Somewhere in the fourth or fifth chapter of his [damned good] book 'Blink', Malcolm lets the cat out of the bag. He's a brudda. I'm reading it now and am resisting the temptation to thin slice it. But I know a good thing when I read it.
I recorded his interview with Charlie Rose about a month ago and the first thing I notice about this guy is the way that his hair shoots up and accentuates his forehead. As he went on to explain the premise of 'Blink' about the congnitive engine of our first impressions, I was working out what it was about him that struck me as different. It was the hair, it was the bearing, it was the suit.
Then he told Charlie that he was from Canada. Aha! I knew there was something about this guy that made him different from the run of the mill American intellectuals. He's sharp, dammit, he's sharp as a tack. And since he's got this bearing of intellectuality I'm saying that the hair is his Blink signal. It makes him look a little bit like a mad scientist, not quite as mad as Beakman, but close. I like his style, and more importantly I like his concept.
So over the course of the last few weeks on the road, I've been doing a lot more reading and this time out I picked up Gladwell's book. I've been meaning to get around to it and the other one about distributed collective decision making, since that's what I do for a living - build systems that aid in business decision making. Last night I read the sentence, his moms is from Jamaica. What a surprise.
And now suddenly, especially in Googling an image for this blog entry, I see in a series of other pictures that which had not been evident in my first impressions. Negrosity! Funny how that works. What's interesting is that he was discussing his results from Harvard's Racial Implicit Assumption Test which I have taken several times without chagrin. To the extent that this is a brief and light meditation on race, Gladwell's book (and not his appearance) adds yet another drop of reason onto the pile of evidence about Class Three Racism - the background bigotry of American culture. In short, first impressions are significantly determined by a large number of associations which the brain manifests subconsciously. I don't believe that raises it to a significant political level, but the associations and sublime reactions are real nonetheless.
What's fascinating is that I hadn't taken Gladwell's hair as seriously as he had. I had read the following paragraph before and considered him a rather thoughtful guy with that experience. I was not surprised at how he had taken it in stride, neither then nor now.
Believe it or not, it's because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers' thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.
One of the reasons I have been very specific about not calling people racist when I was a race man is because very few people actually are. Nevertheless we all swim in the same soup they piss in, and few of us are unaffected. Stay tuned for the actual review of the book.
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