Personal essays
Recognizing differences
Adjustable seats
The car I learned to drive in was our family Buick station wagon.
The first thing you would do when you got in was adjust the front seat.
“Big deal, Daniel,” you say, “I always adjust the driver’s seat when I get in.”
Yeah, but I didn’t say the driver’s seat, I said the front seat. The driver and passenger sat on an upholstered bench and the whole thing moved forward or back.
When my mom was driving, she needed the seat to be pretty far forward so the passenger side had little legroom. When my dad was driving it was back and passengers could sit comfortably.
I don’t remember if there was a passenger side mirror, and I believe the driver side mirror required that you lower the window so you could reach out and adjust it by hand. Maybe there was an internal post that we could use by then.
The steering wheel wasn’t adjustable.
Cars these days have a lot more options. I can adjust the height of my seat and how far forward or back it is. I can adjust the back of the seat as well so that my feet are correctly positioned for the pedals and my arms sit comfortably on the steering wheel.
I think I have a lumbar back support adjustment but I’m not sure I know what that does.
The steering wheel is adjustable, but at my height if I put the steering wheel where it is most comfortable, I can’t see how fast I’m going.
I think back to that early station wagon where the whole front seat moved forward or back and it’s amazing about what we’ve learned and come to expect for driver comfort and safety.
Adjustable seats mean that the seat can be radjusted for a wide range of body types.
They’re just better at that
Ron Jeffries posted an essay that asked Are these better than those.
It began with him saying how much he hates phrases that use the formula, “Are
Recently Malcolm Gladwell had a story on William Shockley and why Silicon Valley is where it is as opposed to in Boston or other hubs of research at time.
Gladwell went on and on with examples of what a genius Shockley was and I kept thinking… “Shockley, why do I know that name?”
I didn’t remember thinking of him as a genius.
And then I remembered.
Shockley believed - without any proof or foundation - that the difference between the intelligence of white and black americans was genetic. As if that wasn’t horrible enough, he also advocated that people with IQs under 100 should be paid to be sterilized.
This is an example of why I worry when we transfer our admiration of somebody who is accomplished in one area and assume that they are generally worth listening to.
Anyway, back to Ron’s essay, he argues that “plenty of people in the under-represented group are capable of exceeding the performance of even really good people, far beyond the average people, in the over-represented group.”
Making it harder
One of the guys I went to grad school with was a Russian Jew.
He told me that it was much harder for Jews to go to grad school in Russia at the time. Non-Jews could apply to many schools while Jews could only apply to one each cycle.
Although this had the desired effect ot keeping the number of Jewish academics low, it had the unintended effect that the standout student in each class tended to be Jewish because only the really best got admitted.
You could wrongly look at this and conclude that that group of people was better at academia than other groups - but it was really the way in which the two groups were selected.
Jeffries is kind to formulate his statement as a question. I more often hear it as, “
I cringe because saying Asians are good at math or Jews are good with money is just as racist as any negative stereotype.
“What?” people will ask if you confront them, “I’m saying something nice.”
Are you?
Adjustable feats
I taught at Oberlin College Upward Bound for years. That’s where I first heard about Shockley’s ideas and heard the challenges to the SAT, IQ test, and other supposedly objective measures of aptitude and achievement.
They weren’t objective. They often assumed something about the person being tested that had to do with their upbringing.
The differences in scores could more easily be explained by income level than by race or other factors.
My mentor Booker Peek would say if we could raise the income level of the families we were serving, the scores would increase as well.
But that was outside of what we could do - so what could we do in the meantime?
Jeffries argues, “I do not know how to make things fair, and in fact I tend to believe that things cannot be made fair.”
“Fairness,” he says, like our modern day seats, “must be adjustable.”
Imagine if we had a fixed seat in a car. I’m short enough that I couldn’t reach the pedals or the steering wheel.
We’d conclude that I’m not a good driver or that I’m not meant to drive.
We don’t recognize the constraints that have been arbitrarily designed into the world around us and instead make judgements on the people who don’t fit in.
When we see voting statistics about certain groups that didn’t make it to the polls, we could conclude that they’re not interested in voting, or we could look for ways to make it easier or possible for them to vote.
“Fairness must be adjustable.”
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 190. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe