On expectations and minority experience

The thing is, you can’t blame people for their assumptions, especially when they’re just based on general experience. Especially when those same people are generally perfectly willing to adjust those assumptions and are amused and delighted when they find someone who is different. It’s fun to see the one little white guy on a team of tall black players. It’s fun to see the one little suburban dad surrounded by women at the clothing store. I don’t blame people for being what they are, and I don’t blame me for being what I am. It’s not necessarily a moral issue.

It can become a moral issue if, say the women told me I couldn’t shop in the women’s clothing section. And the question of competence is entirely different and unrelated. I don’t belong on the court, to be honest, because I couldn’t compete. In that case any assumptions people might have about me are perfectly justified in practice. But I do belong in the clothing shop because I am very competitive and skilled at choosing clothes, and in practice that comes out.

And generally people in America are pretty utilitarian. They may have certain low-resolution assumptions based on experience, which are perfectly natural and do provide a basic guide for what to expect when you encounter people in the world. But they really, at a higher resolution, just care about results. If you can do the job well and provide value, they don’t really care if it runs counter to their assumptions. In fact they’ll replace them quite quickly in specific cases. But neither really tells you anything morally about the person, or even how good or bad the society they’re in is.

In the same way that people aren’t morally obligated to possess counter-intuitive expectations, people aren’t morally obligated to embody counter-intuitive expectations. I don’t carry any special moral weight of the need to prove that most men aren’t great at fashion, or that short Dutch guys aren’t great at basketball. If I want to, I can do those things. Nothing is really preventing me other than competence and my own interest and pursuit (or lack of it). White people don’t have to become equally represented in rap, black people don’t have to become equally as associated with kung fu mastery as the Chinese.

It’s fine for us that be what we are, and for people to notice it and operate at a low resolution based on those experiences. Most of them are perfectly reasonable, and most of them are perfectly amenable to making room for non-conforming cases, for anyone who can actually demonstrate they have the interest and what it takes. No one really cares if you’re black when it comes to being a fighter pilot, whatever they might assume based on experience. What they really care about and that virtually everyone will immediately respond to is if you ace the exams and prove you’ve got the skill.

Expecting people to be generic and interchangeable isn’t exactly a pathway to understanding or living them either. We often characterize people by what we love and respect and appreciate about them, or what is simply different then ourselves, than what we don’t like about them (unless they have directly harmed or threatened us in some way, and even some of our negative associations are quite true about all kinds of people; we each have our endemic flaws as well as virtues).

Denying the fact that Germans are generally extremely efficient but also often lack a sense of humor doesn’t improve my idea of them, it just erases their identity and my right to notice or understand or appreciate it. You can’t deny people the right to have low resolution understandings of people. It doesn’t mean they don’t also have high resolution understandings. It doesn’t mean they aren’t ready, in any individual case, to assign a high resolution understanding to any particular person of any particular group.

But we’re heuristic machines. We learn, we deduce, we observe and abstract. We apply those frameworks situstionally. We assume that people who are dressed like they have lots of time and money are probably of an elite class, and they probably are, and that informs our navigation of the situation. We assume that a guy in a sweat stained wife beater with unkempt hair and beard probably is of a very different class, and use that to navigate.

We don’t know the majority of details about the majority of people in the world, and so we signal each other in various ways to give people relevant tidbits of information so we don’t present ourselves as completely unknown ciphers to them, so they know how to navigate around us socially. And we build up collective expectations based on our individual experience, which is likely to vary different depending on what time and place you’re standing in.
I don’t know, I think people just want to simplify and judge how everyone else thinks, as if everyone has some obligation to know exactly who you are and what your story is and why you matter. This is a country of almost 400 million people, each with their own lives and problems, and most people can really only know about 200 people in any seriously meaningful sense in their lifetime. That’s just totally unrealistic.

I think people just lack confidence and meaning in their own lives, and aren’t known sufficiently by people they really care about, and so they’re hoping to get meaning and significance and the sense of being known the way people in a small town know each other by some sort of moral or government mandate.

Any time you’re out of your close community, any time you’re out of your family, any time you’re out of your majority environment, you’re not going to be understood. Certainly not at a glance. That’s not a white or black phenomenon. That’s life.

Maybe white people seem genetic to blacks, but we seem pretty different to one another. Enough that we fought all kinds of wars against each other and see ourselves fractionated into all kinds of subgroups that we communicate our belonging to and make assumptions about based on those little markers.

I think it’s worth seeing how much sense you can make out of the large generalizations people make about white people if you’re not allowed to use the blanket term “white” and have to start talking about actual concrete people and people groups, like the Irish or Jews or Italians or the British or Germans or the Dutch or Danish. You start to realize that they all have their own stories. Their own distinctiveness. Their own rivalries and assumptions about themselves and one another. Their own struggles and histories and differences. Black and white is just too shallow an identity marker to reduce people to.
The real, actual problem is the tendency among modern Americans to have the cart backward. Expectations and assumptions don’t produce results. Results produce expectations and assumptions. Men don’t become soldiers because we expect them to. We expect them to because that’s what they do. The expectation can reinforce the result, but it doesn’t generate it ex nihilo; it follows it. We expect that things will fall when dropped because that’s what we’ve observed they do. People expected the Spartans to win battles because that’s what they did. People expected Athenians to be great poets and philosophers because that’s what they did. People create their own low resolution impressions and identities. They’re creating them all the time.

And you can’t mandate expectations or results. You can’t decide a priori what they can or can’t be, you can override people’s right to be what they are or other people’s right to notice. You can’t decide expectations by fist. But you can change them. You can be the person who achieves the result you value. And if enough other people also decide to achieve it, and want to, and demonstrate the skill, that will create the expectations and assumptions.

People don’t buy tons of Japanese cars because they expected them to be superior. At first they weren’t, and assumptions aligned with that. Then the Japanese started making awesome cars, and as a result people adjusted their expectations. That’s the way the process flows. You can’t make it flow in reverse; people are too practical and too a posteriori for that. They like to see it to believe it. But they’re often very willing to sacrifice their shallow assumptions and prejudices for more practical and actual outcomes and knowledge, if it can be offered.

You don’t change expectations to produce results. You produce results to change expectations. That’s not only how it does work, that’s how it should work. Trying to work the process in reverse, for any group, is the same kind of subversion that forms the core of truly harmful and non-adaptive prejudice, true racism. Attempting to set the rules for assumptions a priori, what you can and cannot assume, what you are or are not allowed to think or conclude, and in a way that is not subject to feedback from actual people and their behavior and accomplishments, that is true injustice.

On a side note, being in either the majority or the minority in a situation isn’t an inherently moral stance or position. It just is. And it affects your experience. A lot of people like to think that being welcomed and having an assumed position in the majority makes them a good person and confirms them be in the right or confirms the majority in the right confirmation runs both ways). And some people are tempted to think the opposite; they are affirmed by being in the minority; the positioning itself seems indicative of virtue and validation and value prejudice.

A lot of people with a shallow conception of value just want to be part of the majority or make the majority be like them and affirming of them to make them or it good. But as much as you might be able to learn something about one from the other if your survey is Broad enough, they’re really separate questions, and you can’t derive reliable, complex moral judgments and prescriptions that way, whichever position you prefer to occupy.

On a further side note, I think it’s a violation of human autonomy to stake moral value on the arrangement of people in areas of life that are largely dependent on individual difference. Yes, there are plenty of things in life that do have moral significance, where your position in regard to them, and even your whole society’s position, is indicative of moral excellence or degeneration. Some things aren’t just down to individual differences and temperaments and talents and personalities. Some thing fall outside the scope of individual freedom. And those tend to be the really important and powerful things that form the foundation of the human organism and human psyche and human social organism. Cruelty to infants isn’t a matter of valid personal freedom because the race would literally die from its adoption as a cultural feature. Some qualities and behaviors are inherently catastrophically harmful to people and to society, and some are inherently helpful. And sometimes they’re the same thing, gone good or gone bad, powerful qualities that can be leveraged either to serious help of seriously harm humanity.

But some things are normally distributed. They aren’t moral issues (though how you use them could be). Height varies. How tall you are might affect what things you can do, it might structure how you interact and compete with others. But it’s not a moral issue, being this tall or that tall. It’s a normally distributed variation. It doesn’t really matter that much. And we can argue about and discuss what things are and are not important and critical and essential to human survival and flourishing and which are variable and tertiary and aren’t worth such weighty judgments.

Those minor things are part of what make us particular and distinct. Not just human (it’s the big things that are more fixed that determine that), but this particular individual human, with these quirks and this story. Morality is important. But you run into real danger when you moralize or make primary things that are secondary or tertiary, or when you make secondary or tertiary things that are primary.

You cannot make judgements about the moral content of a whole society based in shallow, ad hoc judgements about majority or minority positions. It’s not your right to decide that a good society will be defined as one where 50% of everyone in a clothing store will be men, where 50% of the basketball players are white, where 50% of preschool teachers are men, where 50% of trash collectors and oil drillers are women, where 50% of rap artists are white suburban females. People have a right to their individuality, and you can’t mandate those outcomes as a moral prerequisite without erasing and violating the sovereignty of people’s individuality, their right to be more or less tall or short, fast or slow, extroverted or introverted, sociable or shy, object-oriented or people-oriented. These are all things that vary in non-norslly significant ways across the population. And people have a right to their own history. As a society, as a race, as a family with a particular character. Humans are not generic. You cannot decide everything that matters most deeply about them, their moral status, what they should be or do, what outcomes they should reach, by such trivial facts as things like skin color. There isn’t such a trivial formula for identifying a just society as “5% of the people are Jewish and 5% of the CEOs are Jewish”. You need some deeper, more sophisticated measures than that. Race particularly, and often gender as well, just aren’t strong enough and restricted enough categories to make those kinds of judgements. There’s far, far too much natural variation within them, there are too many other factors that matter more and better explain the results in those individual circumstances. They’re too pat an explanation for the outcome and conclusions reached, too subject to easy counterexamples.

As far as I’m concerned, the argument that someone of that race or that gender must achieve these results is just as bad as the argument that someone of that race or that gender could never achieve these results. Both deny human individuality, as well as the true foundations of moral responsibility, reducing everything down to mere prejudice. In fact to my eyes the two positions are virtually indistiguishable. They’ve both decided a priori things that it is not within people’s right to restrict and delineate.

One great failure of our educational system is the failure to articulate the true horror and heroism of the sacrifice that is being made in agreeing to the law. If you have never known the horror of a terrible crime done to you or to another that you care about, if you have never known the rage and disgust that it provokes, if you have never known the terror that such a wrong might go unrighted, then you don’t appreciate what you’re really asking. Some people act as if the demand to follow the law was an easy thing, as if giving up your absolute autonomy and pursuit of your interest were such a simple bargain to make that they could trust. Some people act as if the demand to trust the law were a trite thing, a matter of little cost, as if giving up your personal right to justice and defense and revenge to some other you don’t even know was a small matter.