Life, Science, and their Many Intersections

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality

Anyone who closely follows academic innovations or social activism has probably heard the term “intersectionality” thrown around recently. But like many authors writing for the already well-informed, these sources generally don’t define that term. That leaves us uninitiated, merely interested audiences struggling to derive its meaning, usually from context or etymology. This has created no shortage of confusion and flagrant misuse of the term. Or is that just me?

Professors Collins and Bilge, of the University of Maryland and the Université de Montréal respectively, strive to overcome this neglect. They define intersectionality as a heuristic (another term scholars toss around indiscriminately) linking different influences that shape individuals and communities. This may include geography, religion, and learning. For our purposes, however, Collins and Bilge focus on the most readily quantifiable: the classic race/gender/class troika.

As an introduction to a philosophical concept, this book rapidly telescopes between global discursion on (putatively) universal notions, and narrow, applied examples. In the first chapter, for instance, after laying out the terms of discussion, our authors address the multiple layers of social inequality exposed by the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. How do we discuss racism, for instance, in a country that doesn't track race, where race officially no longer exists? How do we discuss working-class issues in a country with widespread poverty, where Pope Francis’ influences have recently muddled the Catholic Church's historical anti-communism? The overlap of issues creates a massive intersectional maze that makes discussion more complex, but more meaningful.

(I think the authors miss a wonderful opportunity. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto writes, the notorious Brazilian favelas host a vast off-the-books parallel economy that in some ways mirrors, and in other ways remedies, the inequalities of the official economy. But authors, of course, have to make choices.)

Our authors often use terms in a very self-reflective or “meta” manner that readers will absorb more through osmosis than reason. “Intersectionality as a form of critical praxis,” they write, “refers to the ways in which people, either as individuals or ad part of groups, produce, draw upon, or use intersectional frameworks in their daily lives.” Notice how the definition contains the word it seeks to define? Your Freshman Comp professor would’ve graded you down for this, but it’s common in scholarly writing.

Professors Patricia Hill Collins (left) and Sirma Bilge

Therefore, once Collins and Bilge establish the terms, their reasoning may seem superficially circular. One doesn’t so much receive their writing like information, as contemplate it like a Zen koan. As a heuristic, that is, as a semi-guided experimental approach to learning, intersectionality invites us to perceive a world outside our usual individual experience. It isn’t a research method, so much as an invitation to get lost in someone else’s world. Who could resist?

Like most scholarly writing, this book makes its most important points in the early chapters, then spends the remaining pages explaining, clarifying, and sharpening how those points apply. Less committed readers could dip casually into the first sixty or so pages, get the general thesis, and move on. Admittedly, after that range, the writing gets somewhat abstruse and pointy-headed. Though I consider myself a minor scholar, I found the latter chapters rather slow, difficult reading.

However, that doesn't mean the later chapters aren't worth reading. As Collins and Bilge consider the applications of intersectionality to education or public protest, not exactly fun bedtime reading, I felt the discussion challenging my outlook on areas I assumed I understood pretty well. As a sometime educator, I’ve struggled with how race, sex, and economic standing have influenced my students’ learning capabilities. The intersections of these forces, though, often remain invisible until someone calls our attention to them.

Thus, these authors have a somewhat self-selecting audience. Readers who embrace difficult reading, hoping to see their worldview changed, will find plenty to love between these covers. Running barely 200 pages plus back matter, this book’s fairly standard length for academic writing. Though readers should expect to make slow progress, that progress remains consistently meaningful and transformative.

This book is part of the “Key Concepts” series from Polity Books. Over the last few years, I’ve reviewed several Polity titles, in categories ranging from politics and current events, to history, to philosophy. Polity may be the best, most influential publisher you’ve never heard of. I have not agreed with every Polity title I’ve reviewed, and a few have pushed me into awkward positions as a critic. But they’ve always pushed me. Polity titles always leave me a better, quicker, more refined thinker.

Why I Started Buying CDs Again

I did something this weekend that I haven’t done in years: I bought a CD. For a guy who once spent nearly as much on recorded music as on books, that’s saying something. Having resisted downloading for ages, I don’t recall the exact point when my music collection basically consisted of digital encodings with no physical basis. Probably about the time Amazon Prime began offering full music albums at no added cost with their service.

But I impulsively purchased Waiting For the Dawn, by the Mowgli’s [sic]. I downloaded the album over a year ago, but only upon seeing it displayed in a downtown vinyl record store did I realize: I’ve never listened to the whole thing. I simply shelved it in an incorporeal music “library” that includes hundreds of albums I’ve never listened to, by artists I really like, from Gordon Lightfoot to Marian Hill to the Scissor Sisters.

That joins movies I’ve never watched, and e-books I’ve never read, some of which I’ve paid for, others made available “free” through an expensive subscription service. My tablet is a cluttered mess of content, a virtual TBR pile that, if translated into the material world, would crowd me out of my apartment. Why can I not power through this content? I’ve spent a week thinking about that, while I’ve kept the Mowgli’s on near-constant repeat.

Shlomo Benartzi of UCLA writes about studies going back to the 1980s about humans’ reading comprehension and retention when reading off a screen. Almost from the time computers became compact and affordable enough to read from, researchers began comparing screen reading with paper reading. And from the beginning, it’s been poor: when reading from a screen, our retention and processing ability drops by half. Human beings read better of printed pages. We probably always have.

Back when the Apple IIe was peak design, researchers attributed this to kludgy 8-bit type. No word on whether the “printed” reading came off a dot-matrix printer. But it gets complicated, because today’s screens aren’t kludgy. Typical laptop and tablet computers have dpi resolutions greater than most cost-effective printing techniques today, often twice the image resolution. Yet outcomes are unchanged. Screen reading from the most current iPad reduces retention by fifty percent, the same figure.

The Mowgli's [sic]

Benartzi suggests this reflects a paradox: excessively clear images enter our brains with minimal resistance. We don’t recall information we don’t struggle to process. Making screens slightly less legible might improve reading retention. He makes a pretty persuasive case, backed with evidence. But it misses an important point: whether clear or kludgy, reading from a screen reduces reading retention by half. This applies to both simple and difficult reading. Screens are the only common factor.


Simply reading digitally makes human brains less receptive to information and change than reading off paper. I lack conclusive scientific data, but I suspect this happens because digital reading is both cheap and ubiquitous. With just a mouse click or touchscreen tap, the specific information goes away, occupying no space and demanding no commitment. Physical books have mass and require storage. Paper books, with their multisensory experience and material weight, demand our accompanying psychological engagement.

This extends, I propose, to all digital media content. Streaming a Netflix movie requires no commitment, something owning a DVD absolutely demands. Playing a CD makes us listen to the whole thing, or at least consciously program which songs to include; downloading the same content doesn’t. I’ve spoken to a few people since buying this CD, and they agree: they download full albums, then listen to just the singles. Pandora streams or Spotify playlists? Pshaw.

Basically, I’ve concluded that when we don’t commit to owning the physical artifact, we don’t commit to consuming the content. Because downloading a Kindle book doesn’t require us to handle or store the material item, it doesn’t require us enough to care enough to finish the book. Downloaded music doesn’t commit us to care about anything besides the singles we already know and love. Streaming TV and movies are passive, requiring virtually nothing from us.

Don’t mistake me. After buying that CD, I did what I’ve done for a decade, ripping its content onto my laptop. Owning the item isn’t a magic talisman; we still buy the silver disc for its aesthetic content, not its physical beauty. But owning the thing still affects our thinking. It requires us to care about the entire package, not those comfortably familiar bits. If you need me, I’ll be off browsing the CD rack.

This Election Is Not Rigged

I first heard a Presidential election’s legitimacy questioned before me, in real time, in 1992. Oh, sure, the 1876 election still casts a squalid shadow, and the 1824 election, settled in the House of Representatives, probably arose from a secret back-room deal. But history is history; in 1992, I heard someone I trust second-guessing an actual election that hadn’t yet even gone to the Electoral College. That questioner was my dad.

“If people had voted right after the war,” Dad said, referring to Operation Desert Storm, “you would’ve seen this vote go a whole different way.”

Which, on balance, was probably true. Amid the high nationalistic feeling Americans enjoyed (if that’s the word) following our first decisive spanking of Saddam Hussein, George H.W. Bush was practically synonymous with patriotism. But the intervening months saw Bush’s military coalition dissipate, his domestic policy drift, and the American economy wind down. The high feeling of summer 1991 descended into the dejection of fall 1992.

So naturally, my father second-guessed, not the electoral outcome, but the electoral process. A devoted Republican, he thought the election ought to reflect his favored candidate’s career high, not the situation the voters actually faced in November. I was more conservative back then, a reflection not of deep commitment, but a fear of alienating my father. So naturally, I agreed. If the system didn’t reward my favorite candidate, the fault lay with the system.

Chris Wallace, moderator of the
third presidential debate

My father’s message has followed me through this campaign. And it has primarily followed me in Donald Trump’s voice. From the beginning of the primary season, Trump vowed he’d honor the procedural outcome only if he thought he’d been “treated fairly,” a concept he never defined. Into the general election, he’s repeated the claim that the national election would be rigged, implying that only a Trump victory would be truly just and small-D democratic.

I dismissed this language as Dad-like bluster, pure sour grapes from a protest candidate whose ultimate outcome was virtually pre-decided. But in the final presidential debate, Chris Wallace backed Trump into a corner, demanding whether the candidate would accept the legal, constitutional outcome. Trump literally replied: “I will look at it at the time.”

Secretary Clinton called this answer “horrifying.” I couldn’t agree more.

What Trump and my father have trouble accepting, is that elections are arbitrary, but consistent. There’s no reason why presidential elections should happen on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in years divisible by four, except that we’ve always done it that way. We have a change in government at consistent intervals, and those intervals don’t reflect transitory conditions of popularity or outside issues. Elections happen because it’s time for them to happen.

These victories don’t necessarily mean one person has won the ideological debate. Those can continue for decades. I own a book of essays by Isaac Asimov, entitled Fact and Fancy, in which he discusses global warming. The book is copyrighted 1963, and the specific global warming chapter is dated 1952. So that ideological debate has continued for at least sixty-four years, without reaching any resolution.

(Consider that next time somebody says we’re moving “too fast” on global climate change.)

Other debates have continued even longer. The ebb and flow of America’s race debate has persisted since whites imported the first African slaves in the 1520s. The debate has changed: should slaves be free, should races be equal, how do we define race? What about rights for women and the poor? Where do we define poor, non-white women? The debates mount up. And they don’t get resolved “on time.”

Elections, by contrast, happen at specific intervals. Congressmen need their constituents’ approval every two years to hold office. Presidents (and most state governors), every four. Senators, every six. Some positions, mostly local municipal positions like school boards, may need fresh approval every year. But these intervals happen with absolute, machine-like consistency. They happen because it’s time for them to happen.

And that includes the presidential race. George H.W. Bush lost the election because the election took place in November 1992, not August 1991. The timing must remain immune to the candidate’s personal popularity, because otherwise, skillful politicians could remain in office permanently. President Obama’s current Gallup ratings show a majority approval, yet nobody, Republican or Democratic, should wish him installed forever.

So yes, fairness and justice in elections don’t describe the outcome. My favored candidate may lose—and often has. But justice describes the system, regardless of whatever human temporarily occupies the office. And refusal to accept the system makes the individual, therefore, unjust. That alone should be disqualifying.

Pardon Billy Bush!

Billy Who?

News came down on Monday, October 17th: Billy Bush, the third-hour host of the Today show, a personality so forgettable that I’d even forgotten he’d been suspended a week prior, was fired. As the Ed McMahon to Donald Trump’s Johnny Carson on that now-notorious Access Hollywood tape, he’d contributed some vulgar and offensive lines to Trump’s praise of sexual assault. So Bush is out, apparently. Meanwhile, Trump is still polling around forty percent.

Upon Bush’s suspension last week, his NBC stablemate Seth Meyers wisecracked that this means Today show hosts, in the lowest-rated hour of broadcast network programming, are held to higher standards than presidential candidates. It’s literally easier to pull somebody from interviewing celebrity poodle groomers, than from contention for America’s highest office. Admittedly, no serious presidential candidate has ever said anything quite so revolting on tape. But still.

Fact is, I’m sympathetic with Billy Bush. Not completely, of course, since you’d expect a TV pseudo-journalist with over a decade’s experience to know not to feed trolls. His sounds of possibly enthusiastic agreement with Donald Trump probably encouraged the classic bully to keep going with his diatribe. But I’ve been in situations where one foul-mouthed goon appeared to dominate a crowd. It’s very hard to resist in that situation.

And when I say “been in situations,” I don’t mean in grade school. In all-male workplace situations, where one dominant personality winds other men up, that dominant asshat probably uses offensive language to control the discussion. Nobody in the crowd wants to be the first to speak against the type-A jackass, because it’s impossible to determine who really agrees, and nobody wants to be the one spoilsport. So things get worse rather than better.

Literally within the last month, in my current job, I’ve been in conversation with a man who used the N-word in conversation. I’ve stood silent, watching two men push each other’s buttons about long-discredited conspiracy theories regarding Hillary Clinton, while three other men hung back, pretending to be apolitical, lest the two leaders’ increasingly heated tone gets turned on us. And I’ve watched two dominant guys use sexual language approaching, but not topping that which Trump got recorded saying.

We’d all like to believe we’d have courage enough to speak against such situations. Ask most white Americans today (most, not all), and they’d probably say that, yes, if they time-traveled to that iconic Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, of course they’d have courage enough to speak against the bigotry and violence. Surely they’d have sense enough to decry hanging witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Yeah, I’d know to give Mary and Joseph a warm bed.

But until you find yourself in such a situation, I seriously believe you don’t know how you’d respond. All your fine-seeming ethics fizzle and die when you realize you don’t know whether anybody would support you, or whether you’d find yourself the outcast in a situation you can’t leave—trapped on a bus with a rich, spoiled thug like Billy Bush, or trapped in a job you can’t afford to leave, like me.

It’s a situation I wouldn’t wish on anybody. Because for every Rosa Parks, whose singular sacrifice ignited a movement against entrenched bigotry, there are dozens of unnamed martyrs whose sacrifice did nothing. Civil rights historians record that many black Americans before Parks refused to relinquish their seats; most were jailed, and vanished from history. Only a confluence of circumstances, impossible to reconstruct now, made Parks the hero America needed.

Like me, Billy Bush found himself in a closed space, in a crowd of men, while one egomaniac pandered to the crowd’s reptile brains with tales, possibly fake or exaggerated, of sexual conquest. Yeah, Bush said “Whatever you want,” which Melania Trump has construed as “egging [Donald] on.” But nobody believes that. Bush’s short, grammatically incomplete sentences reflect a man scared to resist the tide.

So while I’m not exactly on Billy Bush’s side, I understand his situation. Merely having one woman within earshot would’ve changed the situation altogether. My workplace became, temporarily, a less hostile space when the company hired two young female electricians, and the guys trying to out-dude each other stepped back. And the Trump tape reflects a changed tone when Arianne Zucker appears.

Maybe Billy “Don’t Call Me George” Bush really isn’t that bad. Maybe he is. But he deserves the opportunity to explain himself on air, not just have his press credentials yanked because we’re outraged by Trump. He shouldn’t pay the price because there’s no established mechanism to fire a visibly deranged presidential candidate.

The Heart of Mathematics; Mathematics of the Heart

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 74
Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor

When a young single mother gets an agency referral to keep house for an aging, reclusive mathematician, she considers it another by-the-book job. This attitude only increases when she discovers her client has no love for anything but mathematics and number sets. However, when the mathematician discovers she has a young, intellectually struggling son waiting at home, he demands she bring her boy around daily. The change this sudden family wreaks, in a man who otherwise cannot change, is instantaneous and remarkable.

Yoko Ogawa's best-known novel, at least internationally, is the sort of project publishers release for sheer love of books. It's unlikely to be made into a blockbuster film, admits no franchise possibility, and has no fist fights or car chases. (It was adapted into a 2006 film, a quiet, understated study that’s never had an American release.) But it's the kind of book that makes me want to read, and it will enjoy the loyalty of anyone who reads because the word is a joy in itself.

Ogawa creates a world remarkably free of names. The first-person narrator is called only "I," and she keeps house for an invalid genius she only terms "the Professor." These two form a non-traditional family with the Housekeeper's son, nicknamed Root, in "a small city on the Inland Sea." The Housekeeper and her son build a bond with the Professor based on loyalty and his love of teaching. Their every accomplishment brings effusive praise from the old man they're actually caring for.

But the trick is that the Professor has a head injury that has scrambled his limbic system. Nothing entering his head leaves a mark lasting longer than eighty minutes. The Professor needs someone to care for, while the Housekeeper and Root long for a man in their lives to complete their troubled family. The Professor's yin finds the Housekeeper's yang. Root and the Housekeeper are inspired to be better people by the Professor, and seek after his praise, even knowing as they do that in eighty minutes he won't even remember.

Besides the sudden, unexpected family, this novel also deals heavily with mathematics. The Professor loves baseball, but because of his injury, cannot watch entire games. Instead, he reconstructs games from stats on baseball cards. This book involves the first clear, vernacular definitions I’d ever encountered of perfect numbers, Napier’s constant, and other math concepts. But this isn’t a math textbook, and has reportedly frustrated teachers who’ve used it as one. Rather, it’s a love story to math’s human implications.

The only proper nouns in this novel are prominent mathematicians and Japanese baseball heroes. The actual characters are named by their humanistic roles: housekeeper, sister-in-law, professor. In this regard, the novel recalls Expressionistic plays of the early Twentieth Century, peopled by characters with names like "Boss," "Stranger," and "Woman #4." Or perhaps it's more like Aesop's fables. But it clearly signals that these characters relate according to their responsibilities, not their identities.

The Professor must surely be one of the most interesting characters in recent literature. Like the mathematical constants he loves, he simply exists, unmoved by a world that continues changing without him. The only changes he faces come late in the novel, when his injury deteriorates further. In some ways, he requires coddling, lest an ignorant world break him. But in his absolute, incontestable stability, he requires others to change, to grow into his reality. Like math, his constancy is a change agent for an uneducated world.

Reputedly, Ogawa based her characterization of the Professor on Paul Erdős, a Hungarian mathematician who eschewed virtually all human contact in favor of math. But Ogawa refuses to make the Professor a bog-standard eccentric. Math, for the Professor, is not a drab science; it's a work of art and a mode of prayer. And it is this love of beauty and spirituality that inspires the Housekeeper and Root. Math is a tool that brings them together as a family and motivates them to reach for something higher.

The cerebral and episodic story, like many Japanese art novels, doesn't burst like a string of dynamite. Readers weaned on the cinematic style of paperback American fiction will seek for sturm und drang which never arrives. But lovers of language magic will find a refreshing rest from breathless American fiction. This novel’s self-selecting audience comprises those who truly love when words changes the way we see our world. Stunning, punchy, smart and touching. A book that reminds readers that we read for a reason.