Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - Posts
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By the time The New Yorker
landed in my mail slot today, I'd seen the cover so many times already
it was like, "You, finally!'' As if it had stopped off for a couple of
drinks on the way over here and lost all track of time. So, allow me to
be the last to tell Jack
why I totally hate this image of the Obamas: It would be funnier if
half the country didn't actually think of this hardworking,
high-achieving woman—remind me again what Michelle Obama has not done right?—as
Angela Davis in a sheath. I don't know whether to cry or spit for every
morning she got up before it was light outside to make sure she
got every single thing on the do-list done, only to be looked at like
this. But I am not tempted to laugh.
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Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely
"youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the
Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.
Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two
founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk
appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking
and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead
ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.
The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by
the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in
Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally
undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in
1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps
predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.
Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong. There are second acts in American life. Wurtzel,
who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief
following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was
overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild
is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is
well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public
approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas
eventually grow up.
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I can't help myself: I have to weigh in on the the New Yorker cover in which the Obamas are drawn as terrorists (one homegrown, one international). Yes, the cover was a veeeery feeble attempt to satire the right-wing response to the Obama's televised fist bump. Yes, they have the right to run a cover like that. But it makes me feel a little sick.
I appreciate, Kim, your big yawn about the controversy. But the cover does matter, and no one seems to understand why. Not because the cover is Good or Bad for the Obama Campaign, which is none of my business. Rather, in displaying these images, The New Yorker reinscribes ugly stereotypes that are already etched deeply into our mind. It doesn't matter that the magazine's or cartoonist's intent was satirical. The cover "activates" certain points of view and thereby strengthens them.
That's just how stereotypes work, as social psychologists have been discovering in amazing depth and detail for the past 20 years. Our minds are always, below our awareness, automatically slotting perceptions of the world around us into categories. Just as your growing brain learned that (say) birds have wings but lizards don't—which is why pterodactyls are so thrillingly boundary-breaking—so it also soaked up all sorts of ugly categories that you may consciously reject. Go take one of these short online tests if you think you don't have any unconscious beliefs about one group or another: If you're human, you can't help it. Our busily categorizing brains more easily gather up any information that reinforces unacknowledged categories and rejects information that doesn't fit.
And those powerful, pre-installed concepts really do affect how we behave. Consider Claude Steele's well-documented concept of "stereotype threat," in which activated stereotypes lead some groups to underperform. For instance, in one experiment, when one group of students were told that women and men did equally well on a particular math test, they did score equally well; when a matched group of students were subtly reminded of the belief that men are better at math ("I'm sure you girls will do fine"), the women scored lower on that test.
So what? So when The New Yorker runs a cartoon showing Barack Obama (with his suspect name) as a Muslim terrorist and Michelle Obama as the classic angry black woman, as Angela Davis/Jackie Brown, it reinforces both those neural pathways in our brains—no matter how sophisticated and satirical we readers may be. Arabic name = Muslim terrorist. Black woman = gun-toting rage. Like that horrifying New Republic cover (which I refuse to link to) of Hillary Clinton as shriekingly hysterical, it tosses dirt into our minds, making the world a little uglier. It works the way a catchy song does, a song that worms into your head and unexpectedly becomes your soundtrack for a week: You can't help it; it's just there, whispering to you in the background. That New Yorker cover, sitting on newsstands in airports across the country, is doing the dirty work of the tribal mind.
(Note for nerds: Click here for a famous and influential Law Review article about how the fact of these unacknowledged mental categories should be dealt with in the law. The social science has gotten more sophisticated since, but the concepts are the same.)
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