YOU'RE NOT UNBIASED.
You're biased. Every word that falls out of your mouth is biased. No matter how hard you try, you're still biased.
And, the harder you try to hide your biases, the more dishonest you become.
You're Biasey McBias-face.
But so am I! So is everyone.
So don't worry—you're not a bad person! You're biased because of the groups to which you belong, everything from your nationality to your gender. You're biased because you're a unique human being. There's no one else like you alive today, no one like you who has ever lived in the past, and no one like you who will ever live in the future. No one.
Biology plays a role in your uniqueness. Even twins brought up by the same parents end up with disparate personalities and interests.
A path in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Serene, huh? It could be the featured image on one of those big black company board room posters, and it could say, “LIFE. Enjoy your journey." (c) 2017 J. STANFORD.
No two people are the same.
So it stands to reason that when we speak and write, we cannot escape who we are. Our unique view of the world helps to shape what words we choose to include and what words we choose to omit. Sure, it's less true when writing something technical like an instruction manual, but when we attempt to persuade, our biases shine through.
“What you’re perceiving is a lack of fairness—a lack of objectivity.”
We can pretend we lack bias, but it's dishonest.
So what am I really saying, if I complain something is “biased"?
I'm using the wrong word. I have a right to complain, sure: what I'm perceiving is a lack of fairness—a lack of objectivity. I hate it when that happens!
Is it possible to be truly objective?
We need to change how we think about objectivity. It's not binary, like pregnancy. We can't say something is entirely objective, or entirely subjective. It manifests in shades of grey.
Indulge me now, won't you please; I'm going to test-drive an analogy. Think of gravity. Without gravity, you float around and bump into people. It's messy—ask any astronaut about peeing in zero gravity. Or eating sunflower seeds. Or cleaning out a thin-necked wine carafe with those little steel beads. What a mess!
Objectivity is like gravity—it grounds you. It attracts people to you.
If you wield objectivity with enough power, you'll become like a bright burning star, or like the deep gravity well of a black hole. Anyone who beholds your argument will be helpless to resist its power! Not even light can escape!
Yeah, yeah, the analogy kind of sucks. And it's liable to annoy a student of physics who understands that gravity functions even on the space station, because if it didn't, the station would float away into deep space rather than remaining in orbit.
And then all the astronauts would die.
Gravity is everywhere. Objectivity most certainly is not. Every corner of our intellectual universe is polluted with fetid flows of overly subjective, emotionally overwrought, patently unfair statements and arguments lacking any pretense of objectivity. But, I still find the gravity analogy useful. We need to stay grounded. We need to argue with sobriety, if we're going to persuade people that we're right about something.
So we shouldn't be asking if an argument is objective. We should be asking if the writer is making any attempt at objectivity, and if so, what is the quality of the attempt?
Think about abortion.
Oh no—anything but that—
Right? We can't even name the issue without nearby objects spontaneously combusting with rage. Call it the “abortion issue" and you're assumed to be a Catholic priest or one of those sneering people who stand on the street corner holding up gigantic color photographs of bloody dismembered fetuses screaming Murderer! Call it the “women's reproductive health debate" and you're assumed to be a bug-eyed lesbian feminist tree-hugger who hates men. (Full bias disclosure: I'm a feminist and a tree-hugger and I certainly do not hate myself, and I kind of wish I was a lesbian because all the ones I know are super cool, but do not call me bug-eyed.)
When was the last time you heard an unemotional argument about abortion, one way or the other, that attempted objectivity? A statement closest to perfect objectivity about the abortion debate would explain, with fidelity, each side's position, and would not devote more space to one side than the other. But that's not an argument—it's an explanation of other people's arguments.
As a pro-choice man, I can pose a (mostly) sober, unemotional argument in which I make a strong attempt at objectivity—by offering, with fidelity, the other side's position, not in order to weaken my own argument, but in order to strengthen it.
And I can do this from the pro-life position, as a pro-choice man.
Dare me? Think I can't? Behold, grasshopper!
Abortion should not be legal. Our nation's laws must reflect our values, if our moral authority is to be taken seriously by our children and by the other nations of the world. Legal abortion means we are hypocrites, that we do not actually believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and it means we don't believe in justice for all. All these are empty words, while legal abortion remains the law of the land, because, at the moment of conception, an unborn child is a human being with the same natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. However much we must protect the life and the rights of the mother—and that includes saving her life when we cannot save both—we cannot allow the codification of murder, whether the person we mean to kill lives in a womb, or in prison on death row. Although it is true that codifying denial of access disproportionately punishes women of poverty, since we can expect women of privilege to seek abortions illegally or overseas, there are other ways to address that problem than by keeping abortion legal. We can fund education and family planning, and we can do much more to make sure that unwanted children find good homes, instead of simply discarding them.
How am I able to argue either position with fidelity?
Because, when it comes to attempts at objectivity, we need to worry less about what we say, and more about how we listen.
I'll come back to that in a minute.
Tatters (c) 2011 J. STANFORD.
DISHONEST ATTEMPTS AT BEING "UNBIASED"
Remember your American history class?
Of course you don't. (If you do—raise your glass to that teacher!)
Remember your American history textbook?
(All hands go down. All smiles fade.)
In case you don't remember, or in case you tried to forget, I'll refresh your memory. You're welcome!
It begins in the late fifteenth century, with Christopher Columbus visiting the court of Queen Isabella and requesting ships, so he can sail to Asia for spices. And gold!
She replies, “Fetch, you strange, swarthy Genoese captain. And bring me some face cream from the Body Shop on Melrose."
Or, it begins earlier, in the eleventh century, when Vikings settled L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.
To me both of these beginnings seem odd, since Columbus landed in San Salvador, one of the Bahamas, which has never been a possession of the United States. And you can tell from the name of the Viking settlement that they were the ones who brought the French language to Quebec. Soooo not American. I thought this was American history! There isn't anything else about the Bahamas or Canada in the entire bloody book. Well, except maybe a map of troop movements during the War of 1812. (You do realize I'm kidding around about the Vikings being French? Just checking.)
Anyway, from Columbus, our Friendly Neighborhood Textbook skips ahead to the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving.
From there we continue: a protracted “mainstream" history about explorers and leaders and wars and treaties and diplomacy and capitalism and progress. In the 2,000 pages it will take to tell this exciting story, we'll need only 8 or so to “cover" Native Americans, including a breathless recounting of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as the Lakota Sioux call it, the Battle of the Greasy Grass, in which Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer redefines hubris and gets himself scalped. We also call this event Custer's Last Stand, since he is (apparently) the only person involved in the battle who really matters.
1884 Republican candidate James Blaine, who lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland, in large part because of the Mugwumps—Republicans who split the party by refusing to support Blaine. See? Electoral betrayal was invented wayyy before Al Gore. Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26489291
And now back to our regularly scheduled program: Free Silver, Mugwumps, and Grover Cleveland!
What's going on here?
Well, what we have in our American history textbook is The history. You know, the one everyone is supposed to study.
The faceless writers of The American history, a group of traditional historians—mostly white, mostly male—pretend that all other history—anything not involving explorers and leaders and wars and treaties and diplomacy and capitalism and progress—is biased, political, divisive, and most of all, less important: the history of non-males, non-whites, non-Protestants, immigrants, workers, ordinary people, sexual minorities, and anyone else whose story should matter less.
This bias masquerading as not-biased is so deeply ingrained that anyone subscribing to it would bristle, teeth bared, after reading the sentence immediately preceding this one.
But I am not claiming that one history is better or more important, and I am not claiming all perspectives matter equally; my point is that any narrative is inherently biased, even the history of presidents and landowners. I would not claim that a history of the LGBTQ movement is unbiased. Of course it's biased!
If bias is defined by a human perspective, then we must conclude that all perspective, all narrative, all exposition, all description, and all argument is inherently biased, and we must also conclude that bias is only a bad thing when the writer attempts to conceal or employ it for some dishonest purpose.
IT CUTS BOTH WAYS
Speaking of dishonest, what exactly is the nefarious purpose underlying the biased narrative in your Friendly Neighborhood Traditional American History textbook as I've described it?
No, it's not some racist conspiracy. Stay calm. What it reflects, I believe, is a structural problem tied up in what many of us consider “biased"—when we read something that deviates from one of the majority groups to which we belong, we tend to view it as somehow less fair, less objective. We tend to get defensive. Why do you hate America? we think. Shut up and leave me alone.
But as readers, when we cry “biased" in an attempt to silence others, we're engaging in one of the worst kinds of intellectual malfeasance.
This cuts both ways: if I assume a white male Christian conservative history professor cannot offer an insightful, objective perspective, I'm engaging in precisely the same dishonest behavior. I can listen to him with two minds, an open mind, and a skeptical mind—as I believe I should listen to everyone.
If I listen with only an open mind, then I'm vulnerable to manipulation; if I listen with only a skeptical mind, then I'm nothing more than a cynic. I'm not actually listening.
“I have to listen with two minds: an open mind, and a skeptical mind.”
LISTENING, NOT SPEAKING, IS THE KEY TO OBJECTIVITY
There are two reasons I do not conceal my own biases, neither here nor in my classroom: first, because to do so would be dishonest, as I've just argued; second, because teachers enjoy far less influence over their students than is generally believed. It is exceptionally rare to find a student moved to break philosophically from the family's worldview by a teacher.
Did you? I didn't.
I enjoyed many teachers who moved and encouraged me, who broadened my mind and showed me how to learn and how to think, but I remain the fiercely independent child of a highly-educated irreligious environmentalist and a highly-educated liberal Protestant. I have never been moved fundamentally from that upbringing. Not even coming out as gay moved me fundamentally from that upbringing.
I still remember my middle school social studies teacher, Mrs. Churchill, a hearty big salt of the earth woman, and a Reagan Republican. Yep, Churchill was her real surname.
I loved her class. I remember we were each assigned an African country, and mine—Malawi—I optimistically tried to argue was a developing country by the definition she taught us.
She looked at me like I'd sprouted antennae.
And, it was during her class one day we found out President Reagan had been shot. Reflexively, I cheered like a little commie bastard.
“That's our president," she said darkly to me. “Disagree with him if you want, but show some respect for the office of the president. And show some respect for human life."
On another occasion, I remember arguing with her about taxation.
(Yes, I was that seventh grader. #Nerd)
She explained calmly to me that she believed everyone ought to pay the same tax. Not the same percentage. The same amount.
What a bunch of crap! I thought. And I still do.
Loved Mrs. Churchill. Learned something about respect and Malawi from her. But did she influence me and turn me into Alex P. Keaton? Please.
My biases originate almost entirely from my upbringing, and my biology.
Just like every American, there's surely something about my biases you won't like, and there's probably something else we share, something about which you and I can relate.
So here goes:
I'm white, male and educated, but I do not identify as straight, religious, or conservative. I'm middle class, but I'm aware of my many privileges. I'm a wine-loving Californian—Southern California (in California that matters!)—but I grew up in Colorado helping my grandad harvest apples. I've been almost everywhere in Colorado and I have traveled all over the American West, especially Montana and Washington. I enjoy big open spaces. I need mountains near me. (In many ways I relate more closely to Canadians in this time zone than to Americans in the Eastern time zone.) I understand how to prepare a campsite in a wilderness full of bears. I know what it's like to live downtown, uptown, in the suburbs, and in the country. I ski. I crave strategic board games. I prefer nonfiction because I'm curious about the world. I eat meat. I love watching football as much as any red-blooded kid raised in the Centennial State and I would choose it over a stage musical any day of the week. Want to see people lose all objectivity? Watch them argue about football. Patriots suck! Go Broncos!
Lizard Head Pass above spectacular Telluride, Colorado, June 27, 2011. I miss that little car. We named him Hans. (c) J. STANFORD.
Nothing about who I am is intended to be a secret to anyone, but in the classroom I do not deviate from curriculum in order to share about Me. Mostly I don't have time, and it's just kind of gross I think, to talk incessantly about myself when the audience is so captive.
Sure, they want to know who I am; when confronted with these questions I say, “You're more than welcome to stay after class and interview me."
Seldom does anyone stay after class.
But one time, a number of them did, after each period, all day long. They wanted to know, in November 2016, for whom I voted. The answer did not surprise them. I was not in the best mood but I kept my still-raw emotions in check—I needed to, because many of the students came from liberal households awash in despair.
“They wanted to know, in November 2016, for whom I voted.”
I think it's likely they didn't care much for whom I voted. They simply wanted to know that the world wasn't going to end before Christmas. They wanted to feel safe.
And, I had to keep my emotions in check because there was this kid, a Latino former student of mine. We liked to joke around.
“Ha ha!" he yelled at me, fist outstretched. "Trump! YEAH."
I smiled wanly. “I'm going to miss you."
“Why?"
“Because you're going to be deported."
“What! I'm American."
“I don't think he cares," I said fake-regretfully.
He laughed. I laughed. I needed that laugh. Thanks, Hernando. (Not his real name.)
Most days, if not every day, the kids are consumed with friendships, problems, hopes, dreams, passions, and Twitter. My personal life and my personal opinions do not rank on those lists.
Good. It would seem things are just the way they ought to be.
If any of my students remember me fondly down the line—and I hope they do—it will be a memory of the guy who taught them how to write. Other than their physical safety and emotional well-being, inasmuch as I can guarantee that for an hour a day, teaching them how to write is all I care about.
But good intentions are not enough. I have to be objective—as objective as humanly possible.
Objectivity isn't about what I say. It's about what I hear.
I don't have to hide who I am in order to teach students how to think and how to write. I have to listen to my students with two minds: an open mind, and a critical mind. I have to listen to myself with a critical mind, with an ear that listens for my many biases. They can't be silenced. They can't be set aside. They can't be turned off like a light in a room. They're always going to be there.
So if you're worried about avoiding bias and thinking objectively, start by focusing less on what you're saying, and more on how you're listening.