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CONVERSATION LESSON

Tall, Dark and Handsome

Dan: Okay. Hello, hello. How are you doing, Aaron?

Aaron: Pretty good. How are you doing?

Dan: I’m doing pretty good. Today we’re talking about discrimination and bias.

Aaron: Discrimination and bias. Are you–?

Dan: So we started with… What were you going to say?

Aaron: Are you full of bias?

Dan: I think we all are. I think that’s at the crux of all these stories in the Core Audio, is the hidden bias that we all have.

Aaron: We all have and we’re not always aware of it.

Dan: This month’s Core Audio starts with the story of Warren Harding who supposedly was the worst US president in history.

Aaron: I haven’t really heard much about Warren Harding until we started putting this together.

Dan: Was he really the worst? I don’t really know. I haven’t read a lot about Warren Harding but apparently a lot of historians agree, but I’m wondering if that decision was made before or after George Bush became president.

Aaron: He definitely would give Warren Harding a run for his money.

Dan: Yes. But supposedly he was not a very bright man and he was not an ambitious man.

Aaron: But he was tall and he was good looking.

Dan: He was tall. He was good looking. ‘Tall, dark and handsome’ is the phrase that people use.

Aaron: And that goes a long way, apparently.

Dan: Yeah, it took him from a small town newspaper editor to a local politician to a US senator, all the way into the highest office, to the presidency.

Aaron: Wow.

Dan: Apparently, his record was not very impressive. He was absent quite a bit during important debates and votes.

Aaron: And he was into womanizing and fishing and poker. There you go.

Dan: He’s a gambler.

Aaron: Sounds like a fun guy to hang around.

Dan: And apparently, he was easily manipulated. In addition to his good looks, he was seen as inoffensive, somebody that could be manipulated by the powers that be, behind the scenes, like Daugherty. So Daugherty, apparently when he first met him, he thought to himself this is an opportunity. This is someone I can use and manipulate.

Aaron: So he was kind of a shrewd businessman.

Dan: Yes. Machiavellian, he is described as.

Aaron: He basically saw the potential in just the way this guy looked.

Dan: Right. So Daugherty was 6 feet tall, which I think is–

Aaron: Well, by today’s standards, that’s not really tall.

Dan: What is that in centimeters?

Aaron: That’s about 183.

Dan: So it’s still above average even today, but back then it was very tall.

Aaron: How tall are you?

Dan: I am 5’10” so I think 178, which is pretty average. I’ve heard different estimations for the US of 5’9” and 5’10”.

Aaron: I’ve heard 5’10”.

Dan: Of course, some countries are much taller. I think the Danes are very tall.

Aaron: Yeah, the Danish, and I think the tallest people are the Dutch.

Dan: The Dutch. Okay. Icelandic people apparently are very tall, as well. But anyhow, I think tall people, they naturally have a lot of advantages from the time when they’re little kids. People look up to them. Other kids look up to them as–

Aaron: Literally.

Dan: Yeah, literally, but also figuratively as being powerful or cooler or more charismatic.

Aaron: Sure, head and shoulders above the rest, kind of thing.

Dan: And of course the way other people look at you affects how you look at yourself.

Aaron: Yeah, your confidence levels.

Dan: Yeah, imagine that you can have more confidence which is going toAaron: Sure. As you’re growing up, people are giving you more positive vibes so you naturally feel more confident and that translates into tackling challenges in more positive ways.

Dan: So you’re 6 foot, right?

Aaron: Yeah, I’m 6 feet tall.

Dan: What is that in centimeters?

Aaron: 183.

Dan: 183. Okay, so that’s above average. Were you a tall kid?

Aaron: No, I was just a normal kid.

Dan: Average.

Aaron: Yeah, average. I just kept growing until I was about 183 and in the last 10 years I’ve started to shrink. I think I’m 182 now or something. I don’t know if that has to do with age or I don’t know what.

Dan: A lot of people are very attached to their height. My father was 6’3” and he lost an inch later in life and he really didn’t like that.

Aaron: Oh really? Actually, living in Japan, I don’t mind losing a little bit of height because the doorframes in Japan are typically 180 centimeters high. And since I’m 183 or 182, I’m constantly hitting the top of my head when walking through, so I have to be very careful about that.

Dan: Yeah, even at 5’10”, I got to be careful. I bonked my head pretty good last week; I almost knocked myself out, which was embarrassing. Actually, I did it twice last week.

Aaron: Wow, you need to slow down, Dan.

Dan: So that was embarrassing. Both times I did it in front of other people. I think tall people have a lot of advantages and then they get older and people have in their mind this image of somebody being tall as being more capable. I think nobody goes to vote for presidents as who’s the tallest person, but unconsciously, they’re picking up on that height factor, that physicalAaron: I have a friend who’s 203 centimeters tall.

Dan: 203 centimeters. What is that in feet and inches?

Aaron: I don’t know. It’s probably like 6’10” or something. I don’t know. Something like that.

Dan: Ah, he’s a monster.

Aaron: But he got into politics, local politics in the state of Illinois, and he later became a State Senator. And now he’s the treasurer of the state of Illinois and his slogan is ‘Standing Tall for Illinois’. He has his sights I think on the national level next.

Dan: Just a regular Abe Lincoln.

Aaron: Yeah, exactly.

Dan: Abe Lincoln, we think of him being as like a giant, but in reality he was 6’4”.

Aaron: Was he? Are you serious?

Dan: I’m pretty sure he was 6’4”, so he was shorter than your friend, quite a bit shorter. But at that time the average person was like a hobbit. This is like the 18… When was he president? 1860s?

Somewhere around there. And I think the average height in the 1900s was 5’4” and the 1860s it was probably even shorter. So tall people, you know, I was a short kid. I’m average now.

Aaron: I still see you as a short kid.

Dan: Yeah, that’s why we’re talking about… That’s why we wrote this lesson to shine the light on the biases and discrimination of you. We kind of talked about it as if it’s everyone but it’s mostly you.

Aaron: Mostly me? Okay.

Dan: Tall people have a lot of advantages. The only time that tall people don’t have an advantage, I think, is on the airplane.

Aaron: Oh, right, because it’s so cramped.

Dan: I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the news articles about people getting into physical fights on planes.

Aaron: Oh, because of the chairs, the seats being reclined into someone’s lap or something like that.

Dan: Yeah, that’s tall people getting angry at regular-sized people for reclining their seat and they say how incredibly rude it is.

Aaron: But it’s our right to recline our seats because that’s what the airlines give us.

Dan: That’s the way I feel. I paid this amount of money for this amount of space. And if you’re too big, then buy a business class. That’s not really a fair thing to say but… Aaron: That’s the mentality of some people.

Dan: Yeah, some rude people like you.

Aaron: I’m a nice guy on the airplane, I am.

Dan: Do you recline your seat?

Aaron: Yeah, I do. But I don’t see that as a problem.

Dan: Do you ask first?

Aaron: No, I don’t. I just recline. I am aware if they have their tray out and if they have food there, I’m very, very careful about that. Usually, at mealtimes I will put my seat up knowing that it could be a problem. So I do, I’m aware of that. I’m considerate.

Dan: Tall people say you should always ask. You should turn around and ask the person. “Is it okay if I recline my seat?”

Aaron: I guess I haven’t reached that level of politeness.

Dan: Yeah, I’m not doing that. There’s actually a device called the Knee Defender that you can buy that disables–

Aaron: What is it?

Dan: It’s some kind of clamp that attaches to your food tray and the seat in front of you and it stops the seat in front of you from being able to move back and recline.

Aaron: Now, if somebody put that on the back of my seat, I would not be happy.

Dan: No, I‘d be really angry.

Aaron: I wouldn’t start a fight over it.

Dan: I would. I’d be throwing down. I’d be throwing hands. Of course, height discrimination or the benefits of height are not the most common biases we often talk about.

Aaron: Actually, when we think about bias and discrimination, we’re usually thinking about, well, gender is one, race is another.

Dan: So we have the story about the professional musician, Abby, who was able to become a professional musician because they thought she was a man when she applied.

Aaron: They thought she was a man and then she was rejected by almost all of the auditions that she tried to get.

Dan: Well, her applications, she didn’t get any responses.

Aaron: The applications, that’s right. And the only one that gave her an opportunity thought that she was a man.

Dan: Right. And she locked out that the audition that was given, because they thought she was a man, was a blind audition. And it wasn’t a blind audition to protect against gender discrimination. It was a blind audition because another one of the applicants was the son of a famous musician.

Aaron: Ah, so there would be bias there, as well.

Dan: Yes, that was the kind of bias they were worried about and they were shocked when they lifted the screen and found the person they had chosen was a woman. And then they started to discriminate against her.

Aaron: And then they started to discriminate against her.

Dan: They demoted her from the first chair or the top trombonist to the 2nd chair.

Aaron: But she fought it, right?

Dan: She fought it and she won, and then she had to fight them again for pay discrimination. They wouldn’t pay her the same as a man. And this isn’t something that happened 100 years ago or 50 years ago. This is something that happened in the 1980s.

Aaron: Oh, really, the 80s. That’s pretty recent.

Dan: And her cases lasted for 13 years.

Aaron: Wow.

Dan: So it wasn’t until the 90s when she completely won. But apparently, for something like 25 or 30 years, it has become common for there to be blind auditions in the US.

Aaron: And since then, the percentage of women in these orchestras has skyrocketed.

Dan: And of instruments that were classically thought to be masculine, like maybe percussion or trombone or these big instruments–

Aaron: The tuba, that kind of thing.

Dan: Right. I think there’s always been a more equal share of women violinists or flautists. Now we have perhaps the first chance of the first female president.

Aaron: Well, we had a chance. We had, 8 years ago when she ran and she almost got the nomination, and a black man was the one. That was an exciting time in the US politics.

Dan: I never thought that would happen because of all of the racial bias which we can see in the news happening now. All these cases of police killing minorities, often black people, and because there’s all this hidden bias. I was listening to this story about the way that police see the world and how they see it differently and how they see threats according to their own personal racial bias.

And it was interviewing this cop whose job it was to try to raise awareness of racial bias of other policemen and he had some sort of video game where there were different people that would pop up and you had a video game gun, then you had to decide to use it when there was risk of life and death. And they found that if the video game character was a minority, the speed in which they would decide this person was a threat would be much quicker. This particular police officer who was working with this video game to teach other police officers, he had to really make the other officers understand that this isn’t a question of you being consciously racist. It’s about what is aAaron: Your cultural conditioning. You’re a product of your culture and your environment and that has conditioned your mind to behave in biased ways.

Dan: Yeah. They even found that some black officers, or that most black officers on average were biased against other blacks. The same thing because they were a product of the same culture.

Aaron: We see evidence of this constantly in the news of situations where blacks are being beaten by police or unfairly treated.

Dan: Or just murdered.

Aaron: Or murdered. Flat-out murdered. And whites who may be in the same position are treated much differently.

Dan: Of course they don’t see it as murder but that’s what it amounts to. I don’t know if you… Do you remember that case in 1999, that guy, that African immigrant named Diallo in New York City?

Aaron: Is this the guy that was attacked by white undercover?

Dan: Yeah, right. So he was an immigrant from Guinea and I think he sold stuff on the street, video tapes and other things. He didn’t have a lot of money.

Aaron: But he was outside his house, right? His own house.

Dan: He was living in a low income area of the Bronx, the south Bronx, and he stepped outside to his front stoop and at that time, some white officers, undercover officers drove by. And he saw them drive by very slowly and he stepped back into the doorway.

Aaron: And they were sort of mean-mugging him.

Dan: Yeah. And they said, “Look at that guy, up to no good, stepping back into the shadows. Stop the car. We’ve got to investigate.” And he was an immigrant. I think his English wasn’t so good. I think they told him, I think they said, “Hold up. Hold up.” And his reaction was… He saw these four white guys, scary-looking white guys who had bulletproof vests under their clothes and it looked like big scary guys coming towards him, telling him to hold up, and his reaction was to turn around and try to get back into his building.

Aaron: Which is a reasonable response to that kind of threat coming at you.

Dan: And they kept yelling and I guess at that point, he decided that running was not the way to go and he was reaching for his wallet, and they thought he was reaching for a gun.

Aaron: And they shot him.

Dan: Yeah. They unloaded more than 40 times. They fired more than 40 bullets at him.

Aaron: So it must have hit him dozens of times.

Dan: Yeah. So he died immediately and the cop that started shooting first, the highest ranking officer there ran up and went looking for the gun and saw a wallet. Apparently, so the story goes, the policeman sat down and just started crying. He was a mess. He was devastated that he had just killed this innocent person.

Aaron: Which indicates that it was never his intention to attack a black person.

Dan: No, he didn’t walk out saying let me go murder somebody. It was most likely his unconscious biases that black equals greater chance of a threat or danger. I think that kind of stuff happens all the time.

Aaron: Yeah. Well, there’s another case fairly recently, several years ago in Florida, of a neighborhood watch guy named George Zimmerman who saw a young black man in a hoodie walking through a fairly affluent neighborhood and he pursued him and the police told him on a 911 call to not pursue the kid.

Dan: Yeah, he was a neighborhood watch guy, right?

Aaron: Yeah, and this is a young guy. The kid, the black kid… We call him a kid. I mean he was about 18 years old.

Dan: Was he? I thought he was–

Aaron: He was a young man.

Dan: Okay, he’s a teenager.

Aaron: He was like 17 or 18. Anyway, he ended up shooting him and that made the national news.

Dan: I think these things are happening all the time and that’s why we’re hearing this slogan ‘Black lives matter’ a lot in the news and demonstrations happening. I think the response from people who don’t want to look at the bias and discrimination happening in the US, the response is ‘All lives matter’.

Aaron: Yeah, but that’s kind of skirting the issue. The issue is the hidden bias that we all carry within us.

Dan: Of course all life is precious. Of course all lives matter. But nobody’s denying the… Nobody’s murdering white people and seeing him as a threat.

Aaron: For just being white.

Dan: So that ‘All lives matter’, that’s really annoying when I see that response. It’s just completely missing the point.

Aaron: It’s really a shame and it kind of raises the question, well what do you do about it? How can you change bias? It’s not an easy solution. Conditioning runs so deep within us.

Dan: I think the only thing you can do is to try to raise awareness and I think that’s the whole idea behind ‘Black lives matter’, it’s like let’s look at these hidden biases. And when you say ‘All lives matter’, it’s like, oh no, let’s not look at anything hidden. Let’s just talk about life in general.

Aaron: But I think that is really the key to where the solution lies, is developing on an individual basis our awareness of our own biases, so that when those biases arise, if we can maintain the awareness, we can catch them when it comes to decision-making or it comes to dealing with people who might be the object or the target of that bias, because if you’re aware of it, then you can actually, consciously not act upon some of those biases. That’s hard, though. It’s very difficult to do and it’s throughout a society

Dan: Because we don’t know where these ideas are coming from because they’re coming from our unconscious. So much of the decisions that we make are due to unconscious preferences or biases.

Aaron: Sure they are. Absolutely. Have you ever been the victim of discrimination being part Asian?

As a child?

Dan: Well, you know, I think as I get older I look less Asian, but when I was a child people thought I was 100% Asian.

Aaron: This was in the United States.

Dan: Yeah, in the United States, and not just in the United States. I think anywhere I travel. In Brazil, they would call me an ‘ariga’ which is short for ‘arigato’, thank you. And they would say, “Oy, ariga!” And they would say it in a way that didn’t make me feel like they didn’t like. It wasn’t such a negative thing, but clearly they thought I was Japanese. And in Costa Rica, they call me ‘chino’. I would say one way that it really hurt me was when I lived in Nepal, they thought I was Japanese, and at least at that time and probably still, to a Nepali person they would see a Japanese person as somebody who was wealthy and was not good at bargaining or negotiating. So they would see me and get really excited. And they go, “Oh, come, come, come. Come into my store, Japanese person!” Aaron: “This is the price.” Because in Japan bargaining is not really a part of the culture. They don’t negotiate the price and there’s just no discussion.

Dan: One of my first jobs was at Subway Sandwiches.

Aaron: Big chain, right?

Dan: Yeah. And I had a boss, his name was Jack. I remember one time he called up and he wasn’t happy with something I was doing. I remember one of the other co-workers, name was Boon, and she was from Laos. And he said, “Why can’t you be more like Boon and have some of that Asian work ethic?”

Aaron: Oh my goodness.

Dan: Actually, he was one of the few people who didn’t know that I was part Asian. So I said to Jack, “Actually, Jack, I’m half-Asian. So does that mean I work twice as hard as Brian but half as hard as Boon? You don’t like that.”

Aaron: But that whole thing about identifying people’s racial background, I think is really wellillustrated in that story about Jose who changed his name to ‘Joe’, the guy that was applying for different jobs. That’s just really revealing, how he applied for the exact same jobs, the exact same jobs, exact same resume, everything. The only thing he dropped was the letter ‘s’ from his name to change it to ‘Joe’, and then suddenly he’s getting lots of calls.

Dan: And one letter can reveal so much of our hidden biases. Well, on that note, let’s bring this to an end.

Aaron: Okay.

Dan: Alrighty.

Aaron: Sounds good.

Dan: Talk to you soon.

Aaron: See you!