Radical Equality

I became a fan of Sharon Draper when I read her book Out of My Mind earlier this year, but I didn’t know anything about her as a person (the copy of the book didn’t have an author photo).  Recently I wanted to refer to the book in a forum post and googled her to check a fact. I went first to an interview where someone asked why race hadn’t come up in the book. I thought that was an odd question, but it made me realize that race had never been mentioned. Then I clicked on another link and saw a photo of Ms. Draper and realized she is black. Then the question made sense.

But why should the book have to revolve around race just because she’s black? Ms. Draper was addressing an issue that confronts people of all races—the prejudice faced by a young girl with cerebral palsy—and giving the girl a racial identity would just have clouded that message.

Knowing this about her has made me even more of a fan. She is an example of the radical equality I dream of, where we don’t have to pay attention anymore to details like race, gender, or sexual orientation. Those things are immaterial; what matters is what kind of person you are.

American culture has made great strides in the last decade in recognizing the rights of LGBT people. But I dream of a day when no one has to “declare” their sexual orientation. In other words there is no “normal” sexuality that requires you to say “I’m not that, I’m this.”

Years ago SouthPark had an excellent episode about the end of racism. Chef, who is black, was angry about the town’s flag, which depicted a black man being lynched and white people dancing around the tree. The adults were confused about why Chef was angry—“this is our tradition,” they said—and the children were too…for a different reason. Chef realized that the kids didn’t see color—when one of them described the flag he said, “it’s a person hung from a tree and other people are standing around.” Chef realized his response had racism in it—it was all about color. The resolution was the flag basically stayed the same—a black person hanging from a tree and people all around—with one significant difference: the crowd is now multicolored and includes a black person.

One day we will all realize that everyone is radically equally human.

Update: my niece and I just read To Kill a Mockingbird, set in segregated Georgia in the 1930s. My niece thought that Calpurnia, the black cook/housekeeper, and Atticus were probably going to get married. By way of explanation she said, "The kids loved her!" I could see her struggling to understand as I explained why that marriage would have been unthinkable at the time. It was great seeing that the explanation made no sense to her.

The Value of Fathers

Yesterday I listened to a friend sing “Cat’s in the Cradle,” by Harry Chapin, a song about a father and son. When the boy was young the father was too busy to spend any time with his son, and when the father was old the son was too busy.

That was the cultural norm for fathers when I was growing up; dad worked so was always too busy to spend much time with his kids. That’s what moms were for.

But things have changed; now I see fathers carrying their infants on their chests in slings and taking their kids to the park. It’s okay for a man to say, “I love you” to his child. Fathers are much more involved with their kid’s lives and I am very optimistic about what this means for the future. I think this will bring stronger women and more peaceful men.

So I was shocked this week to see a “Room for Debate” on the New York Times, in response to the news that women are the breadwinner in forty percent of U.S. households, asking “What are Fathers For?”

In almost half the American households with children, mothers are the sole or primary breadwinners…So what is the purpose of men in modern families? We’re approaching the holiday that celebrates dads, but do fathers bring anything unique to the table?

How could anyone even question the value of a man’s contribution to the psychological health of his children? In my opinion this is a sign our culture has taken a strange turn in the attempt to bring equality between the sexes.

One of the debaters brought in a few statistics for the value of men in children’s lives, Fathers are Not Fungible, by W. Bradford Wilcox:

Boys are more likely to steer clear of trouble with the law when they grow up with their father in the home. One Princeton study found that boys raised apart from their fathers were two to three times more likely to end up in jail before they turned 30. 

Dads matter for daughters as well. Another study found that girls whose fathers disappeared before the girls turned 6 were about five times more likely to end up pregnant as teenagers than were their peers raised with their fathers in the home. 

And we know that kids — especially boys — are more likely to excel in school, and to steer clear of the principal’s office, when they are raised in a home with a father who takes their homework and school conduct seriously.

My parents divorced when I was 14. My dad really loved his kids, but I didn’t see him much after the divorce. As I've gotten older I have realized how much I missed by not having his input in those formative years. I love watching President Obama with his daughters, because it gives me a glimpse of what I lost.

Next Front in the Equality Wars

I predict that the next front in the struggle for equality will be prejudice based on physical features: attractiveness, height, and weight.

I have never worn makeup, and I have often mocked women who do. In my mind, makeup created an artificial face, and I have been a devotee of the natural. “Why can’t women be like men,” I thought, “and live with the face they were given?”

Recently the New York Times had a forum about the use of makeup, “Does Makeup Hurt Self-Esteem,” with brief essays on both sides of the issue. One was by Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and a research psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. She has done research into the perception of women’s faces with and without makeup.

Her experiments showed that when a viewer first saw a face with makeup, the initial reaction was positive, but upon longer reflection, the more dramatic the makeup the less trustworthy the person was judged to be.

We asked people to rate photographs of women with and without makeup. Seen very quickly (250 milliseconds), women wearing makeup looked more attractive, likeable, competent and trustworthy to our viewers than those who went without it. On longer inspection, responses became varied and nuanced. Faces with natural makeup were seen favorably but faces with more dramatic makeup were seen as less trustworthy.

This seemed to validate my prejudice against makeup, but then I read her journal article online and changed my mind. Ms Etcoff and her associates cite four different studies showing a strong prejudice against unattractive people in the workplace. Men and women who are judged to be unattractive have a harder time getting hired, earn lower salaries, and are judged to be less intelligent and competent.

Global Gender Equality

When I visited my mother in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua in 2009, Pelican Eyes Resort was building a new pool near the house I was staying in. A female engineer was in charge of the construction, and I admired her clear sense of authority over the male workers. I spoke to her in my pidgin Spanish, telling her that I found it impressive that the men were so willing to work under a female engineer, and she seemed surprised. “You mean it’s not like this in the United States?” she asked. “Not in my experience,” I replied.

Since then I’ve wondered if I was exaggerating, but a new study by the World Economic Forum, the 2012 Global Gender Gap Report, bears out that conversation. The report ranks 135 countries (which collectively contain over 90 percent of the world's population) based on 14 indicators used to measure the size of a nation's gender gap.

Nicaragua is 9^th on the list, while the United States is #22. Cuba beat the U.S. also, coming in at #19.

According to the Huffington Post the indicators can be grouped into four key areas:

1. Economic participation and opportunity, which includes female labor force participation, wage equality and the percentage of women in high-ranking jobs.
2. Educational attainment, which looks at female literacy and how frequently women are enrolled in higher education.
3. Health and survival, which is measured by comparing female and male life expectancy and mortality rates.
4. Political empowerment, which examines the number of women holding political office as well as the number of female heads of state over the last 50 years.

At the Huffington Post article there’s a graphic showing the top 25 and bottom 25 countries. Not surprisingly, most of the top countries are in northern Europe, while most of the bottom are in the Muslim Middle East.

Addendum: The day I posted this, I later went to film an event. I’m a professional videographer; I had my large hi-definition video camera on a tripod. At one point while I was waiting for the event to start I was standing near my camera talking with a man who was a part of the event. A second man came up to us and, looking straight at the first man, said, “That’s a bad place for your camera.” The first guy replied, “That’s not my camera,” and number two just started walking away, without giving me a glance. Clearly he assumed that no woman could be associated with that kind of camera. Believe me, I have seen this prejudice before.

I said, “That’s my camera, and that’s the only spot I can shoot from. And who are you?” He turned to me and apologized, saying he was doing the lighting for the event.

How telling of attitudes towards women in 2012 in the U.S.A.