{"id":26633,"date":"2010-09-05T10:49:00","date_gmt":"2010-09-05T15:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=26633"},"modified":"2013-12-05T03:57:22","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T08:57:22","slug":"privilege-and-perception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/09\/05\/privilege-and-perception\/","title":{"rendered":"Privilege and Perception"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nCount how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball, then continue after the jump:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

So, did you see it?<\/p>\n

I’m really curious as to how many of you did.<\/p>\n

This exercise is designed to illustrate how perception is an active process, driven by what we are primed to pay attention to.\u00a0 Because we were told to focus on the players in white, we (theoretically) filtered out the players in black and, as a consequence, the black gorilla.<\/p>\n

Rachel at The Feminist Agenda<\/a>, from whom I borrowed this clip and these ideas, argues that this means that:<\/p>\n

…there really is no completely neutral stance from which a human can observe the world. We are always everywhere making value judgments about what’s important in our environment, what things mean, how they’re relevant, etc.\u00a0 And this process of selective, and even normative, perception is inseparable from our deeper thoughts about what it all means. There’s no clear line between perception and cognition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She continues:<\/p>\n

This explains a lot. For instance, it explains why for so many years, male researchers were seemingly blind to whole swaths of female behavior in primates they were studying. After all, in the patriarchal worldview they had inherited from their culture, females were passive, and not agents in any real way. So when the females mated with males who not only not the dominant male of the group, but often not even a part of their group, the human male researchers overlooked it altogether, and thus we have the myth of the dominant male primate who has sole access to all the females in “his” group.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Rachel, there is a lesson here about how to approach privilege.\u00a0 She argues that much of the time people who fail to see how a system advantages them and disadvantages others are simply looking through a lens warped by privilege.\u00a0 They’re truly blind to the inequities in society.\u00a0 But, she hopes, once you help them see the gorilla in the room, it’s absolutely impossible not to see.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball, then continue after the jump: Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology.\u00a0You can follow her on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,675,37],"class_list":["post-26633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-psychology","tag-social-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26633"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59786,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26633\/revisions\/59786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}