the people who are drawn to work there also really want to share their thoughts with pretty-much-strangers.) Someone I worked with would bring up something topical like the protests in Ferguson, Missouri or illegal immigration, maybe (this was before we were forbidden from talking about anything besides DONALD J TRUMP all the damn time) and I would find myself carefully toeing the conversational line. They weren't saying anything I could disagree with (yes kathy you're right all lives do matter) but I also didn't really want them to think I was on their side either. Because if I did happen to agree with them on this particular thing, it was often for totally different reasons.

I remember once posting on Twitter (before that became a Trump-exclusive platform, along with pretty much every other form of communication): "There needs to be a way to say 'I agree with the literal words you are saying, but not with the larger cultural narrative you are trying to invoke.'" I'd find and link the Tweet, but that would lead to an hours-long rabbit hole of me being endlessly amused by my own old jokes, and I do that often enough anyway. But it's still true, and I guess this post is just an expansion on that same old idea. There is no good, concise way of communicating that.

Another example: there's a semi-recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History (about one in every three episodes is brilliant, I'd say) that discusses satire. It talks about Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey's impressions of Sarah Palin, but the point that is most relevant here has to do with the 70s show All in the Family. Gladwell cites a study that found that both conservatives and liberals watched and enjoyed All in the Family, but that the former group was more likely to view Archie Bunker as speaking the truth and espousing "common sense," whereas liberals typically viewed him as a buffoon and a bigot. The intention of the people who created the show was, presumably, to satirize Bunker and his way of thinking about the world as outdated and laughable. But that is not how many people perceived it.

Now, I've never seen a single episode of All in the Family. It went off the air more than a decade before I was born. But I did, in my formative years, watch a decent amount of Family Guy and I am culturally-aware enough to know that it and its brethren are the spiritual descendants of All in the Family. I mean, even the opening theme song is an homage to Archie Bunker and his wife sitting at the piano. And I remember once, listening to the audio commentary on one of the DVDs of Family Guy that I owned, hearing Seth MacFarlane talk about the relationship between the two shows. (Yeah, I know. It's weird for me to remember that I used to be someone who would listen to the audio commentary on a Family Guy episode, too. But I'm pretty sure I only did it, like, once.) 

Whatever your thoughts are on this guy,
can we agree he's got a punchable face?

Macfarlane's point was essentially: back in the 70's, everyone understood that Archie Bunker was the one being satirized, that his beliefs were being mocked rather than promoted; in the 2000's, people were so "easily offended" that they could not distinguish between a character who was a bigot and the show promoting bigotry. And I definitely liked that way of thinking at the time; that's why it stuck in my memory. But the research indicates that MacFarlane is empirically wrong about All in the Family. Not everyone who watched it saw Archie Bunker as the target of satire. Those who held similar views agreed with him, and may even have felt emboldened by hearing their ideas repeated back to them via the television.

So when Family Guy makes a joke about gay people and MacFarlane believes that it's obvious that the homophobic person is supposed to be the butt of the joke, there is a significant proportion of the audience that does perceive the joke in that way at all. They perceive it as a joke about gay people. Because artistic intent (yeah i guess i'm calling Family Guy art) does not dictate how something will be perceived by the audience. Because a joke, too, is like an iceberg. Even if we both laugh, it does not mean we're both laughing in the same way or for the same reason. Even when we agree, that doesn't mean we agree.

Hot Take on the OJ Trial, 23 Years Later

I was pretty young when all the OJ Simpson stuff went down. (I mean, the real OJ Simpson stuff, not that weird 2007 sequel that I’m pretty sure people only paid attention to because of the first one, the way that some people watched the second and third Matrix movies or will go see the second, third, fourth, and fifth movies in the Avatar franchise.) I was two-and-a-half when he was arrested, and I had just turned four when the trial ended. So I wasn’t exactly tuned in to what was going on. I had other interests at the time, like Barney and Rugrats and my imaginary friend Lucinda the Chicken who loved Froot Loops.

Since then, I’ve obviously gathered the basics of the case, as well as a sense of how people felt (an continue to feel) about the verdict - and an even stronger sense that it was all a really big deal. But I feel like I didn’t have a full understanding of it all until I watched The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story on Netflix a few weeks ago and then, inspired, did a bunch of reading about it. Now I finally feel like I’m caught up.

Watching the show, I was struck by three main things. First of all: sorry, David Schwimmer, but you’re always going to be Ross to me, and Ross sucks. Second: all those appearances and mentions of the Kardashian children are some weird sort of 2016 fan-service that people from the 90s would likely find baffling. Third, and most importantly: both sides of the case seem to believe that they are the underdog, that they are David up against some massive, systemic Goliath, and that the narrative of it all should be of their triumph over that juggernaut.

Yes, he and Rachel were on a break. But Ross still sucks.

From the defense’s perspective, epitomized by Johnnie Cochran: OJ Simpson is a black man in a country that has a long and awful history of discriminating against black people and treating them unjustly. There is a specific hatred of black men who date or pursue white women - or are believed to. (See: Emmett Till, Scottsboro Boys.) Interracial marriage has only been fully legal in the United States for, like, twenty-five years. (Holy shit.) The Rodney King beating and subsequent riots just happened a couple of years ago, solidifying the idea that the LAPD is a racist institution, or at least an organization that protects officers who hold racist views. Mark Fuhrman, one of the cops who found evidence against OJ Simpson, turns out to be unequivocally racist. The LAPD and the prosecution are therefore “the man” or "the system" - participants (some deliberately, others unconsciously) in America’s long history of bringing down strong, powerful black men.

From the prosecution’s perspective, epitomized by Marcia Clark: OJ Simpson is a very wealthy and famous man who lives not in downtown Los Angeles but in the posh neighborhood of Brentwood. He has reportedly claimed, "I'm not black; I'm OJ." He benefits from having the money to hire a “dream team” of lawyers, as well as from a network of loyal fans and supporters who find it hard to believe that he could have done anything wrong. Even some of the police officers who investigated the murders are fans of Simpson’s. Moreover, Marcia Clark has to contend with sexist criticism of her appearance, voice, and demeanor; her own “likability” becomes a factor in whether the jury, judge, and public will listen to her arguments in a way that it would never be for a man.

Both of these narratives are portrayed in The People v. OJ Simpson (though it is probably slanted towards Sarah-Paulson-as-Marcia-Clark’s side) but I was familiar with them already. They are the two basic stories that I have heard people tell about the trial in the many years since it ended. (By the way, I think they’re both true. OJ Simpson was both black and famous.) Obviously it’s not this simple, but it’s easy to frame them as the “black story” and the “white story.” I certainly have heard the “white story” more, to the extent that I considered it the received wisdom about OJ Simpson, that he got away with it because of his wealth and fame.

Or, as pop-punk demigods and middle-school-angst staple Good Charlotte put it:

“Did you know when you are famous you could kill your wife

And there’s no such thing as 25 to life

As long as you’ve got the cash to pay for Cochran?”

This is what I thought "cool" looked like when I was 12

But there is something more to the “white story” - and this is where things get kind of problematic. Both in the TV series and in many (white) people’s summary of the whole OJ Simpson debacle, there is an implication that the prosecution’s narrative was not a narrative at all. They were focused on the facts, the evidence; it was the defense who crafted a narrative. And that narrative was so appealing that it made many people forget about the evidence. Therefore, there was another element to the Goliath that the prosecution was facing, and that element was the popularity of the defense’s explanation, the whole “race thing”. OJ Simpson was acquitted not just because of his wealth and fame, but because so many people believed that he had been targeted because of his race.

And so I kind of feel like the OJ Simpson verdict was a real turning point in American culture. It became the go-to example that white people could point to as proof that things had gone “too far in the other direction” - that our culture had become so sensitive about race that now we were letting murderers walk free because we were afraid of being called racist. Granted, I wasn’t old enough at the time to know for sure, but I wonder whether this is when phrases like “political correctness run amok” started to be thrown around. If it wasn’t the beginning, it certainly is the flagship example.

And to this day, that seems to be one of the most common narratives that white people (especially, but not exclusively, conservatives) tell regarding race: that tides have turned and now it’s actually white people who are the targets of racial persecution.

Of course, that’s total crap. White people are still the majority and there is still an enormous amount of privilege that comes with being white in America. People of color, and particularly black people, are still so much more likely to be targeted by the police, to be shot in their dealings with the police, and to be given harsher sentences for similar crimes. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The OJ Simpson verdict was a unique event, not proof of a pattern.

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So, would it be better if people had paid attention to the evidence instead of the more interesting story? It’s tempting to say yes, but I think it’s kind of a false dichotomy. Evidence and narrative have to go hand-in-hand. And while the defense’s narrative won in the short term, it is the “white” narrative about the trial that has won in the court of popular opinion after the fact. Hence all the outrage and continued interest in OJ Simpson. I mean, when’s the last time anyone brought up Robert Blake or even Casey Anthony?

And speaking of evidence: how many people have detailed knowledge about the evidence in Simpson’s armed robbery case? And yet so many people maintain vehemently that “that guy” should be locked up.

Besides, what about the old adage to the effect of, “Better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man convicted?” Our whole criminal justice system is supposed to be built around the presumption of innocence, the notion that reasonable doubt about the suspect’s guilt is enough to aquit him or her. Otherwise, we risk becoming an authoritarian state where being accused of a crime is tantamount to being convicted. And honestly, that’s the possibility that frightens me a hell of a lot more than knowing that one black guy might have gotten away with something at some point.

The Conversation Between Expertise and Experience

I enjoy mindless television (as does, I believe, everyone else.) And one of my favorite genres over the past couple of months has been the sort of reality show where the following narrative plays out: someone (or group of people) is struggling to do a thing, then an expert (or panel of experts) comes in and teaches them how to do the thing better, and then they do the thing better. “Savior reality,” maybe? Three shining examples of this genre are Kitchen Nightmares, Bar Rescue, and Supernanny - all of which follow the same basic formula, down to the point two-thirds of the way through each episode where the expert “leaves” the ordinary folks to fend for themselves and then offer them further feedback.

(Side note: Remember when we had both Supernanny and Nanny 911? It seems like Supernanny won that war, at least in the glorious world of syndication. Wasn’t that around the same time that Nanny Mcphee came out, too? America must have been working through some weird Mary Poppins nostalgia or something.)

Pictured: Gordon Ramsay (née Mcphee)

But as formulaic as these shows are, there is one feature that makes each episode unique and therefore entertaining: the people. (Let’s leave aside the question of whether reality TV is really real or not, because I have a lot of thoughts about that, too, but it isn’t really relevant here (and I’m working on my parentheses addiction). Whether we’re talking about actual human beings or fictional characters in the next section, the point is the same.) Sometimes the people on these shows are grateful for the advice of the experts: they take it all to heart, implement it to the best of their ability, and come away from the experience profoundly transformed. But other times, they resist. They argue with the experts; they refuse to take responsibility for their failure; they insist that the way they’ve done things is better. (It should go without saying that these are the good episodes.)

Now, I do not respond to criticism very well. I get defensive and argumentative just like that douchey bald guy. But I know this about myself, so I don’t go out there and actively seek out criticism. (Besides, I criticize myself and everything I do more than enough to make up for it.) The people on these shows applied to be on them, though. Or, at least, they have hard evidence in front of them that proves (as I often yell at the TV) “WHAT YOU’RE DOING ISN’T WORKING.” Their bar or restaurant is losing money, or their kids are out of control, or their pet doesn’t obey them or whatever. (Is there a pets version of this show already? If not, it’s mine.) Very often they utter the words, “I need help.” So it’s fascinating that they still can manage to be so resistant to the help that comes.

Moreover, one of the central premises of these shows is that the people who are giving them advice - the Gordon Ramsay, the Supernanny Jo, the Supertrainer Steve (TM) - are qualified to do so. They have done this sort of thing before, many times, and have had success; they aren’t pulling any of it out of their ass, so to speak. But still, many people don’t want to hear it. They’d rather cling stubbornly to their own failing policies than accept the advice of an expert.

*

In education, we are inundated with experts. There are the consultants from outside organizations that teach us about the initiatives that our school has been signed up for (often without teachers’ awareness or consent); there are our actual bosses, the principals and superintendents and department heads; there are the legislators who pass laws regarding what we can/cannot/should/must do in the classroom; there are the scholars who study our discipline and/or education at a higher level, and publish their research in journals that nobody but their colleagues can access anyway. And in a broader sense, everybody sort of considers themselves an expert on education, or at least acts like it. When I used to mention to people - my coworkers at Subway or Toys R Us, for instance - that I was planning on becoming a teacher, they always had some opinion that they wanted to share. Either teachers were too boring, or too judgmental, or needed to be more strict, or needed to focus more on teaching critical thinking, or needed to go “back to basics” - each opinion uttered with the same air of authority that you would expect from the Jon Taffer of teaching.

I wonder if people in other professions deal with this phenomenon, too, but I kind of doubt it. At least not to the same degree. But it does make sense. Pretty much everyone you meet does have all kinds of experience with education - at least twelve years of it, which is plenty of time to form some opinions. Plus, there’s always that “taxpayer” card that can get played (which is a whole other discussion, but let me just quickly make the point that I, too, pay taxes, so unless I pay my own salary, you don’t pay my salary either, SHARON.)

Demetri Martin is just, like, really really good

And it would be one thing if all these experts and “experts” agreed with each other, but of course they do not. I figure it’s sort of like this: you’re sent to five different doctors to figure out what is wrong with you and how to make it better. The first doctor diagnoses you with some specific disease and writes you a prescription. The second doctor diagnoses you with something else and writes you a different prescription, which absolutely cannot be taken with the first pill you were prescribed or you will die a gruesome, painful death. The third doctor solemnly tells you that you need to have surgery. The fourth doctor tells you that you simply need to exercise more, drink more water, and eliminate all potential sources of stress in your life (you know, like a job and a family.) The fifth doctor insists upon the “rest cure,” where you are to do nothing but lie in bed and stare at the patterns on some yellow wallpaper all day. And each doctor is positively emphatic that his or her cure - and only his or her cure - will make you better.

And then you go home and say to yourself, “Man, I didn’t even think I was sick. I mean, I didn’t feel amazing or anything, but I didn’t think things were that bad.”

It would be easy, in this situation, to become distrustful of “experts,” to conclude that none of them really knew what they were talking about, since they can’t even agree on the nature of the problem, never mind the solution. And this is exactly what I think a lot of educators (and others, but we’ll get to that later) have done. At every single mandatory training or instance of professional development I have attended over the past few years, there has always been a silent majority of teachers who have listened politely to the speaker, participated in all activities and discussions, but - candidly, after the fact - expressed a general sentiment that it was all a waste of time, that they already knew what worked from their own experience, and that’s what they were going to continue to do. You know, the same thing that some reality show participants say about the advice that they are given.

What I want to consider here is the relationship that ought to exist between “expertise” and “experience.” (To be clear: I am using “experience” here in the sense of one’s personal, direct experience doing something. Someone else’s experience, or an appeal to the amount of experience that another person has doing the thing, would really fall under “expertise” in this framework.) I think that is is unhealthy and unproductive to dismiss expertise and revere experience, and equally harmful to dismiss experience and revere expertise - and yet we have a tendency to fall into these patterns.

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Probably the best example of “expertise” in our culture is science. Most of us don’t really understand science beyond, like, an eighth-grade level, but we do believe in the authority of its experts, even when what those experts teach us directly contradicts our personal experience. I mean, do you believe that the Earth revolves around the sun? Yeah, me too. Do you believe that disease is caused by little living creatures so small you can’t even see them, and that millions of those little creatures live on and inside your body? Same. Do you believe that all life on Earth descended from one organism that lived billions of years ago? So do I, but I certainly don’t have any personal experience that confirms it.

Oh, yeah, these are totally real. Not made up at all.

(Interestingly, out of those three examples, I feel like evolution is the most intuitive. If you believe in the notion of heredity and the possibility of mutation - which are things that can be and are observed directly by average people - doesn’t the concept of evolution follow pretty smoothly from that? Whereas “Earth goes around the sun” is a pretty solid mindfuck, and you kind of can’t blame the people of the 1500s for being all like, “Yeah, right.”)

Of course, there is a certain segment of the population that does not believe in science. Our president happens to be one of the most egregious examples. (He doesn’t believe in exercise because he thinks the body contains a finite amount of energy, “like a battery” - which goes against, like, pretty much everything we know about bodies.) But then there is also the US Senator, James Inhofe, who brought a snowball into Congress as an argument against global warming, or every annoying guy in line behind you on a cold day who has to offer his two cents: “So much for global warming, huh?” Then there is alleged comedian Steve Harvey who doesn’t believe in evolution because (and this is a direct quote): “Why we still got monkeys?” Or all of the people who are “just raising questions” about vaccines, or the small but presumably serious group of people who still claim the Earth is flat. Man, we’ve got a lot more of this shit than I thought.

And if you asked any of those people what they were doing, I bet they’d say something about how they were being skeptical, or questioning authority, or challenging things that simply “don’t make sense.” That is: they are choosing to follow their own experience over other people's expertise. Which is kind of strange for me to think about, because putting it that way, I instinctively want to side with them. I believe in being skeptical, don’t I? I believe in following my own perception rather than what a group of experts has told me I’m supposed to think. But, like, just not in this case?

There is a fantastic scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that illustrates this whole situation perfectly. In it, the character Mac makes what is honestly the best argument I have ever heard for being skeptical of scientific truth: we only believe in it because we have read about it in books, which is exactly what we criticize religious people for doing. And Dennis is all of us, unconvinced but unable to rebut the point. Because, holy shit, Mac is actually right. We have been trusting in the expertise of scientists even when it contradicts our own experience. Because, like, the Earth does look flat and it does look like the sun is the one moving.

So how do we contend with this? I think the answer lies in the necessity of allowing for a conversation between experience and expertise, in scientific as well as all other matters. Choosing one side and defending it no matter what only leads to absurdity. What we need to do is understand that both our experience and the voice of experts are valid in some way, and that there is some sort of relationship between them. They make comments upon one another. In some cases, expertise is able to explain why we perceive things the way we do; in other cases, it cannot account for them and therefore is not sufficient.

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I mentioned before that one of the groups of experts that teachers have to contend with are the scholars who study their discipline, with their ivory-tower pronouncements about the right and wrong ways to teach. I can’t speak for other disciplines, but I know that one of the groups that has the most clout within the writing-pedagogy community is the National Writing Project and its associated academics, people like Donald Murray and Lucy Calkins and Peter Elbow. They espouse a particular approach to teaching writing - the “workshop” style, as it is often called - which I personally find appealing and try to emulate in my own classroom. But there is undeniably a sense of “Thou shalt” in their writings and speeches and so on, and I know that plenty of teachers have reacted to that with resistance.

For instance, way back in 1990, before I was even a person, a high-school English teacher wrote a piece that was published in English Journal entitled, “Why High-School Writing Teachers Should Not Write.” This was a direct contradiction of one of the central tenets of what was then, and arguably remains, the orthodox view of how to teach writing. Jost’s opening line reveals her position pretty clearly: “From the mountain heights of academia a new dictum has been passed . . .all the way down to those of us in the trenches.” She then goes on to explain that the experience of teaching high-school English does not leave her with time or energy to write seriously, and ends by challenging the experts to “come on down here into the trenches and show me how it’s done . . . the day you join a high-school faculty, I’ll pick up my pen and start a novel.”

Kind of an extreme metaphor, huh?

Jost’s piece is a very clear argument for valuing experience over expertise, and I think it articulates the frustrations of a lot of teachers when it comes to being told what they should be doing (or should be doing more of). “But I’m already stretched to my limits! And you’re telling me I need to be doing more?!” And of course, academia is only one source of this sort of thing; typically it is coming from all directions, and very rarely from people who actually spend all day teaching.

I do not think, though, that what Jost wrote is a problematic example, though, the way that the Senator’s snowball is (senator's snowball new band name called it) - for two reasons. One: it is about a particular thing that she feels she is being told to do, rather than about expertise in general (though some of her snide remarks do veer in that direction). Two: it was written down and submitted for publication, thereby beginning a conversation about the issue, which is exactly what I am suggesting is the right way to deal with a discrepancy. In fact, the way I found Jost’s article was through another article written a year later by a practicing teacher named Tim Gillespie called, “Joining the Debate: Shouldn’t Writing Teachers Write,” which articulates some of the reasons why writing might be useful for writing teachers. And I found that one from a blog post by Peter Anderson, a writing teacher who I follow on Twitter, who was researching the same question. So the conversation has been going on for twenty-seven years now.

But I think the most interesting part of Gillespie’s article is the following section: “I was surprised that Karen Jost railed against experts who urged her to write, since I have always viewed by own writing as my main defense against experts. My own experience as a writer inoculates me from any nonsense I might run across in the pronouncements on the teaching of writing by anyone . . . Karen Jost views writing as acquiescence to authority; I view it as establishing my own authority.”

What one person considers to be dripping with expertise is someone else’s revitalizing experience.

And so that means that it is our own perceptions that really need to be examined in all of these cases. After all, to Charles Darwin, evolution was something that he had observed directly rather than the received wisdom it is today; to the early Protestants, reading the Bible for oneself rather than listening to the interpretations of a priest was the ultimate in experience. These things are relative. And so perhaps the most important conversation that needs to take place is the one that happens inside oneself, where we reflect honestly on what we believe and why we believe it.

I do believe the Earth goes around the Sun because I read it in a book. That is the truth. And that is the only worthwhile starting point.