A couple of things I didn’t know at first

April 29th, 2008 at 10:30pm Pat Cunningham

 

If you’ll bear with me, I have a personal story to tell here that relates to a few of the issues that loom in this year’s presidential race.

During my vacation up North last summer, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller “Blink — The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.”

Toward the end of this wonderful book, Gladwell writes of what he calls “A Revolution in Classical Music.” Sounds boring, I thought, but the tale turns out to be about music only in a sociological sense.

Not so long ago, Gladwell notes, there were very few female musicians in symphony orchestras.  The problem, as the evidence now makes irrefutably clear, was latent sexism.

 Auditions were held where the maestros who were doing the hiring could see as well as hear the prospective employees, and thus biases, unconscious or otherwise, came into play.

Lots of orchestra bosses had the notion that women weren’t well-suited to play certain instruments — trombones, for instance. And even with regard to more presumably feminine instruments like strings, women applicants weren’t always judged purely on the merits of their music.

But when the idea arose that auditions should be held with the musicians unseen behind screens, the world of classical music changed forever.  The bosses had no choice but to make hiring decisions without regard to gender. Not even their subconscious prejudices could influence the process.

Writes Gladwell: “In the past 30 years, since screens became commonplace, the number of women in the top U.S. orchestras has increased fivefold.”

Two experiences of my own last year were not unlike what those orchestra maestros must have felt when they discovered their perhaps unconscious biases against women musicians.

Both of these cases involve prominent bloggers, one who writes under a pseudonym and the other whose face I never saw in a photo until he died.

The pseudonymous blogger is known to readers of the Hullabaloo site simply as Digby.  I’ve long been a big fan of Digby, whose work I frequently cited in a blog I had before this one.  When Digby won some kind of hotshot award, I considered it well-deserved. But when the plaque (or whatever) was conferred at a gala ceremony, Digby turned out not to be the clever guy I had expected.  She’s a clever woman.

I was almost embarrassed at how surprised I was.  Why did I assume that Digby was a man?  Do male pundits write differently from their female counterparts?  I wasn’t the only one.  Nobody in the blogosphere knew Digby was a woman, and expressions of surprise abounded. (Incidentally, she still hasn’t revealed her real name.)

The other blogger in this tale was Steve Gilliard, who ran a popular site called The News Blog until his death from heart and kidney problems in June 2007 at age 42.

Gilliard, a great writer and passionate partisan, was hugely influential among liberal blogs.  His expertise on military history in the Middle East added authority to his perspectives on the war in Iraq, and he was quoted widely.

As a great admirer of Gilliard, I was shocked at news of his sudden death — and shocked again to learn that he was black. Why, I asked myself, should I be surprised?

As this presidential campaign season progresses, with issues of race and gender at the forefront, I occasionally think of the musicians in Gladwell’s story and of the writing talents of Steve Gilliard and Digby.

I can’t help but wonder how the American people would react if they could read the position papers and the statements in debates offered by John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama without knowing that one was a septuagenarian, one a woman, and one a black man.

What roles do our prejudices, even if they’re only subconscious, play in our opinions of these candidates?

When we look back on the great statesmen of American history, most of them are politicians who were never heard or seen (except in drawings or paintings) by most of the public they served. 

It used to be that the only way Americans had of judging their leaders was to read what they had to say. (Of course, the race and gender angles were taken for granted.  Only white men were eligible.)

So, there are two other questions to consider here before closing: 1) How would today’s politicians fare in the kind of system that gave us Jefferson and Lincoln, et al? And, 2) How would those giants of long ago fare in the kind of system we have today, with its white-hot media focus and its obsession with trivialities?   

Entry Filed under: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama