Shots in the Dark

13 Responses

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 2:40 pm

  Marcella Bombardieri, always ahead of the curve.

  The insightful journalist of higher education has an article in the Globe -Saturday December 23rd B3- chronicling the saga of Professor James Sherley, a scientist at MIT who was denied tenure and who claims that racist attitudes explain in part why.

  As the year comes to a close it is time to recognize Marcella for her courageous and intelligent journalism. Her voice of reason holds Higher Education in Massachusetts accountable to high standards.

  Thanks Marcella. Keep up your good journalism. Have you considered creating your own blog? Posting your past articles and providing a blog so readers can comment on them would extend and deepen the impact of your exemplary journalism.

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 2:42 pm

  A picture of Bombardieri

  http://www.nationalheadlinerawards.com/images/2006BombardieriM.jpg

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 10:52 pm

  http://business.bostonherald.com/businessNews/view.bg?articleid=173357

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 10:55 pm

  A recent UMass report confirms that race relations are declining in Massachusetts. Why should a little racism at MIT cause such a furor?

  http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/526060/

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 11:02 pm

  Why pick on MIT when Harvard is just 3 metro stops away?

  http://www.badideafactory.net/disguide/racism.htm

• Anonymous
  12/23/2006 11:46 pm

  Back to Rich’s original point: “Mormons are free to believe what nutty theology they want to. And the rest of us are free to think that Mormonism is absurd and that anyone who believes such nonsense shouldn’t be running the most powerful country in the world.” More absurd than, say, belief in human parthenogenesis? Or resurrection from the dead? If belief in apparent magic disqualifies presidential candidates, then most religious people, of all faiths, should be ruled out. If literalism is the issue, aren’t there degrees of Mormon belief as there are of conventional Christianity?

• Anonymous
  12/24/2006 2:17 pm

  it isn’t that the US wouldn’t vote for a Mormon-it is that we just are a little suspicious of Mitt Romney…what a great job in MA! They turned the lights off about 6 months after taking office…what will he do if elected president-what’s the next “take over” target since that is the issue at hand not his religion.

• Anonymous
  12/25/2006 8:37 pm

  Interesting Pastoral Letter on race relations. Should Harvard follow suit?

  http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=22439

• Anonymous
  12/25/2006 11:40 pm

  Have you heard about institutional racism?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

• Anonymous
  12/26/2006 9:26 am

  Is there racism in universities?

  http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=1096

• Anonymous
  12/26/2006 9:29 am

  http://www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=1096

• Anonymous
  12/26/2006 1:42 pm

  Don’t miss Orlando Patterson’s column in the Dec 26 New York Times, “Our overrated inner self.” For those who enjoy Harvard in-fighting, it’s interesting in part because he’s a Harvard sociologist and he takes on a Harvard psychologist (Mahzarin Banaji).

• Anonymous
  12/26/2006 6:05 pm

  Here it is:

  HEADLINE: Our Overrated Inner Self

  BYLINE: By ORLANDO PATTERSON.

  Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist.; Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.
  December 26, 2023

  In the 1970s, the cultural critic Lionel Trilling encouraged us to take seriously the distinction between sincerity and authenticity. Sincerity, he said, requires us to act and really be the way that we present ourselves to others. Authenticity involves finding and expressing the true inner self and judging all relationships in terms of it.

  Authenticity now dominates our way of viewing ourselves and our relationships, with baleful consequences. Within sensitive individuals it breeds doubt; between people it promotes distrust; within groups it enhances group-think in the endless quest to be one with the group’s true soul; and between groups it is the inner source of identity politics.

  It also undermines good government. James Nolan, in his book ”The Therapeutic State,” has shown how the emphasis on the primacy of the self has penetrated major areas of government: emotivist arguments trump reasoned discourse in Congressional hearings and criminal justice; and in public education, self-esteem vies with basic literacy in evaluating students. The cult of authenticity partly accounts for our poor choice of leaders. We prefer leaders who feel our pain, or born-again frat boys who claim that they can stare into the empty eyes of an ex-K.G.B. agent and see inside his soul. On the other hand we hear, ad nauseam, that Hillary Clinton, arguably one of the nation’s most capable senators, is ”fake” and therefore not electable as president.

  But it is in our attempts to come to grips with prejudice that authenticity most confounds. Social scientists and pollsters routinely belittle results showing growing tolerance; they argue that Americans have simply learned how to conceal their deeply ingrained prejudices. A hot new subfield of psychology claims to validate such skepticism. The Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji and her collaborators claim to have evidence, based on more than three million self-administered Web-based tests, that nearly all of us are authentically bigoted to the core with hidden ”implicit prejudices” — about race, gender, age, homosexuality and appearance — that we deny, sometimes with consciously tolerant views. The police shootings of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, they argue, are simply dramatic examples of how ”implicit prejudice” influences the behavior of us all.

  However well meaning these researchers, their gotcha psychology is morally invasive and, as the psychologist Philip Tetlock has cogently argued, of questionable validity and use. It cannot distinguish between legitimate apprehension and hateful bigotry as responses to identical social problems. A fearful young black woman living in a high-crime neighborhood could easily end up with a racist score. An army of diversity trainers now use Banaji’s test to promote touchy-feely bias awareness in companies, which my colleague Frank Dobbin has shown to be a devious substitute for minority promotions.

  I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?

  Scholars like Richard Sennett and the late Philip Rieff attribute the rise of authenticity to the influence of psychoanalysis, but America’s protestant ethos and its growing intrusion in public life may be equally to blame. Whatever the cause, for centuries the norm of sincerity presented an alternate model of selfhood and judgment that was especially appropriate for non-intimate and secular relations. Its iconic expression is the celebrated passage from Shakespeare: ”All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players./They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts.”

  Shakespeare’s ”self” is inescapably public, fashioned in interaction with others and by the roles we play — what sociologists, building on his insight, call the looking-glass self. This allows for change. Sincerity rests in reconciling our performance of tolerance with the people we become. And what it means for us today is that the best way of living in our diverse and contentiously free society is neither to obsess about the hidden depths of our prejudices nor to deny them, but to behave as if we had none.

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