Funny Hats

Prodded by judiang :), I'd like to air some more thoughts about Elizabeth Moon's posting about Park51, continuing in the same spirit of respectful disagreement as before. (This may take a few postings - there's a lot of think about - so bear with me. And thank you hugely for making it possible for me to do this, by commenting assertively but not aggressively!)

When I first began to look more seriously at race and racism, I came across Ricky Sherover-Marcuse's writings, including Towards A Perspective On Eliminating Racism: 12 Working Assumptions. In this posting I'd like to speak to a couple of points from that list:

• "Racist attitudes and beliefs are a mixture of misinformation and ignorance which is imposed upon young people through a painful process of social conditioning."
• "Misinformation is harmful to all human beings. Misinformation about peoples of color is harmful to all people. Having racist attitudes and beliefs is like having a clamp on one's mind. It distorts one's perceptions of reality."

In my view, a number of Ms Moon's statements are incorrect because they're based on wrong or inadequate information. By "information" I mean more than just "facts", such as Park51 being a community centre and not a memorial: I mean ways of thinking - how we get meaning out of facts.

One of these ways of thinking is our brain's ability to pick out new and different details from a familiar background. You can immediately see how useful this would've been for our ancestors, who needed to spot the arrival of a sabre-toothed tiger without delay. But this useful ability can also mislead us: because what's unusual stands out to us, we're more likely to notice it, and we're more likely to remember it. It's the reason "dog bites man" isn't a headline and "man bites dog" is. This thing our brain does is one of the reasons white people often overestimate the proportion of non-white people in their nations or neighbourhoods. For instance, a 1993 survey showed many Australians overestimated the Indigenous proportion of our population by as much as eighteen times or more the true figure.

At this point, I want to quote part of Ms Moon's posting:

"Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream. This is not just an American problem--this is human nature, the tribalism that underlies all societies and must be constantly curtailed if larger groups are to co-exist.

The "bad citizens" Ms Moon correctly identifies at the start of the essay are criminals: the corrupt judge, the rapist prison guard, and so on. But wearing a funny hat is not a crime. Nor is it an example of the vices of the failed citizen: "greed, dishonesty, laziness, selfishness, cruelty, anger/resentment, refusal to take responsibility for his/her own acts and their consequences". Which of these sins causes immigrants and their descendants to live near other people with similar backgrounds, or to speak their first languages? How are those behaviours provocative or offensive?

I think what's happening here is more than just an overestimation of how many Muslims are around: I think it's an overestimation of how different they are, and crucially, how much that matters. The problem is not the funny hat, but the meaning assigned to it: "I refuse to fit in, I am like those who are corrupt and fraudulent, irresponsible and selfish. I am not really an American at all. I am a danger." That's a lot to tell from a hat!

Ms Moon goes on to say:

"It is natural to want to be around those who talk like you, eat the familiar foods, wear the familiar clothes, have the familiar cultural references. But in a multicultural society like ours--and it has been multi-cultural from its inception--citizens need to go beyond nature. That includes those who by their history find it least comfortable."

I think that's right. But if Australia's history since Federation is any guide, those who are the least comfy with the unfamiliar are not the new arrivals, but the white people nervously watching them arrive - or passing laws to keep them out.

Dear gods, my eyes are melting. More later. In the meantime, some related links:

( This way to the links )