Lean In - A sort of review

Discrimination has multiple aspects. And there are different kinds of discrimination. I wonder sometimes if, despite our presumed universal commitment to fighting discrimination in forensics, we are doing that good a job of it.

We always begin by thinking about things in terms of rights, this being a very elementary way to understand human entitlements. It’s built into our civics lessons from probably the first time we hear about US history in grammar school, that we are all endowed with certain unalienable rights; it’s a concept built into the value premise of the Declaration. It is an easy path from there to believing in civil rights for all. The Bill of Rights started it, and in our own educations we simply recapitulate it on a personal level. Legally we accept that everyone ought to be free to do and be whatever they want. So why, then, can’t everyone do and be whatever they want?

What we think, the very ideas in our head, do not arise there without context. Some of that context is our own experience. And a lot of that context is the social sphere in which we live. From the day we are born we are surrounded by information. That information, and how we process it, defines our selves. That information is, to wit, the culture in which we live.

Culture can be understood via meatballs. If you are born into a family from an Italian culture, your parents like meatballs. The day you are born, perhaps, your parents share a meatball sandwich while you’re taking your first nap. There are often meatballs cooking in your family’s kitchen, and in the kitchens of all of your relatives. Meatballs are taken for granted. They are a part of your culture. This doesn’t mean that they are always front and center, or that you personally like them or dislike them. It just means that they are there. Meatballs are an indisputable part of your existence.

All culture is meatballs. Religion? If your parents are observant, their religion surrounds you from day one. If your country is religious (e.g., you live in Pakistan), your country’s religion surrounds you from day one. Living in Pakistan doesn’t make you a Moslem, but you live in a space that’s Islamic. It’s a part of the information that surrounds you from birth. It and all the other aspects of culture, like language and art and climate and everything other thing you can think of, define the world that surrounds you; you as an individual are defined by how you act in and react to that world. If individuality itself is minimized by a culture, so be it. If individuality is maximized, so be that. It all varies, but the process is the same. The point is, all of us are products of our culture. Culture is the source of all information around us, including even the most natural of sensory data (we smell the meatballs). We can be separated from our culture, perhaps, but we cannot be separated from the fact that we as individuals are the end result of our responses to that culture. Most of it, we internalize our culture. That is, we accept it and it becomes part of us. Before you know it, we are sitting around eating meatballs with our own children.

One of the aspects of culture is perception of other people. This is not us as individuals reacting to others, but our culture actually defining the others. Obviously, if we are in a meatball-centric culture, cultures that are vegetarian are going to be radically different from our own. And our meatball-centric culture tells us what to think about vegetarians. Value judgments are made on a cultural level. Vegetarians are not as civilized as meatball eaters (or vice versa). We go on from there.

This is all basic stuff, Culture 101 if you will. And at the end of the course we understand that there are cultural prejudices that are built into us as individuals because we have been surrounded by them from Day One. And regardless of how enlightened we might be as individuals, stripping our selves of these prejudices on a personal level, the prejudices remain at a cultural level, unless we figure out a way to strip our entire culture of them.

The reason I think that we in forensics aren’t doing that great a job in this area, not simply of stripping prejudices from our selves but from our culture (the smaller culture of forensics and the larger culture of America as a whole), is that we look at it the wrong way. For one thing, and this is perhaps the biggest thing, we have some of the godawfulest literature to draw on. And worse, we aggressively use that literature in cases and in our self-education. We know just enough about, say, feminism, to think that what we need to do is read and cite Judith Butler. Even if we only look her up and just take a few shots off the bow of her impenetrable writing, we look to her, and others like her, as the source of our ideas. And we proceed accordingly, in an academic and ultimately jejune approach to a subject that is, frankly, neither academic nor jejune.

Sexual discrimination is real. Racial discrimination is real. LGBT discrimination is real. They are built into us as individuals and into our culture. We can establish as a goal the absorption of as much philosophical text as we can, in an attempt to understand it, or we can simply blink a few times and realize that there’s not much here to understand. For one reason or another, and yes, the histories here are different but the results are the same, people in positions of power often maintain that power by exercising it over others in a discriminatory way, often because they believe that their own position in society is more culturally “correct.” On the other side of the coin, the disempowered can be dispirited and, worse, even buy into the cultural biases themselves. The disempowered will alter their expectations based on the arbitrarily insignificant reasons for which they are disempowered (race, gender, sexual orientation).

There is need for two-pronged attacks against discrimination. On the one hand, we have to attack discrimination on the cultural level, removing it from the culture itself. I’ve always felt that education is one answer to this, and I would like to see lots of energy aimed in that direction. On the other hand, we have to attack discrimination on the personal level. And by this, I don’t mean that we have to not discriminate ourselves, although obviously that is a necessity, but those who are being discriminated against need to change themselves and not buy into their disempowerment.

All of which is prelude to my comments on Sandberg’s Lean In. I have to admit that I went into this book, having read the reviews, thinking that it might be a useful tool for debaters. I mean, since I started doing this job back in the Paleolithic Era, I have seen the culture of adolescents in general, and the role assignments that were being made, and the work that needed to be done to combat the bad stuff. (I’ve never particularly subscribed to the idea that debate is somehow worse than high school in general, aside from perhaps the idea that one would expect a little more enlightenment from tournament rats versus mall rats.) As I said above, I’m not a fan of the average sexual politics literature in the activity, so I was looking for something that would relate better to the average reader, something I could point out to a high school sophomore. Let’s face it: most of us couldn’t read Butler if we wanted to. How about something we could read? That was the goal.

Unfortunately, I was a little disappointed by the book. What I did like is the fact that she spends a lot of time talking to women directly, on how they have to change themselves and to combat the bad assumptions that is part of their enculturation. I think that is good stuff, and can be useful to young women, especially those starting out in careers. In other words, there’s some good stuff here for college students and young professionals. At the same time, there’s a certain hifalutin aspect to the book that keeps the reader from truly engaging. Sandberg’s personal story is so unusual, and her career is so high level, that sometimes it’s hard to push down the message she’s sending to a real level.

Probably it’s best that one take the book as a slogan and a concept more than, well, a book. It’s certainly an easy concept to understand; I’ll bet that watching Sandberg talk for half an hour would be more rewarding to almost anyone than reading the book, which ultimately just sort of slogs along. Still, in our little parochial world, where most of the literature is too old—feminism in 2013 is radically different from feminism in 1973, for instance, and Ms. magazine’s inaugural issue was closer to suffragist concerns than today’s, if you ask me—or too arcane, this may be the best book around to put in a young person’s hands, at least until the point is driven home. It won't hurt to take most of Sandberg's advice, and a lot of the facts and figures need to be seen. Just put aside that she was the top student in her Harvard class and after getting her MBA at Harvard Business she was a cabinet level chief of staff and VP at Google and COO at Facebook and that you, dear reader, are just another schmegeggie trying to find a place to park your bike out of the rain. She still has stuff to say to everyone; she just doesn't happen to be everyone.