Getting an anonymous annoyance off my chest

[jack]

1. When recounting, you often call out one or two of the most obvious characteristics of someone involved. Eg. if you said "And I overheard two professors walking across Trinity College, and one of them says to the other 'And, ninethly...'" or "And I overheard two students walking across Trinity College, and..." even if it doesn't actually make any difference to the story.

2. I think this ties in to the tendency to make little provisional pictures in your head when listening to a story or hypothetical.

3. People often have a default little picture.

4. Sometimes their default little picture is unfair, (eg. a default doctor being male) and in aggregate constitutes prejudice.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that I often see an exchange that goes something like:

A: I saw a black man in the grocery store and he said...
B: Why is it relevant that he's black? Eh? Eh?

And I've a feeling that's a result of a miscommunication somewhere. I imagine that (1), (2) and (3) are natural human behaviour and inherently harmless (I may be wrong?), but often reveal a problem with (4).

Particularly, a noticeable characteristic is often one that differs from the default, so if the default is eg. adult white male, you might mention someone's gender or race if it's different, but mention some other characteristic if those are your "default" expectation.

I think you can try to change (4) by changing (3) and (2), eg. the common technique of picking a variety of people as examples. This can be clumsy, but is a sensible approach. However, whenever I read the A/B exchange I feel guilty for ever doing (1) at all. It may make sense to avoid it if it has the likelihood of bringing up prejudiced ideas, but I don't think it's inherently bigoted. However, of course, A and B often don't have the vocabulary to express the difference, just know that something's wrong with what the other said, so end up arguing without knowing exactly what they're arguing about.

Comments

[redbird]

Part of it is that in the first case you're describing a social role, and in the last you're referring to a physical characteristic, and one that people are often prejudiced about. People would likely think it odd if you said "I saw two tall people walking across the quad, and one of them said 'and, ninethly'" because their being tall feels less relevant than their being professors. ("If it was "I saw two tall people, and one of them said "I've always hated basketball," there would be a connection to their being tall.) Again, if you said "I was in the grocery store, and one of the other shoppers said..." or "someone carrying a stack of pies said..." there'd be an expectation of connection. I could come up with examples where the man in the grocery being black is relevant, of course, but usually it's not.

[liv]

That's a really good point. Thanks for expressing it that way, it makes me understand something I didn't realize before.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh, hm. That's a good description. Except I would have guessed people would often include noticeable but non-relevant physical details like that, and the problem is that often, such detail turns out to have been implicitly relevant (black, overweight, etc). I wonder which is more true.

[redbird]

It's often hard to tell what's relevant, especially since it can tie either in to the speaker's prejudices (e.g., that a cart of groceries that's unremarkable if bought by an average-sized person may excite unfavorable comment if the shopper is fat) or be relevant because the story is at least in part about other people's prejudices and is unclear or entirely incomprehensible without the information.