Pride and Progress : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Pride and Progress

Posted on: July 4, 2008 11:33 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm not just saying that because I want universal health care and a progressive tax policy (although I do). I think what it really illustrates is just how far this country has come within Barack Obama's lifetime.

Now, I'm not sure I agree with that recent Shelby Steele quote about how "white Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in the history of the human conditions." For starters, I'm pretty sure that Germans deserve that dubious honor. The moral arc from Nazi Germany to a liberal, eco-friendly social democracy with a female-physicist president seems a wee bit steeper than the transition from Dwight Eisenhower to George Bush. But I do think Obama's candidacy should serve as a poignant reminder of our collective achievement in creating a more just society. (And yes, I know he hasn't won anything yet and that signs of injustice still abound.)

What allowed white people (pat yourself on the back) to make such moral progress? How did we go from Rosa Parks to Barack Obama within a few decades? Obviously, these questions don't have simple answers: you could fill long books with the answer and still leave lots of the history untold. But I think an unheralded part of what happened is that we redefined the boundaries of public discourse. Political correctness may have a bad reputation, but it's hard to deny the importance of collectively agreeing that certain types of language and certain kinds of thought are simply unacceptable. Not illegal, just wrong. To utter these words and ideas - to say that your racial identity, an almost entirely meaningless biological category, is somehow superior to every other possible identity - is to brand yourself a bigot, an outcast, an ugly anachronism. Over time, these conscious limits on language helped re-engineer our unconscious beliefs, allowing people to slowly purge themselves of obsolete stereotypes. (We tend to think of the unconscious as the domineering elephant of the mind, but sometimes the feeble rider manages to steer the beast in the right direction.) Of course, the unconscious remains a murky and biased place, but I think white Americans have shown that it can be amended, that simply altering the ways in which we refer to people can, over time, change what we secretly think of people.

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Comments (11)

Wait - a beer heiress? Which beer? I might have to change my vote...

Posted by: sinned34 | July 4, 2008 3:01 PM

Anheuser-Busch distributorship in arizona

Posted by: natural cynic | July 4, 2008 7:49 PM

to say that your racial identity, an almost entirely meaningless biological category, is somehow superior to every other possible identity - is to brand yourself a bigot, an outcast, an ugly anachronism.

only if you're white :-) the high priests of political correctness are happy to offer dispensations generously to people of color.

Posted by: razib | July 4, 2008 11:19 PM

Voting: Each one us is one bad decision away from disaster. Not since Robert Kennedy have I thought that a common citizen such as myself had a chance for to vote for kindness in a President. I'd opt for kindness in a man who just may make more gentle the nature of man. Good luck Sen. Obama.

Posted by: OftenWrongTed | July 5, 2008 12:36 AM

why do you assume your readers are white? [re: "What allowed white people (pat yourself on the back) to make such moral progress?"]
i agree with what you are saying about racial identity, but i wonder if the "patting" shouldn't be dispensed more broady. Discrimination does not only affect the people on the "superior side" of it, you can easily believe it, and contribute to it, as a member of the group targeted by the discrimination. Another thing that comes to my mind about this is that not talking about something (or to consider a particular kind of talk as bigotry) is not a sign of having solved it. i don't know you, but i would like to see some kind of annual income report based on those racial identities, too... ;)

Posted by: chalten | July 5, 2008 11:13 AM

I know you thought long and hard before posting this piece Jonah, knowing the difficulty of merely making observations about how race works in America. For my own sake, I hope I can convince you that if there is racial progress, "Rosa Parks to Obama" does not capture the scope of it, and neither would an Obama presidency be the signal of a more just society.

What seems to be true is that when white people make observations about race in America it is dangerous territory, partly because of "political correctness", which, if you buy into that idea, limits what you can say about race. But when you ascribe America's moral progress to p.c., i.e.,"what you can't say", do you think you might be making a correlation-causality error?Is Obama's lead in the national polls attributable in any way to "what you can't say"?

Political correctness has a bad reputation because it deserves its bad reputation. As it is, p.c. serves the end of not offending anyone, but without anyone really understanding why terms are offensive in the first place. Those who buy into that, can and do still make conclusions that they ascribe to race, but merely think, in a way that suspiciously seems to follow the lines of a very legal type of accountability, that explicitly expressing those terms is the fault. The reason you don't say un-p.c. terms is because they are designed to place people lower on a social hierarchy. There is a bottomless way to suggest social inferiority that does not involve stating the case in charged terms.

And because I don't want to write an essay, I won't say what the careful de-emphasis of his race actually says about Obama's success. But I will say that it goes far more towards signaling that the problems remain, rather than signaling progress. Consider Iweala's op-ed*.

Also, consider the washington post article on the Chinese government's response to Obama**, in which they observe that:

"Obama is a graduate from a first-class university," the editorial continued. "He is a symbol of assimilation rather than a representative of different races coming together. Obama did not break the superiority complex of white people. On the contrary, his appearance strengthened the superiority complex of white people."

Jonah, please, please do not offer observations on racial progress without better evidence and argument for it. As a citizen and a black man, in cambridge, massachusetts, it affects me in a very real way if you get it wrong.

*seen here:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-iweala23jan23,0,1775254.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
**seen here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/16/AR2008061602122.html

Posted by: TJ | July 5, 2008 12:33 PM

Thank you everyone for your comments. Political correctness, as chalten and TJ rightly point out, comes with a high cost, which is that it prioritizes politeness over honesty. It hides our subterranean ugliness underneath some verbal makeup. That's obviously a bad thing to the extent it makes the dialogue less sincere and straightforward. But I was trying to point out that it was a necessary first step, an essential part of retraining the collective unconscious if you will.

And I certainly didn't mean to suggest that Obama's success represents the end of racial injustice. Far from it. It's hard not to be shocked by the ugly exit polls in places like West Virginia, where 30 percent of people who didn't vote for Obama listed "race" as a decisive factor. I was simply making the glib observation that it's possible to lead in the polls despite that undercurrent of bias, that the vast majority of Americans (especially young Americans) have managed to look past a funny name and different race. That, to me at least, is evidence of important progress, regardless of what the Chinese newspapers say.

The hard part of writing a post like this is that, in the end, it amounts to self-congratulation, a white guy congratulating white people on their improvement. There's no getting around the awkwardness of that premise, or the fact that, not being black or brown, I have no real experience of what I'm talking about.

Posted by: jonah.lehrer@gmail.com | July 5, 2008 1:10 PM

Wow Jonah, thanks for the feedback! Let me preface by saying how much I love this blog!

I have no idea whether or not as "a necessary first step, an essential part of retraining the collective unconscious" is true as far as that means 'higher order thinking will change the biases of lower order thinking'. Actually, maybe i'm unclear on that, Banaji's IAT suggests that you can change implicit attitudes doesn't it?

Obama's success is absolutely evident of important progress. And I'm riveted about Obama's success despite persistent anti-black bias. But that's partly because I was not shocked at all when "race" was offered as a decisive factor in West Virginia, though it's intriguing that people would actually admit this in a p.c. paradigm. But what do you think it means that this caught you by surprise? What does it mean that this was not a surprise for me?

I disagree with you on the this: "the fact that, not being black or brown, I have no real experience of what I'm talking about." I think you do. We experience race almost everyday in America, whether it's through interaction, or sometimes more insidiously, through absence. I don't think you were attempting to capture what it was like to be on the non-white side of the equation. So you were not unfair in that sense.

Your last paragraph pretty much captures what i suspected about the post. Many of us want relief from issues of race and are eager to feel progress. I don't help this when I spoil that feeling somewhat by suggesting that your good faith premise is not quite supported. Part of the double edged sword of even pointing out that we may not be as far as we hope is that I look a lot like a debbie-downer.

Posted by: TJ | July 5, 2008 2:00 PM

I, too, believe that political correctness is a necessary first step. I have never understood why so many people look down at and ridicule political correctness. Why should we not abhor anti-semitic or homophobic speech?
And I believe it goes both ways; it is, or at least I think it should be, just as ugly for a white person to utter derogatory words about people of other skin colors that it is the other way around.
As depressing as it was to listen to the exit-polls from kentucky and West Virginia on their primary nights, I do think that this country has come a long way since the 1950s. And yet, yes, there is still a long way to go, but at the same time I believe many people in my generation are devoid of prejudice partly because we were raised in a society which looks down at racist/homophobic/anti-semitic speech.
I am so proud to live in a country, that as said above, can and does look beyond race and a foreign-sounding name to give Senator Obama a lead in the national polls, and hopefully this November too.

Posted by: mehran | July 5, 2008 4:35 PM

Thanks to neuroplasticity and a country like the Unites States (not the only one), there is hope for the human race. This story predates my own personal memories but is something that was told about me. When I was growing up train travel was more common than flying and my mother was taking me somewhere on a train. My father was an officer in the Navy and not often home when I was young so, not surprsingly, three year old? me dashed forward to hug the conductor in his navy blue uniform with its brass buttons mistaking him for my dad despite the fact that the conductor was black. Since they passed this story along, my relatives were probably more amused than mortified but I'm sure after that incident I was no longer 'colorblind'. Some years later I will go back to being 'colorblind' by choice to vote in the next presidential election on the basis of more relevant concerns. A freedom we all have.
PS If you missed the celestial fireworks last night go out tonight after sunset and see the planteary lineup with the crescent moon. See www.spaceweather.com for details.

Posted by: jb | July 5, 2008 5:14 PM

My late mother, who experienced all but four years of the 20th century, made these comments over a period of about 50 years. She first said, "A black man working for you should have food just as good as anyone else. Of course he would eat it out in the yard." Some years later, she moved him to the back porch, and finally, years later, sat him down at the table with everyone else. Progress in one person's thinking anyway.

Posted by: Jim Thomerson | July 8, 2008 5:18 PM